TA Hook 0.83

welcome.to/yankspankers
"We spank all Americans, regardless of race, age or gender." -Yxan



Description
TA Hook automates several common, repetitive tasks when playing TA, allowing to concentrate on more important events. It will issue the common "+commands" used in every game by hitting one key. It aids the player in queueing long lines of buildings with minimal work by filling in all the clicks between the start- and endpoint. Full DT rings will be clicked down for you with a single doubleclick. Help is also available for those who always wished they could say they had nothing better to do than spell their name in DT...



Installation
No installation is required. Just make sure all files are in the same directory, and run TAHOOK.EXE.



Usage

 Chat macro

This is activated by hitting F11.


 Queueing lines of buildings

  • Keep Shift and X pressed
  • Click down first structure
  • Click down last structure
  • You can now depress X - however, you should wait for TA Hook to finish clicking before depressing Shift.


 Queueing rings of DT

  • Keep Shift and X pressed
  • Doubleclick at desired location


 Writing on the map with DT

  • Press F10
  • Type the desired text
  • Keep Shift pressed and click at desired location


 Notes

Since this is program is not a patch to TA, but rather just a "mouseclick simulator", you can only create lines of buildings within one screen. If you scroll around during any point of the process, the result will be misplaced structures.

If you want to create lines of buildings with a larger footprint than DT or want to ring a building with a larger footprint than an LLT/HLT, you can use PageUp to increase the footprint. PageDown will obviously allow to decrease the footprint again.

The minimum footprint used is 2, the maximum is 6. Footprints correspond to:

  1. Dragon Teeth
  2. Metal Extractor, Pulverizer/Defender
  3. Wind Generator, Metal/Energy Storage
  4. Solar Collector, Moho Metal Extractor
  5. Kbot Lab

For writing on the map, remember that only three characters fit on a 1024x768 screen area, so you should not try to type the full text of 'War & Peace'... since TA Hook can only simulate the clicks on one screen of game area, it would simply not work. In addition, the spacing reacts to changes of footprint, so you may get even less on one screen.

Please report any bugs and/or crashes to orbit@tripnet.se. Before sending a report, please make sure that TA Hook is the problem. Also, give as many details as possible. "It doesn't work" is not very helpful - explain what you tried to do, possibly what programs were running in the background, and exactly what happened then.




Configuration / Troubleshooting
To access the configuation, right-click the system tray icon of TA Hook and select 'Settings...'.

 Keycode for actionkey

This is the keycode for the key used for the queue-building functions. The default is 88, which corresponds to 'X'. If you cannot make the queueing work, you might want to change this value. Click into the box, and hit the desired key. The corresponding keycode value will be detected and entered by TA Hook automatically.


 Delay in ms for timer

This is the time that TA Hook will delay each action. If TA Hook works too fast and TA doesn't register the clicks, you should try increasing this value.


 Use optimized DT rows

If you check this box, TA Hook will use an alternative ordering for clicking out rows of structures with a footprint of 2 which will help ground- or sea-based contruction units to work more effectively.


 Chat macro

The chat macro by default contains

  +setshareenergy 1000
  +setsharemetal 1000
  +shareall
  +shootall
  +noshake
which is what players typically use in a team game. In constellations where you have no ally, the shareXXX commands are useless but will not harm you. And you can always edit the macro to be anything you would like.




History
0.83
  • Removed further traces of the "crash on pressing H" bug, hopefully fixed now.
0.82
  • Changed maximum footprint to 6
  • Fixed memory overwrite bug causing unpredictable behavior, including crashes (depending on affected program)
0.81
  • Fixed bug not setting the chat macro default
0.80
  • Default action key changed from < to X
  • Added automatic detection of keycode
  • Added option for enabling optimized DT building
  • DT rings are now affected by the change of footprint with PageUp/PageDown
  • DT rings for footprint 2 are now changed to the 6 DT version
  • Added text writing
  • Added features that enable the new TA Demo to report any users of TA Hook
  • Fixed an error causing TA to crash sometimes when H was pressed
  • Fixed an error causing the errorlog file to sometimes not appear in the TA Hook directory
  • Changed filemapping to pagefile, the program no longer writes TAHOOK files here and there
Program written by Yeha. This README written by Screamer.