Starters guide to DAoC and HKN

This is a simple message I just sent to a guy on VN. Some day I’ll redo it and write a proper guide, but here it is:

Creating different scripts is actually quite easy 🙂 The first thing to start out with, is to define the labels you’re going to be using. 1 label corresponds to 1 DAoC account. If you’re running 1 account per computer, you would have something like this:

<Label t0 local SendWin "Dark Age of Camelot">
<Label t1 192.168.1.150 SendWin "Dark Age of Camelot">
<Label t2 192.168.1.151 SendWin "Dark Age of Camelot">
<Label t3 192.168.1.152 SendWin "Dark Age of Camelot">

Where t1-t3 is the name of the label you’re defining. If you’re running more than 1 account per computer, you need to change the send mode from SendWin to SendWinSF:

<Label t1 192.168.1.151 SendWinSF DAoC1>
<Label t2 192.168.1.151 SendWinSF DAoC2>
<Label t3 192.168.1.151 SendWinSF DAoC3>

For this to work, you also need to rename the windows of DAoC. This is done in HKN by going to “Actions” and then “Rename a window”. In the example above, I’ve just used “DAoC1” to “DAoC3” as window names.
I would recommend only running one toon on your main computer. This is because of the way DAoC works with windows in the background. If you try to send hotkeys to accounts in the background, while playing the main toon aswell, some keys might “bleed through”. An example of this:

You’re running around with 2 (or more) toons logged on the main computer. You run around on the main toon, holding down W. You then want to do shields / something on the background accounts, and push a hotkey X, which is bound there. While doing this, you’re still holding down W (running), which causes the W to “bleed through” and hit the background accounts aswell, which will result in the other accounts unsticking.
If you take care when playing, and only push background-hotkeys and nothing else, you can play multiple accounts on one computer just fine. It just takes some time getting used to.
The way I’ve solved this, is to run the bot accounts in virtual machines, but that’s a bit advanced 🙂
Anyway, now that you have your labels created, all you need to do is create your hotkeys. An example here:

<Hotkey 4>
<PassThrough>
<SendLabel t1, t2, t3>
<Key 9>

The first line (<Hotkey 4>) creates an action when you push the button 4 on your keyboard. <PassThrough> means that your focused window (the main account) will receive the key 4 as if you pressed it normally. You can take out this line, so it looks like this instead:

<Hotkey 4>
<SendLabel t1, t2, t3>
<Key 9>

Then once you press 4, nothing will happen on your main account / the window that has focus.
The next line, the <SendLabel t1, t2, t3> defines where to send the next commands. In our example, I have defined 3 labels: t1 to t3. You could have 10 labels, or 1 label. It doesn’t really matter 🙂 The last line tells HKN to send the key 9 to the 3 labels.
All together, when you push 4 on your computer, HKN will then send 9 to all the bots.

That’s pretty much all you need to get started. After playing a while, and getting an advanced script up, you’ll have a lot of hotkeys that’re generally looking exactly the same, except for different keys. This can be solved with Templates. An example template:

<Template PressBots>
<HotKey %1%>
<SendLabel t1, t2, t3>
<Key %2%>
<EndTemplate>

Here the things to notice are the %1% and %2%. These are placeholders/variables, which can be replaced when using the template. To create a hotkey like in the previous example, you would then do this line:

<ApplyTemplate PressBots 4 9>

This will invoke the template and replace %1% with 4 and %2% with 9. You can then define a lot of other keys aswell:

<ApplyTemplate PressBots 1 1>
<ApplyTemplate PressBots X V>
<ApplyTemplate PressBots Tab 6>

Etc.
You can create as many different templates as you like – you just have to differentiate them with their names (In the example: PressBots).
If you have a lot of keys in common on all your accounts, like pressing 1 you want to push 1 on all toons, you can define a keylist:

<KeyList CommonKeys 0-9,V,E,Tab,F1-F5>

And create a single hotkey for all these keys:

<Hotkey CommonKeys>
<PassThrough>
<SendLabel t1,t2,t3>
<Key %Trigger%>

The keylist is named CommonKeys, but could be named anything. The %Trigger% is another placeholder, which simply refers to the actual button pressed.

All this should be enough to get you started 🙂 Feel free to send me a message, or throw a comment on my site. I might copy this message I’ve written here and put it on my page as a starters-guide to DAoC and HKN.

Best regards
Adoweniih