Taking a screenshot, analyzing it, then deleting it - c++

I've been trying to code an auto clicker for a simple game online (a php coded one), but I've had trouble analyzing the colors on-screen. (English isn't my first language, sorry!) I've already done a bit of C++ in university, but only for science-oriented simple console programs. (Edit: I'm working on windows!! forgot to mention)
I've already tried the getpixel function, but since my chrome window is zoomed out at 80% to get the full game in frame, it seems I'm having some DPI related issues, but looking into this made my head dizzy.
After watching a Codebullet video, I thought a better approach to this would be to take a screenshot of the problematic area, analyze it to see if the condition is filled, then delete the screenshot. The problem is, I have no idea how I could achieve this and Google didn't help much this time :\
My code is extremely messy so I can't show it right now, but it's basically just a:
-click there
-click there after 5 seconds
-click there if this pixel is this color
-repeat
Is there an easy answer to this? I'd be really thankful if there is. Have a nice day! :)

You don't need to save the screen shot if you don't want to:
Pass the target window handle to GetDC(), t will return the the device context of the window.
Pass the device context to CreateCompatibleDC() to create a compatible DC.
Use CreateCompatibleBitmap(), passing in the DC and the size of the window. This returns a handle to a bitmap
Use SelectObject() to select the bitmap
Use BitBlt() to do a bitblock transfer of the selected pixels from the regular DC into the compatible DC using the SRCCOPY raster operation code to do a normal copy.
Create a BITMAP object. Use GetObject() and pass the handle to the bitmap you created.
Create a BITMAPINFOHEADER and define the member vars. Create an array of unsigned chars big enough to fit all the pixels from your bitmap.
Use GetDIBits() passing in the handle to the compatible bitmap, the bitmap header and a pointer to the pixel array. This loads the pixels from the bitmap into the pixel array.
Now parse all that juicy pixel data, search for the colors you're looking for and test the results against your conditionals to decide what to do next.
Don't forget to delete objects and release memory & device contexts.
I believe this is the tutorial I followed where I learned this, courtesy of MSDN: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/gdi/capturing-an-image

Related

How to create and edit a bitmap

I'm trying to create a bitmap that I can change the pixels of and then update the window with that bitmap. I've tried to research a way to just create a bitmap, but that was to no avail.
I need to know how to create a blank bitmap, then change its pixels using x and y coordinates and a color, and then how to draw it to the window. I don't need to save it to the computer and I don't want to convert an existing image into a bitmap.
I'm on windows and using Visual Studio with C++
Just to specify, I need to know the syntax for creating a blank bitmap with a certain width and height, and also what function I need to use to change the pixels' colors, and then how to draw a bitmap to the window. Thank you.
There is a free library ImgSource that you can use which has a huge amount of functionality for images.
http://www.smalleranimals.com/isource.htm
It is available in MSDN, but using a library like ImgSource may be to your advantage.
It provides simple methods for rendering your image onto a device context. And there is a good support forum.

Garbage on top of screen when displaying text over image in devkit pro

I am currently using the 16-bit libnds (Whith devkitpro) example as a basis and am trying to display text and the png background image on the same screen (in this example it is the top sceen). I am having a similar issue as this post.
I have garbage on the top of the screen (only ifconsoleInit(...) is called), similar to the first problem in the thread. The only problem is that I am displaying the background image in a different method so the fixes they made in that thread did not apply to this.
All I am looking for is whether there is a way to fix the garbage on the top of the screen. If there is a more efficient/better way to display the image, I am willing to accept it, just I haven't found a detailed enough tutorial on how to load an image as a background without using this method. Any help would be appreciated. I will answer any further questions anyone has about what is not working.
You can find the project attached here.
Sorry for the long delay but there are a few issues with your code. The first is that in Mode 4 the only background that can be set up as a 16 bit bitmap is layer 3. http://answers.drunkencoders.com/what-graphics-modes-does-the-ds-support/
Next, the layers all share a single chunk of background memory and your garbage is coming from you overwriting part of the bitmap in video memory with the characters for the font and the map for the console background. A simple solution is to move the bitmap by settings its map base to 1. This offsets its in graphics memory by 16KB which leaves 16KB of room for your text layer (this only works because we cant display the entire 256x256 image on screen at once due the the resolution of the DS as 256x256x2bytes fills up all of memory bank A...to be more correct we should assign another memory bank to the main background...but since we cant see the bottom 70 or so lines of pixels of our image anyway its okay that they didnt quite make it into video memory).
libnds also has a macro to make finding the memory for your background a bit simpler called "bgGetGfxPtr(id)" which will get a pointer to your background gfx in video memory after you set it up so you dont have to try to calculate it via an offset from BG_GFX.
In all the changes to your code should look like this (I added a version of this to the libnds code faq at : http://answers.drunkencoders.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=289&action=edit&message=1)
int main(void) {
//Top screen pic init
videoSetMode(MODE_4_2D);
vramSetBankA(VRAM_A_MAIN_BG);
int bg = bgInit(3, BgType_Bmp16, BgSize_B16_256x256, 1,0);
decompress(drunkenlogoBitmap, bgGetGfxPtr(bg), LZ77Vram); //Displays/decompresses top image
//videoSetMode(MODE_4_2D);
consoleInit(0,0, BgType_Text4bpp, BgSize_T_256x256, 4,0, true, true);
iprintf("\x1b[1;1HThe garbage is up here ^^^^^.");
iprintf("\x1b[21;1HTesting the text function...");
while(1) {
swiWaitForVBlank();
scanKeys();
if (keysDown()&KEY_START) break;
}
return 0;
}

