How does HeroStats get game information?

CFIndustries · 04-06-2012 02:14 PM

Does anyone know what mechanism HeroStats uses to get game information on status of powers, rehcarge, etc.?

I'm buying a pair of X-Keys XK-24s for use with CoH and they have a red and blue backlight for each key which are programmable via VB. A friend got me thinking: what if I could bind certain powers to these keys and have the backlight turn red on activation and back to blue once rehcarged?

Then I could offload things like Inner Inspiration and other long-recharge powers onto these keys, and also not need to have trays out for visual indicators.

The obvious way is to figure out how HeroStats gets its info and use that same method, or somehow use HeroStats itself as the conduit to get the information (via log sniffing or something).

Anyone have any ideas?

Kitsune Knight · 04-06-2012 02:20 PM

From my little investigation into the inner workings of Hero Stats, it actually reads the network data being sent to/from the server to gather the data. Not something incredibly easy to reproduce... but, since the source is open (and in a .Net language), you could build upon that (I don't think Hero Stats has anything like a plugin mechanism).

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CFIndustries · 04-06-2012 02:26 PM

Blerg. My VB-fu is rather weak, but P.I. Engineering has a basic tutorial for the VB involved with the LED tinkering, and I figured I could muddle my way through the rest with some trouble. But reading the network is likely beyond the scope of this "tinkering" project. ;-p

I seem to recall HeroStats has the ability to do a form of "verbose" logging, so I wonder if just keeping an eye on the log might work? Of course, that might be a bit resource intensive polling the log constantly, eh?

Rajani Isa · 04-06-2012 06:51 PM

If you can get it to read a log file, you could simply have it read coh's log file. I believe that is what HeroStats originally did. The log records ALL chat sent to you, including system messages like "PowerName is Recharged"

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Codewalker · 04-06-2012 06:59 PM

Last I checked HeroStats still got things like power recharge and buff casts from the combat log, it just did it by grabbing the log messages out of the memory buffer rather than requiring you to save it to a file.

That also has the downside of the recharge being calculated as an average of how long it sees it, rather than based on game data. So it'll be a little off for the first activation after Hasten is up.

It's... quite unlikely that HeroStats is reading the network traffic.

Roderick · 04-06-2012 11:51 PM

I'm forwarding this thread to the creator of HeroStats. I can't make any promises on his behalf, but he may have some input on the topic.

@Roderick

Ineffable_Bob · 04-07-2012 01:57 PM

HeroStats looks at information available in the game client memory, mostly from what you see in the combat channels on your chat channels. It does not try to intercept or otherwise interpret traffic between the server and the client, nor does it make any updates to the game client, both of which would be particularly ugly EULA violations.

You can use VB (or C++, or C#...any .NET language) to make use of the HeroStats game client scanner. That's how the CoHLCD mod works. Unfortunately I don't have the source code for that, but if you can read C# code, you can look at the main HeroStats code to get an idea of how to use the scanner.

You might find the information in this post useful. It's not a tutorial or anything, but it does have some information on how things work. http://herostats.blogspot.com/2008/0...-issue-12.html

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CFIndustries · 04-12-2012 01:33 PM

Suddenly the phrase "biting off more than I can chew" comes to mind. ;-p

I don't know hardly any VB. I know programming, just not VB specifically, and "figuring out" the HeroStats API-ish thing without help is a bit more daunting than I figured.

I think I'll try this first with a simple timer. For now, the powers I was going to try this with are things like Inner Inspiration, Mission Teleporter, Base Teleporter, etc. that have fixed recharge times. Don't know if any of these are affected by recharge bonuses, but even if they are at least a fixed timer is a "normal case scenario." Lets me get my feet wet.

For anyone curious about the general LED control on the XK-24:

http://www.piengineering.com/tutorials/backlighting.php

I've enjoyed using X-Keys panels on my Mac for work (the discontinued Button Panel, X-Keys Desktop, and X-Keys Foot Pedal) and I've been using an X-Keys Desktop and Foot Pedals along with my Zboard Keyboard for years for playing CoH. I highly recommend X-Keys products for folks who need more keys and want to tinker.