AutoHotkey Community

garath · Joined: 24 Mar 2005 Posts: 372 Location: germany

AHK MouseRecorder (MoRe)

Today I want to present a funny little tool, the mouse recorder. I hope it is the first mouserecorder and nobody scripted such a tool in AHK, before;-)
Last week i read the thread about the new advanced AHK ScriptWriter, it will be the most important tool in Autohotkey, because it is the first thing a new user will test. If the script writer works well we will get lots of new members in our community. Inspired by the scriptwriter I thought about a Mouse-movement-recorder, which records and replays realtime, so you
can watch the mouse moving, as you did move your mouse in the record mode. At the moment, Mousewheel, left and right button and the movement is recorded. Mouseclicks and wheel are send normal, no controlsend implemented right now. Coordinates are sent relative to the desktop (screen-mode).

The script starts recording by pressing F1, and stops with F2. Replay starts with F3. There is no Gui till now, I wrote the script to test the possibilities Wink

Each 15ms mouse position and keystates of the buttons + wheel are checked. If any Parameter changes, the new parameters are written to a textfile, including the time since start of recording, and the ID of the Window under the mouse.
In replay mode, each 15ms is checked, if the time from a counter reaches the time of the recorded next Dataset. If so, the Dataset is send to the mouse, and the mouse is moved accordingly. At the beginning of the Replay, the same window is activated, as it was active at the beginning of the recording.

I tested it with MS_Paint, I drew a little picture, and replayed it, you can see the two testimages, below.

Missing features:
a nice Gui
scalable replay-speed
recording of additional mouse-Buttons (xbutton1 and xbutton2)
recording of a Joystick
recording of keybord-buttons
export-function to build a standalone AHKscript from the recorded mousemovements
usage of controlsend
support screen and relative Coordmode
documentation in the code

BoBo · Guest

So give us some MoRe, dude ! Laughing

Guest · Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 4:25 pm Post subject:

wow......

garath · Joined: 24 Mar 2005 Posts: 372 Location: germany

Thanks, Bobo and guest Cool

Btw, long time ago I saw somebody using a transparent window to catch mouse events, I would like to use OnMessage, because of performance, the timer performs well, but it seems not to be the best way to catch the mousemovements and clicks. Anybody knows, where I can find it in the Forum? I searched for it the last days, but didnt find it:-(

majkinetor ! · Guest

You can use OnMessage with trans win. U have example in the help file, how to make win transparent.

Keywords: WinSet, WM_MOUSEXXX messages, OnMessage

garath · Joined: 24 Mar 2005 Posts: 372 Location: germany

@majkinetor !
I tried to get WM_Mouse messages, but I only got them with non-transparent AHK-Windows, will do some further research the next days.
I tried it with the OnScreenDisplay example, but only got Messages hovering over the visible text, not over the transparent window Sad

If I remove transparecy, I get the messages :-/

Zippo · Joined: 21 Apr 2006 Posts: 56 Location: East Coast, USA

Zippo() · Guest

When I had this problem, I created a .dll with MASM32 to solve it. The license agreement on that is pretty restrictive... so I just kept it for personal use.

I don't know if you are still working on this, but I finally transfered the code over into RosAsm, which is under the GPL license. Since I can now do with it what I want, so can you Very Happy

The DLL installs a low-level mouse hook and uses PostMessage to notify the script that a mouse event has occured. It doesn't care what mouse event... any will do. The script has to do all the work. Also, it doesn't pass any parameters to the script. So it is best to just set up hotkeys for the buttons and use the DLL to notify of X/Y movement (which is the only thing it was created for).

The DLL is written in Assembly Language and for what it does it is pretty much optimized.

Code in the DLL:

garath · Joined: 24 Mar 2005 Posts: 372 Location: germany

I am working on it, from time to time.
Thanks for the hook, will have a look on it, this weekend. Smile

Right now, I have implemented a gui, scalable replay-speed from 10%-2500%, and a Keyboard-recorder, I only have to secure, that no skript-kiddie can use it as K_e_y-L_o_G_g_e_r Sad

Guest · Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 12:07 am Post subject:

Doesn´t work for me at all....

Antti · Guest

Mouse movement recorder works well with me ( XP SP1 ).

It is awesome.

Just what I do need.

Thank you very match for sharing !!!
---

What I do want to point out to new people who did not get it work is that.

When you copy it to clipboard and paste it to notepad there was this line warped in two lines.

If (xpos<>xpos_old OR ypos<>ypos_old OR Wheel_up OR Wheel_down OR lButt<>Lbutt_old OR mButt<>mButt_old OR rButt<>rButt_old)

It need to be in one line like that.

So remove some spaces and save.

Hopefully that will help someone.

majkinetor · Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 3622 Location: Belgrade

quatermass · Joined: 14 Dec 2005 Posts: 107

Any chance that it could be modified to repeat the same mouse movement a set number of times?

I tried

Bezzie · Guest

Bump?

Cassak · Guest

loop, 2
{
Send {F3}
Sleep, 1883000
}

Create a second script that looks like this. Set the time for however long your recording takes to replay. Set the loop for however many times you want it to replay.

Open the MoRe script, then open the second script when you want to start. Your second script wil start the MoRe script and repeat it for howver many time you specifiy.

I also added a pause funtion to the original script because I found I could not stop it once it started replaying and I had to unplug my computer :S

f2::
SetTimer, WatchMouse, Off
ToolTip
Return

f3::Gosub, replay
F4::Pause