Quote Originally Posted by 'zuvio',index.php?page=Thread&postID=37465#post374 65
I am trying to multibox 6 ffxi accounts on two PC's, so naturally I ran into the problem of keystrokes not being broadcasted to non-active FFXI windows. HotKeyNet offers me some solution to this problem, but it's not 100%.
Thanks for the detailed report.

My basic Hotkey file looks like this...
Those 70 ms delays really add up when you're running that many clients on a single PC. I certainly understand why you want to send the commands in the background.

So far, all the other <send> commands do not work in this game. I have tried the same macro with <sendwinM> + <SetBackgroundFocus> and <KillBackgroundFocus> and <sendwinMF>. These hotkeys do not send any keystrokes to any window...
There are two issues here. First, whenever you're trying to get a game to receive keystrokes while it's in the background, start off with a macro that sends a simple printing key like 1 by itself instead of a combination like <LCTRL 1>. I say this because when you try to specify the shift state -- in other words, when you try to send a combination like LCTRL 1, or ALT 1, or SHIFT 1 -- you introduce additional issues that make the problem much harder.

Second, I've been experimenting a bit with several games, trying to get them to accept keystrokes in the background, and each game has presented unique problems. So far the only games that I've gotten to work pretty decently are DAOC and WoW. (The WoW stuff is in my current work build which is not yet published.) Therefore it wouldn't surprise me if the send methods that are currently in HKN don't work with background FFXI even if you limit yourself to printing keys.

Are there any future plans of incorporating FFXI into the program, such as the DoaC send command? I would really appreciate that.


I probably won't play around with FFXI myself, but I plan to add some new low-level commands to HKN which will enable users to create new varieties of <sendwin> and experiment with them and try to find a version that works with their particular game. In other words, users will be able to do pretty much the same thing that I would do myself if I had time to try to find a <sendwin> method that works with their games.

Another thing that users can do to help is experiment with AutoHotkey. (I single out that program because it has a rich set of send methods and also because it's open source, so I can watch it execute in a debugger and see what it's doing.) If you can get AutoHotkey to send to FFXI in the background, I can duplicate the required functionality in HKN.