Playback AVE events

Copyright © 2001 Jarno van der Linden.

playave

Plays back AVE mouse and keyboard events recorded by recave.

Synopsis

playave <events datafile>

Description

PlayAVE reads an events datafile as created by RecAVE and plays back the events through the AVE.

The datafile has a simple text format. There are three types of events: mouse movement, mouse buttons, and keyboard events. The datafile contains one line per event. Each event line is composed of a delta time, a single character event type, and a number of event-specific values.

The delta time is the number of milliseconds delay between the previous event and this event. PlayAVE will wait at least this long before sending the event through the AVE.

The event types are identified as follows:

The formats for each type are:

Mouse position event
<delta time> M <mouse x> <mouse y> <button state>
Mouse button event
<delta time> B <button state> <mouse x> <mouse y>
Keyboard event
<delta time> K <rawkey code>
All the values are in decimals. The delta time should be no less than zero. Note that for keyboard events key down and key up events are recorded seperately.

PlayAVE can't guarantee that the timing of the played back events is identical to the recorded times. On a heavily loaded machine for example, the playback may be slower than expected.

The mouse pointer
Playing back events through the AVE does not cause the mouse pointer to visually track the mouse pointer position. To overcome this, PlayAVE draws its own mouse pointer. The image data for this pointer is taken from the file /images/playave_pointer.png. As it is a PNG file it contains both colour and alpha (mask) values. Replace this file if you want a different pointer.

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