HotkeyNet Help

[Chilla]

Hey all, I recently started dual boxing using HotkeyNet to help broadcast keys. However, the last day or so, the Ctrl R function to rename the windows is no longer working. I tried a different key to rename the windows and be able to broadcast keys, but that hasn't worked either. I tried manually renaming the windows and that also was unsuccessful. Any ideas? Thanks in advance. Here's my script in case it helps:

<Hotkey Ctrl R>
<SendPC local>
<Rename "World of Warcraft" wow1>
<Rename "World of Warcraft" wow2>

<Label Sam Local SendWinM wow1>
<Label Joe Local SendWinM wow2>

<BroadcastKey 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9>
<SendLabel Sam, Joe>

[Freddie]

Hi Chilla. It sounds like you got renaming to work for a while since you posted last time -- that part is good. :) But now it stopped. Two questions:

1. What message does HotkeyNet display when it tries to rename? The message is red or blue on the main part of the panel.

2. How can you tell the windows aren't getting renamed?

[Chilla]

Hi Chilla. It sounds like you got renaming to work for a while since you posted last time -- that part is good. :) But now it stopped. Two questions:

1. What message does HotkeyNet display when it tries to rename? The message is red or blue on the main part of the panel.

2. How can you tell the windows aren't getting renamed?Thanks for the quick response. The situation is kind of confusing because instead of giving me any kind of error text message, I simply get the error (beep) sound when clicking Ctrl R, or the text in the main panel is shifted to the right of the screen. And second, I can tell because in my startup bar I simply see two "World of Warcraft" instances, when before they would show as wow1 and wow2. Thanks in advance.

[Freddie]

When a message is so long that the window moves to the right like that, a scroll bar appears on the bottom so you can slide it back. Can you slide it back and read the last message after you pressed Ctrl R?

To get a good view of the message, you might have to close down HKN, restart it, and press Ctrl R fresh.

Edit: Or press the Clear button to erase the display, then press Ctrl R.

[Chilla]

When a message is so long that the window moves to the right like that, a scroll bar appears on the bottom so you can slide it back. Can you slide it back and read the last message after you pressed Ctrl R?

To get a good view of the message, you might have to close down HKN, restart it, and press Ctrl R fresh.

Edit: Or press the Clear button to erase the display, then press Ctrl R.Unfortunately, I don't get any error message, and no scroll bar appears. It simply tabs the initial loaded hotkey messages over to the right side. Really confusing because it was working fine the other day. Also, I just tried using a different hotkey (W) and I just get the error (beep) sound and nothing happens. No error messages or anything in the "Last key press" box.

[Freddie]

Welll, let's take this step by step. First let's see if your hotkeys are loaded. When you press "Show loaded hotkeys," you should get a little window that says "10 hotkeys are loaded" near the top. If you scroll down, somewhere in there you should see your renaming hotkey for Ctrl R, and it should contain the same instructions you typed in the file, except indented differently. Could you copy and paste that whole display from that little window so I can see? And then we'll go on to the next step till we find out what's wrong.

[Chilla]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Number of hotkeys: 4

Number of commands: 0

Keys used as modifiers: 0

-------------------------------------------------------------------------


<Hotkey 1>
<SendPC local>
<SendWinM wow1>
<Key 1>
<SendWinM wow2>
<Key 1>

<Hotkey 2>
<SendPC local>
<SendWinM wow1>
<Key 2>
<SendWinM wow2>
<Key 2>

<Hotkey 3>
<SendPC local>
<SendWinM wow1>
<Key 3>
<SendWinM wow2>
<Key 3>

<Hotkey Ctrl R>
<SendPC local>
<Rename "World of Warcraft" wow1>
<Rename "World of Warcraft" wow2>



That's all I have set up for right now, and thank you for being patient with my noobness heh. And yes they are indented just not showing up here.

[Freddie]

No problem! Thanks for sending me the info. As long as you have the patience to show me the info, I'll keep plugging away till we've solved this mystery. I'm actually quite curious what's wrong. No matter how noobish a person is, a well designed program should help them figure out what's wrong by displaying helpful messages etc. That's not happening here so I want to find out why and fix it.

What you pasted looks correct except that it only has three broadcast keys. If that's all you put in your file, that's fine, but if you have nine like you showed me above then we've got a problem in the file.

Assuming you really have three broadcast keys in the file, let's move on. To save time I'll ask you to do a whole bunch of things, and you can tell me if anything goes wrong.

1. Reboot the PC and do *not* start World of Warcraft. That way we should get error messages in red for all your hotkeys. (I'm saying this so we know exactly what we expect to happen. It makes the diagnosis easier.)

2. Start HotkeyNet.

3. Press "Show loaded hotkeys" again and check to make sure your renaming hotkey (Ctrl R) got loaded like it should have.

4. Expand HotkeyNet so it takes up the whole screen by pressing the "maximize" box on right end of HotkeyNet's title bar (the colored bar at the top of HotkeyNet's window). (I'm saying this to make the display easier to read.)

5. (a) Press 1. The following things should happen:

5. (b) In the upper right you should see <1> with various bits of info about that the <1> key.

5. (c) In the upper left, you should see <Hotkey 1>

5 (d) In the main panel, you should see "Received from this PC blah blah" in black, and under that, either a blue or red message explaining the results of the command.

If any of that didn't happen, please write back and tell me.

If all of that did happen:

6. (a) Press Ctrl R. Check to see:

6. (b) In the upper left, it should say <Hotkey Ctrl R>.

6 (c) In the main panel, "Received from this PC blah blah" in black, and under that, a status message in blue or red.

