AutoHotkey Community

[ScottMattes]

I am wondering why I have to specify such a high variation level, so I wrote a test case

[ScottMattes]

I am left wondering


have a offended the entire subscriber base of this community?
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Scott Mattes

My small, and slowly growing, collection of scripts.

[Lemming]

Not sure what you're getting at, or what problem you're trying to solve. Perhaps you could mention the actual app you're working with? Also, being sarky doesn't help.

ImageSearch has worked very well for me in many different apps. As an example, I have a script for WoW, and my ImageSearch variations are only at 3 or 4.

[ScottMattes]

My working with imagesearch began when I was coding a way to automate web testing for at work. The code would wait for certain things to appear in the window before continuing and looked for buttons by picture in order to click on them, etc.

I had my proof of concept code working pretty good but I had to use a variation of 200 and it seemed that sometimes it wouldn't match at all, or sometimes match everything.

So, I whipped up the code at the top of this thread to make a stand-alone test case that I could experiment with. Once I determined that nothing I could think of made a difference I posted it hoping that someone could point out what I did wrong, or what I left out that would make it work better.

My thanks to any and all who look at this and comment.
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Scott Mattes

My small, and slowly growing, collection of scripts.

[ScottMattes]

I finally got this working as I wanted it to, and the variation is only a 1.

My problem was two fold:

the first problem is that I used alt-prtscrn to capture just the active window, this caused the calculator menu shortcuts to be hilighted - F with an underscore, etc - so now I search after sending {alt down}),

the second problem was during testing as I eliminated parts of the code I hand made the bmp of the calculator from a fullscreen shot and that produced a slightly different picture file.

So now this works as desired

[Lemming]

A few tips for ImageSearch:

a) Limit the search area.
b) Use smaller images for the search
c) Implement backup search(es)
d) Try not to use ImageSearch

Point a) you probably know already. Point b) will increase the rate of success and (very) slightly boost performance. For web pages, my search images are about 50x50 pixels max. For games, they are no more than 25x25 pixels max.

Point c) is a bit kludgy, but Ahk is so efficient that you can easily slip in an extra 1 or 2 ImageSearches, even in a loop. Basically this involves screencapping another region of the object you're trying to click on -- something a bit different from your first screencap. If you're dealing with a game or Flash interface, you can recap the same region a few seconds later, or in a different session. The screencaps may look the same, but there are usually subtle differences due to variations in rendering.

Here's part of my code for a backup image search:

[ScottMattes]

Lemming,
d) isn't feasible for what I want to do, the app (Oracle Forms), runs inside an ActiveX region and unless I missed something Window Spy doesn't "see" anything there.

Thank you for the idea of backup searches, I hadn't considered that.
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Scott Mattes

My small, and slowly growing, collection of scripts.