Macro Express For Star Wars Galaxy

[naenyc]

I can empathize with the gentleman talking about machine language, did quite a bit of it myslef.

 

Does anybody know how to use Macro Express to automate a game, in particular Star Wars Galaxy. Just received Macro Express., and couldn't find any method to do it.

 

Tried starting a caputure, switching to the game, moving the sprite(mouse), selecting a few widgets, and alt-tabbing out, and stopping the macro. Nothing in the macro.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

[Jim Korenthal]

Hiya naenyc from a fellow nyc'er, even if you did mistakenly call me a gentleman, hehe.

 

Automating SWG? Sure why not, the project I did to learn ME was automating AC2 (Asheron's Call 2, to the mmorpg-challenged). The games of course are very different so I can't give you specifics, but they're both real-time client-server dealies and I'm sure you'd use similar automation techniques.

 

I did very little of the project using capture. Most of the time I just programmed what I wanted directly into the Script Editor. I wrote my system in little pieces, testing each piece thoroughly by itself and linking them together with Macro Run commands. Whenever possible, I favored the keyboard over the mouse for increased speed and reliability (overcoming server lag can be a problem). A few times I was forced to use capture to create a piece of a macro which dragged an item from one part of the game screen to another.

 

One indispensable tool I used was the Mouse Locator. With this little box on the screen I was able to easily figure out mouse coordinates to insert into my macros.

 

Oh -- are you running the game in window mode? Although it's possible to develop macros for full-screen mode it will make your life much easier to use a window, for both programming and debugging purposes. And don't forget to make all your mouse coordinates window- rather than screen-specific!

 

Unless you want to go to more trouble than it's worth (IMO), you'll have to decide on a single window size/display resolution and program with that one in mind. Otherwise you'd have the devil of a time trying to figure out mouse positions, and I'd suspect that it would be impossible to do more advanced things like screen scraping if you need to determine if specific display elements are present.

 

Well that's all the advice I can think of offhand. While harder than automating a business application, handling a real-time graphics game is a blast to do and it's really fun to see your guild-mates say things like, "How the heck did you do that?"

 

Best of luck,

Jim