Show a colour X Window Pixmap in the root window's background

I have a got a colour X PixMap file, GCC compiler, a working X server on a display and a very simple task: show an XPM file in colour by a C/C++ program via the X Server running on a display.
I have googled a lot and my brain is completely broken. No information about XCreatePixmapFromData. I can't get in the xloadimage sources. But putting a 1-bit depth bitmat is successfull and I want such an easy solution for a colour pixmap.
Teh pixmap is ordinary and here it is, for example, I just wanna show that it has almost the same structure as an X BitMap file (an array of constant chars) and can be included in the C/C++ program... http://pastebin.com/b5QTrDTH
A simple code example drawing a colour pixmap would be great.
That should be easy, please help!
P. S. sorry, that's my first stackoverflow question.
The name of the function is XpmCreatePixmapFromData. It is described e.g. here along with other functions and data structures.
Basically you pass the XPM data and get back two things, a pixmap and a bitmap mask. If your pixmap is rectangular, you may ignore the mask. If not, you use it to set the mask in your GC. Then you use XCopyArea to copy from the returned pixmap to the window.
You may pass NULL as the "attributes" argument. If you don't, make sure the value mask is set correctly.
You need to link with the xpm library which you may have to download somewhere. It is not a part of X11 proper.
An example can be found here.

how do I do print preview in win32 c++?

