Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

Not playing Eve. Astonishingly, not missing it.

However, I am playing some World of Tanks. And I’ve got a problem.

The in-game chat feature sucks and is hard to use while driving a tank. I want a few chat macros, so I can say funny things with low effort. “Hey all you woodchucks, stop chucking my wood!”

I downloaded AutoHotKey, and it sort of works. I can get it to send an {enter} keypress that opens the chat window, enter my text, and send another {enter} to say that to my team.

However, I am failing utterly at sending a {Control}{Enter} that will say the same thing to friend and enemy teams alike. I’ve tried “Send ^{Enter}”, “SendPlay ^{Enter}” and dozens of variations on that theme, with key delays, delays between events, lots of different stuff. None of them work.

There’s also a button you can click with your mouse that will send your text chat to all. I’ve gotten its location, I’ve trained AutoHotKey to put my mouse over the button, but the button press? It fails. Not always — I’ve got a macro that will successfully press it about 10% of the time — but it’s not repeatable with any reliability. Something is eating the mouse clicks. Again, I’ve tried both “Click” and “MouseClick” in various variations, I’ve tinkered with the key timing, I’ve tinkered with the Send modes. If it totally didn’t work, I’d have given up … but, rarely, the keypress takes. So, I feel like there must be a setting that would work.

So, if you have had any success at getting AutoHotKey to work reliably in WorldofTanks, I’d love to hear from you. Ideally what I want is a sample of code that successfully and reliably sends either a control-enter or a mouse click at a location. Which basically means, if you’ve ever written a successful Macro for WoT, you must have what I need. And I’d be very grateful. This is one of those nerd frustrations that doesn’t stem from any real need, I just *want* and have gotten frustrated.

I do know that using macro programs in games can be tricky and difficult. Could be, I can’t get there from here. But I suspect I’m just inept with AutoHotKeys.

Finally, for the rules lawyers among you, the WoT devs have stated that macros of this sort do not violate their EULA. In case you were worried.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 17th, 2011 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Ironfleet Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.