If you still don't see the messages in 6c then I will have to ask you to please email me your hotkey file and please tell me the build number of your copy of HotkeyNet, and I'll try to duplicate the problem here.

I'm sorry we have to go through this hassle, and thank you for your patience! :)

[Chilla]

Assuming you really have three broadcast keys in the file, let's move on. To save time I'll ask you to do a whole bunch of things, and you can tell me if anything goes wrong.

1. Reboot the PC and do *not* start World of Warcraft. That way we should get error messages in red for all your hotkeys. (I'm saying this so we know exactly what we expect to happen. It makes the diagnosis easier.)

2. Start HotkeyNet.

3. Press "Show loaded hotkeys" again and check to make sure your renaming hotkey (Ctrl R) got loaded like it should have.

4. Expand HotkeyNet so it takes up the whole screen by pressing the "maximize" box on right end of HotkeyNet's title bar (the colored bar at the top of HotkeyNet's window). (I'm saying this to make the display easier to read.)

5. (a) Press 1. The following things should happen:

5. (b) In the upper right you should see <1> with various bits of info about that the <1> key.

5. (c) In the upper left, you should see <Hotkey 1>

5 (d) In the main panel, you should see "Received from this PC blah blah" in black, and under that, either a blue or red message explaining the results of the command.

If any of that didn't happen, please write back and tell me.
Yes, my fault, I did only have 3 keys in, yet the problem persists. I followed these instructions and pressed 1 and got the same error sound as I do when I press Ctrl R. Still no error text messages, and still no information on the hotkey in either of the top boxes. Currently I'm using the 0.1.31 build 106 version. Just in case, I will try using an older version to see if that helps any. I'll get back to you with an edit momentarily. Thanks in advance.

Edit: Just tried 104 version and it's the same.

[Freddie]

The upper left is blank (white) right? It doesn't have a red X in it?

It's fine that you used only three keys, I just wanted to know because I need to have all the details to figure out why this is happening. It's great that you're going to try an older build, but could you also email me the file as an attachment? It has to be emailed as an attachment so I get it in it's "pure" form. The email address is freddie (at) hotkeynet.com. Replace (at) with the symbol. Thanks a lot.

[Chilla]

The upper left is blank (white) right? It doesn't have a red X in it?
Correct. I will email you the file now. Thanks for all the help.

[Freddie]

I got the file. Thank you! The file is perfectly okay, and it works fine with HotkeyNet on my PC.

Before we go on, let me say how much I appreciate your help and patience with this. HotkeyNet's in beta, meaning that users are supposed to find bugs and I'm supposed to fix them. You've done a dynamite job of locating a bug. Nobody else has reported this bug even though the beta test has been going on for five months and now has 175 steady participants. Since you're the only one who has reported the bug, and I can't reproduce it myself, I'm going to need your help to pinpoint the cause so I can fix it. And I would really like to do that. So I hope your patience will hold out!

Since this happens on your PC but not mine, let's try to see what's different about your PC. If it's not too much trouble, could you run a Windows utility that puts some info about your system configuration in a text file and then email the file to me? The way you run the utility is, go to Start, select Run, type dxdiag, then press Enter.

Also let me ask a question. You said HKN had been working and then this problem appeared suddenly. Are you aware of anything that changed in your PC (software, hardware, anything) just before things went haywire? Did you change the way you launch HotkeyNet? Change WoW? Change anything?

Thank you so much!

[Chilla]

Glad to help. As far as I know I didn't change anything about how I run the program or with my computer. I will email you my computer information in a few minutes. Just to give it a shot, I might completely remove HotkeyNet and reinstall and see if that helps.

[Freddie]

Could you also email me a file called "hotkeynet.settings" that HKN created in the file where you installed it? As you can probably guess, that contains your settings for the program.

[Freddie]

I loaded your settings file and hotkey file into build 104, and unfortunately they worked perfectly fine on my pc. So we're no closer to finding the bug.

I'm trying to think of how to diagnose this long distance. The problem is affecting both the screen display and whether the command gets carried out. Those things are done in separate threads. I'm trying to think of what could affect both threads. Not a whole lot.

Well, let's try stepping through the chain of events as much as we can.

1. Press load hotkeys and type in the name of a non-existent file (just type random letters).

2. Press "Open." HotkeyNet will fail to find the file, so none will be loaded.

3. Press "Show loaded hotkeys" to be sure no hotkeys are loaded. The little window should say "Number of hotkeys: 0."

4. Press Ctrl. You should see <Ctrl> in the upper right. Let me know if you don't.

5. Press R You should see <R> in the upper right. Let me know if you don't.

6. Assuming you see those things, load your real hotkey file.

7. Press Ctrl and R again. Do you still see <Ctrl> and <R> in the upper right when you press them? If not, let me know.

[Chilla]

Unfortunately I didn't see Ctrl or R in the box you described. Really strange. It's like any key makes the error (beep) noise and nothing shows in either of the top boxes.

[Freddie]

Okay. I think we've gone as far as we can with our naked eyeballs and it's time to bring in the heavy artillery.

What I'd like to do next is make a special build for you that will create a file containing a record of the program's internal activity as it starts up. Then you can email me that file and (hopefully!) I'll be able to see exactly where in the code the problem is occurring. How's that sound?

In case you're feeling like your work was wasted and I could have done this earlier, I couldn't, because I needed to get a sense of the general location of the problem. I'm not sure I have enough of a sense even now but there doesn't seem to be any alternative. :)

[Freddie]

Chilla, if you don't mind, could you download the special build from this link:

http://www.hotkeynet.com/p/download_debug.html

That pages explain what to do. Thanks, this is a big help.