I have a drawing function that just takes an HDC.
But I need to show an EXACT scaled version of what will print.
So currently, I use
CreateCompatibleDC() with a printer HDC and
CreateCompatibleBitmap() with the printer's HDC.
I figure this way the DC will have the printer's exact width and height.
And when I select fonts into this HDC, the text will be scaled exactly as the printer would.
Unfortunately, I can't to a StretchBlt() to copy this HDC's pixels to the control's HDC since they're of different HDC types I guess.
If I create the "memory canvas" from a window HDC with same w,h as the printer's page,
the fonts come out WAY teeny since they're scaled for the screen, not page...
Should I CreateCompatibleDC() from the window's DC and
CreateCompatibleBitmap() from the printer's DC or something??
If somebody could explain the RIGHT way to do this.
(And still have something that looks EXACTLY as it would on printer)...
Well, I'd appreciate it !!
...Steve
Depending on how accurate you want to be, this can get difficult.
There are many approaches. It sounds like you're trying to draw to a printer-sized bitmap and then shrink it down. The steps to do that are:
Create a DC (or better yet, an IC--Information Context) for the printer.
Query the printer DC to find out the resolution, page size, physical offsets, etc.
Create a DC for the window/screen.
Create a compatible DC (the memory DC).
Create a compatible bitmap for the window/screen, but the size should be the pixel size of the printer page. (The problem with this approach is that this is a HUGE bitmap and it can fail.)
Select the compatible bitmap into the memory DC.
Draw to the memory DC, using the same coordinates you would use if drawing to the actual printer. (When you select fonts, make sure you scale them to the printer's logical inch, not the screen's logical inch.)
StretchBlt the memory DC to the window, which will scale down the entire image. You might want to experiment with the stretch mode to see what works best for the kind of image you're going to display.
Release all the resources.
But before you head in that direction, consider the alternatives. This approach involves allocating a HUGE off-screen bitmap. This can fail on resource-poor computers. Even if it doesn't, you might be starving other apps.
The metafile approach given in another answer is a good choice for many applications. I'd start with this.
Another approach is to figure out all the sizes in some fictional high-resolution unit. For example, assume everything is in 1000ths of an inch. Then your drawing routines would scale this imaginary unit to the actual dpi used by the target device.
The problem with this last approach (and possibly the metafile one) is that GDI fonts don't scale perfectly linearly. The widths of individual characters are tweaked depending on the target resolution. On a high-resolution device (like a 300+ dpi laser printer), this tweaking is minimal. But on a 96-dpi screen, the tweaks can add up to a significant error over the length of a line. So text in your preview window might appear out-of-proportion (typically wider) than it does on the printed page.
Thus the hardcore approach is to measure text in the printer context, and measure again in the screen context, and adjust for the discrepancy. For example (using made-up numbers), you might measure the width of some text in the printer context, and it comes out to 900 printer pixels. Suppose the ratio of printer pixels to screen pixels is 3:1. You'd expect the same text on the screen to be 300 screen pixels wide. But you measure in the screen context and you get a value like 325 screen pixels. When you draw to the screen, you'll have to somehow make the text 25 pixels narrower. You can ram the characters closer together, or choose a slightly smaller font and then stretch them out.
The hardcore approach involves more complexity. You might, for example, try to detect font substitutions made by the printer driver and match them as closely as you can with the available screen fonts.
I've had good luck with a hybrid of the big-bitmap and the hardcore approaches. Instead of making a giant bitmap for the whole page, I make one large enough for a line of text. Then I draw at printer size to the offscreen bitmap and StretchBlt it down to screen size. This eliminates dealing with the size discrepancy at a slight degradation of font quality. It's suitable for actual print preview, but you wouldn't want to build a WYSIWYG editor like that. The one-line bitmap is small enough to make this practical.
The good news is only text is hard. All other drawing is a simple scaling of coordinates and sizes.
I've not used GDI+ much, but I think it did away with non-linear font scaling. So if you're using GDI+, you should just have to scale your coordinates. The drawback is that I don't think the font quality on GDI+ is as good.
And finally, if you're a native app on Vista or later, make sure you've marked your process as "DPI-aware" . Otherwise, if the user is on a high-DPI screen, Windows will lie to you and claim that the resolution is only 96 dpi and then do a fuzzy up-scaling of whatever you draw. This degrades the visual quality and can make debugging your print preview even more complicated. Since so many programs don't adapt well to higher DPI screens, Microsoft added "high DPI scaling" by default starting in Vista.
Edited to Add
Another caveat: If you select an HFONT into the memory DC with the printer-sized bitmap, it's possible that you get a different font than what would get when selecting that same HFONT into the actual printer DC. That's because some printer drivers will substitute common fonts with in memory ones. For example, some PostScript printers will substitute an internal PostScript font for certain common TrueType fonts.
You can first select the HFONT into the printer IC, then use GDI functions like GetTextFace, GetTextMetrics, and maybe GetOutlineTextMetrics to find out about the actual font selected. Then you can create a new LOGFONT to try to more closely match what the printer would use, turn that into an HFONT, and select that into your memory DC. This is the mark of a really good implementation.
Another Edit
I've recently written new code that uses enhanced meta files, and that works really well, at least for TrueType and OpenType fonts when there's no font substitution. This eliminates all the work I described above trying to create a screen font that is a scaled match for the printer font. You can just run through your normal printing code and print to an enhanced meta file DC as though it's the printer DC.
One thing that might be worth trying is to create an enhanced metafile DC, draw to it as normal and then scale this metafile using printer metrics. This is the approach used by the WTL BmpView sample - I don't know how accurate this will be but it might be worth looking at (it should be easy to port the relevant classes to Win32 but WTL is a great replacement for Win32 programming so might be worth utilizing.)
Well it won't look the same because you have a higher resolution in the printer DC, so you'll have to write a conversion function of sorts. I'd go with the method that you got to work but the text was too small and just multiply every position/font size by the printer window width and divide by the source window width.

Shatter Glass desktop Win32 effect for windows?

I would like a win32 program that takes the desktop and acts like it is shattering glass and in the end would put the pieces back together is there way reference on Doing this kind of effect with C++?
I wrote a program (unfortunately now lost) to do something like this a few years ago.
The desktop image can be retrieved by creating a DC for the screen, creating a compatible bitmap, then using BitBlt to copy the screen contents into the bitmap. Then use GetDIBits to get the pixels from this bitmap in a known format.
This link doesn't do exactly that, but it demonstrates the principle, albeit using MFC. I couldn't find a Win32-specific example:
http://www.flounder.com/screencapture.htm
For the shattering effect, best to use Direct3D or OpenGL. (Further details are up to you.) Create a texture using the bitmap data saved earlier.
By way of window for associating with OpenGL or D3D, create a borderless window that fills the entire screen and doesn't do painting or background erasing. This will prevent any flicker when switching from the desktop image to the copy of the desktop image being used to draw.
(If using D3D, you'll also find GetMonitorInfo useful in conjunction with IDirect3D9::GetAdapterMonitor and friends, as you'll need to create a separate device for each monitor and you'll therefore need to know which portion of the desktop corresponds to that device.)