Hotkeynet comming back?

[zuvio]

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.

I have to include those delays, otherwise the <sendwin> command goes too fast. FFXI has some inherent laggyness and if I use <sendwin> without ms delays, most characters won't do anything. Simply pressing ctrl to bring up the macro window has like a one second window delay in one FFXI account.

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.

I will attempt to send a simple /hi command using <sendwinM(F)>, but I doubt it would work, that would be too easy

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.

Alright, I'll get AutoHotKey and see if I can send a command to background windows and report my findings. Funny thing is, I opted for HotKeyNet because it looked easier then AHK, but for the sake of multiboxing, i'll learn the program

Thanks for your reply!