hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2398.txt

Episode: 2398
Title: HPR2398: AutoHotkey Master of Automation ?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2398/hpr2398.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 02:18:47

---

This is HPR episode 2,398 entitled AutoHotkey Master of Automation.
It is hosted by Opera Nero R and in about 17 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is, I'll go over my AutoHotkey script I used to give free money in GTA dropping.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hello, this is Rob McCurdy with another episode of HPR15.
Today I'm going to be talking about automation with Windows macros or in general you might have heard AutoHotkey or AutoIT.
One I wanted to talk about is the power and limitations of those pieces of software.
I first explained by how I started with AutoHotkey.
I had some repetitive tasks that I needed to do that were to excel and actually sharepoint data.
I didn't have that background for web application stuff to do it in curl or the command line or anything like that.
I knew that I could find something that would help me click this, click that and then go to here and then go to lines down and click this and then click the next link and then copy that link and go to lines down and repeat that process.
That's how I ended up playing around with it.
I realized that it had features that you could use in other places.
For example, an anti idle script to keep you alive and connected during some kind of video game or in some cases you can completely automate some of the portions of that game.
Meaning grinding, which is basically running around and killing stuff, you can use different methods to automate some of that.
Since actually it was kind of a fun little project.
We had some new DLC downloadable content for the Grand Theft Auto Online game, which I don't really have time to play games, but they had DLC coming out.
I wanted to try and get a little bit of money for that.
Of course, they had these fictional money that you can purchase for ungodly amounts.
We're talking like $50 for something you can blow in one transaction.
It could be ridiculously expensive to buy this fictional money and they still make money with it.
I started joining these Discord channels that had a queue you could sit in and you could sit in this queue and you wait and eventually you get into a private game where this guy throws around money.
It's quite hilarious to watch.
It's kind of like watching people on the slot machines because they're all running around in circles.
I have a video at the end of the thing that kind of highlights some of that.
Anyways, I wanted to get some of this money and I sat in the queue and I missed it.
Seven hours later, I still didn't have that opportunity.
So I looked at how much these hacking tools cost.
There's probably ten different vendors and three of them are worth a damn.
I purchased one and found that it was quite interesting and fun.
So I started actually dropping as the term myself.
So I started to give away money because I noticed that there were a whole lot of people in that community.
There's thousands of people waiting for money and there's only one person dropping.
So I started working on dropping and I thought it was fun.
And I said, you know what? I can probably automate some of this with Adohaki.
And then my grandiose plan was to have some kind of discord script which was easily manageable.
And my ultimate goal would have some kind of custom they call them menus for these hacking tools.
A custom menu that would automate some of that action to keep people from, for example,
that would warn people that we're talking in the channel.
It would warn people that are killing other people or would warn people somehow maybe if they were stealing other people's money bags that could drop from this guy.
So anyway, so it was basically wanted to automate the whole entire process.
So I quickly realized that, you know, I tried my automation pieces through this group and I had some,
some miscomings and mishaps over the night doing away from keyboard AFK drops,
meaning that I automated the whole portion of it and people got stiffed because they sat in a queue forever and they got all upset
because they dropped it in work or it wasn't there, the game crashed, whatever.
So through that experience, I got kicked out of that program because they care about people that for whatever reason sit and wait for free money.
I don't really see why that matters. But anyways, I'll explain why I think they got upset later.
So it started driving more of this automation.
It started doing things like detecting when the program has been crashed.
Some great things you can do within AutoHacking is you can actually detect strings inside of boxes.
So for example, you can look for button titles or titles inside of text within, in most cases within a dialogue.
So the title of the dialogue might be this program has crashed, right?
And you can search for that dialogue or if the title is blank and there's no buttons,
but inside of the dialogue, there's this thing that says this game has crashed or whatever.
You can actually harvest that information using the spy application that comes with Hockey.
So you can figure out what text you need to look for within a dialogue to perform or forsake it for perspective action or specifically.
So I have a couple of check scripts that will essentially look and see the status of the game if it's running, if it's crashed, if it has been crashed by a launcher or something like that.
So it kind of establishes what the status of the game is.
And the second one is basically starts up the game and starts up the drop and sets everything up and starts the cheat thing and all that good stuff.
A lot of it is time-based.
And what I tried to do was, again, figure out a way that I could hook the game to actually tell how many people were in the game and log that to a file and feed that into the macro.
But what I ended up doing is what I ended up doing at most cases is taking using the thing called a pixel search, I think.
Like pixel search and image search.
I started with pixel search and I had some varying degrees.
So what I really ended up doing is saying, I need a way I can find out how many people are in the room.
So I want the room to have about eight people in it.
So what I did was I brought up a dialogue that brought a list down of all the people in the room.
And in that list, for each line, there was a blue square or a blue rectangle for each person in that line.
And going all the way down, if you go past the eight people in the room, that line becomes kind of transparent and it doesn't have that blue square.
So what I ended up doing was finding the location of that eighth blue square and searching for that blue square in that specific location.
And if it wasn't there, that that meant that the room was not full and it would allow more people into the drop per se.
So the idea there is it would just run into the loop, check to see if the game is crashed, if it crashed, restart the whole process of setting up the drop.
And then it would search for that blue icon that would actually show that all the players are filled or at least there's eight or more people in the room.
It wouldn't detect quite yet that the room was over full.
He would just search the next box, so he would search the ninth box for blue.
And if it said, if it was blue in the ninth box, then you would know that the room was not only full, but it was over full and to do something to kick people or whatever.
