Cheat Engine

[hollow87]

I was just curious what are the pros and cons of using RegisterHotKey vs hooking the keyboard via SetWindowsHookEx and polling with GetAsyncKeyState when using them for trainer hotkeys.

For example do some work better with certain games than others?

[Dark Byte]

registerHotkeys :
con:often don't work with games (they get disabled by the game)
pro: easy to setup and when it works it's fast

SetWindowsHookEx:
con:
complex to setup
runs in every application, and if you're not carefull can crash several applications (e. g 64 bit fpc 2.6 generates exes that crash when any dll does exception handling itself)
And in some cases directx will hijack the keyboard messages so you never receive them

pro:when it works it's fast

getasynckeystate (dislexia is fun, you type completely unrelated apifunctions without realizing):
con: you need to poll a lot, and if not done quick enough will feel like a delay to the user
pro: it can even see mouse buttons and it almost always works

[hollow87]

Thank you, before you replied I have already implemented RegisterHotKey which works for me at the moment.

But now I think I'm going to be looking into one of the other ones.

[atom0s]

Keep in mind with the suggestions that Dark Byte gave, some can trigger anti-cheats to ban you if your are working with multiplayer games. So you need to be mindful of things like that while developing your cheat.

If worse come to worse, you could always fall back on GetAsyncKeyState which is system-global.

[hollow87]

Thanks both of you. I have converted my code to use GetAsyncKeyState instead of RegisterHotKey.

I'm using it inside a separate thread running in an infinite loop with Sleep time of about 15ms per iteration of the loop to cut down on the CPU usage of an infinite loop.

At first I was having issues with it detecting the keypress many times when I only pressed it once but I seem to have mitigated that by only handling the key when it is released.

[atom0s]

If you are coding in C++, a simple trick for handling the key would be like this:

[hollow87]

I'm using C# and I thought about doing it that way, but MSDN does say