Overlapped PiP Help w/ Maximizer

[dariuslloyd]

Hey there,

What I am trying to do is run one fullscreen instance of WoW, my main, and have my alt slave in a small PiP in the upper right hand corner overlaying the main. The problem of course is when windows focuses on the main, the pip minimzes. There must be some method out there to force the small PiP window to not minimize, stay on top or in the foreground of the main wow instance, even if the main wow instance is the focus. Did that make sense?

Any and all suggestions welcome.

[keyclone]

well, to be honest...i hadn't thought of anyone needed that... and no, i'm not sure there is such a capability

[Xaedra]

No suggestions here, but I wanted to mention I would LOVE if this were possible in Keyclone. Sorta like how some programs have an "Always On Top" option. I would love this.. Usually I run my 2nd account as small as I can w/ maxmizer just so I can make sure she's following at all times. Would be awesome if it were possible! Would not be a big deal if I had 4+ accts, but with only 2, it uses up a lot of un-needed space.

[dariuslloyd]

Heya,

I already figured out a fairly reasonable way to accomplish this. There is a shareware program here that allows you to designate any window as always being on top. It also allows you to automatically specify windows as focus with mouse over, but this capability is included with keyclone anyway. I don't use it though because of mouse look messing up.

But yah, I am able to run my main full screen and have a little picture in picture up in the corner to keep tabs on the alt.

I'm a handful of hours into this whole dual instancing thing, now its just a matter of figuring out an efficient way of healing. I'd really like to figure out how to incorporate click casting in some feasible way. Maybe with this pip and setting the healer alt to having huge party frames (that would still be pretty small in my 400x320 window).

[Freddie]

What I'm about to say doesn't have anything to do with Keyclone, but just for general info --

Darius said his main is "fullscreen." If this means "full screen mode" as in DirectX exclusive mode, then so far as I know, there's no way to do this.

But if he means the main is in a maximized window, then here's how a program could keep the small window on top while the main window has the focus using a Win32 function:

SetWindowPos ( hwndLittleWindow, HWND_TOPMOST, 0, 0, 0, 0, SWP_ASYNCWINDOWPOS | SWP_NOMOVE | SWP_NOSIZE );

[keyclone]

Thanks Freddie. i had put this item on the list as a checkbox in the command editor. the next release should cover this

got any insight to reduce the time on SetFocus to a window in another process space? for now, i hook to the thread and then set focus.. this causes a 'hitch in the giddy up' as your mouse goes from one window over another (focus follows mouse). i see the same issue with pip, occasionally.

i had considered since i was the starter of the process, that somehow i could get special rights over the window... but no luck finding anything there so far.

any tips to smooth out the transition are most welcome

[Freddie]

Welcome Rob. I thought maybe what I said would be totally irrelevant since maybe you were copying all the windows to your own DirectX window or something.

I'm not sure what the mouse hitch is. For whatever it's worth, here's how I set focus in HKN. Maybe it has the same problem you're describing, I don't know. I attach to two threads because HKN might not have focus when this gets called:

DWORD set_focus ( HWND hNew ) 
{ 
    DWORD dwError = 0; 
    HWND hCur = GetForegroundWindow(); 
    DWORD dwOurThread = GetCurrentThreadId(); 
    DWORD dwCurThread = GetWindowThreadProcessId ( hCur, NULL ); 
    DWORD dwNewThread = GetWindowThreadProcessId ( hNew, NULL );  // this is the Window that will get focus

    AttachThreadInput ( dwOurThread, dwCurThread, TRUE ); 
    AttachThreadInput ( dwOurThread, dwNewThread, TRUE ); 

    if ( NULL == SetFocus ( hNew ) ) // failure 
        dwError = GetLastError(); 

    AttachThreadInput ( dwOurThread, dwCurThread, FALSE ); 
    AttachThreadInput ( dwOurThread, dwNewThread, FALSE ); 

    return dwError; 
}

Seems like a ridiculous amount of code for something so simple, doesn't it? If you have a better idea, please let me know.

[Freddie]

here[/url] that allows you to designate any window as always being on top.

This seems real useful so I just added the same feature to HotkeyNet. Darius, I know this thread was addressed to Rob not me, but I'm glad you brought it up and thanks.

[dariuslloyd]

Welcome. I can already tell this is a great community after only being part of it for one day.