So anyways, that's what I ended up doing. I think I had it running for about two or three weeks in total, two weeks in total at least.
I since kind of gave up because I came at a stopping point because I knew that I couldn't really develop the bot much more without some kind of custom hook or a script hook that there's not a whole lot of people out there that can develop.
And I'm not a software developer or a memory, you know, I'm not a memory engineer or reverse engineer guy.
So I tried to get some spoon feeding in that area and I didn't have a whole lot of luck. So that's where I left off.
Anyways, I just wanted to provide the script and give a brief example of what it does and kind of what you can do.
This outside of the image grabbing, it's all keyboard based.
So, you know, for example, it will try to activate the title of the browser and add friends or accept friends.
There's a wipe friends button that essentially does the same thing. It tries to wipe all of the friends.
Let's see, you can start applications. You can wait for certain things, wait for a window title.
It takes some time to come up, for example, watching the game takes time.
You can tell it to wait for that title to appear and then do some other task.
A lot of it has to do with the speed of the macro and sometimes you can speed it up or slow it down to perform things in different ways.
In general, if you're going to do anything with games, you want to install a mouse hook, at least with AutoHook key.
There's an install mouse hook and install keyboard hook, which essentially allows you to hook these most games to allow them to do scripting inside of those games.
There's a lot of complicated script in here, but it's pretty standard stuff.
Keyboard movements, mouse movements for the image stuff or mouse, or there's no actually mouse movements at all.
There's detecting if the image is there, then you have running tasks to kill any tasks that's currently running.
That's pretty much it. It's pretty basic. That's why I like to make macros that are only keyboard-based macros, so that way they're not having to worry about screen resolution.
That's why I didn't like doing an image search based macro part portion because you had to have a specific screen resolution to perform that check.
Other than that screen resolution and the timing, this should be plug-and-play and work for most other things.
I would take a look at AutoHook key or AutoIT. If you do repetitive tasks, if you're not familiar with programming or coding, you can actually use macros to perform repetitive tasks if you don't know how to script something.
That's a good place to start. I get the tip to build that logic out for programming.
If you have time to contribute, please contribute to HackerPapaGradio, and this is our signing out.
What I also wanted to comment on is within this community, you've got people that essentially resell cheats or they'll resell, so they'll buy in a menu for, say, 60 bucks.
They'll advertise and sell services to give you money, so they'll either ask for your login and password, and they'll give you a bunch of money in-game money, or they'll offer to do a drop and give you things, give you money through that.
So they sell kind of like a reseller of in-game money that they create.
The group that I was in was actually a group of some of them were creators or at least very closely tied to the game hacking for this particular game, Grand Theft Auto, in general.
So this community of free money essentially was closely tied to the people that created these menus.
And what I realized is that through getting people angry at this automation, because since I was dropping 24-7, I think it was making people upset because I wasn't concentrating on the drop-y, they called them, that they were, you know, gypped in, they felt that they'd sit in an queue for seven hours, and if they didn't get their money, they would be upset.
So what I realized is I think this whole free money situation that they have set up here is actually just an advertisement for their cheat tools.
So there's a handful of these guys that are all in bed together, and they all kind of co-hosts or people co-host these channels that give away free money.
So in actuality, if you sit in the room for like I did for seven hours and a couple of days, you don't get that free money, you start looking into what are these people using, what tools, excuse me, are these people using?
Well, these tools run from $10 for one month to up to $70 for an unlimited license or an unlimited plan, whatever.
I said, you know, let me go ahead and purchase these because instead of waiting, right, I'll spend the $10 and purchase my own tool, and I can give myself money and not have the weight.
So what I realized is that these channels are, I think, an advertisement for their own software, meaning that someone says, on a sitting queue and I never get any money, well, I can spend $10 and get all the money that I want if I purchase this menu per say.
So what ended up happening is that I'll provide a link in the show notes is that I got this kind of hilariously funny season to this message from one of the moderators of one of the menus hydrogen, which is the first one I started out with, which was like $10 for one month.
And it was basically like a season to assist from an illegal person, right, so it's black market asking you to, you know, do all these things where they're going to threaten you to cancel your account and you're violating terms of service, blah, blah, blah.
So it's quite a hilarious read to read that section, meaning that I think I just started pissing people off because my character was was giving away free money 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
While there was only a few people giving away money at a time, my script was giving away money all the time to basically anyone that registered or anyone that knew my name.
So I think that's why people started getting upset and people generally had a distaste for the automation of my efforts because if everyone could drop easily and everyone could get money, then why would they need to purchase the trainers, right.
So I think that's the actual actual reason why I didn't get a lot of traction with the groups.
And also it's probably I think because there's a lot of spam in that area, meaning that I say that I give away free money and then it'll be something like, oh, well, you have to give me your log in a password or you have to do some of their stupid thing and go to this website and click this thing and download this program and then you end up with malware or something like that.
So there's a very, very strangely difficult to advertise this free drop for this free money because everyone thinks that it's you're trying to scam them or that you're interrupting these particular groups that sell these menus and they don't want random people giving away money all the time 24, seven.
They would like it that you give that you give money away just enough to advertise their product, I think.
And outside of that, they don't want people just randomly giving away money all the time using automation. So anyways, that's my take on it. And I've got pictures and videos and the actual script and all that stuff in the show notes.
And you guys can have a read at the kind of cease and desist letter that I got that was quite hilarious.
So you've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is.
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the infonomicom computer club.
And it's part of the binary revolution at binwreff.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
And as otherwise stated, today's show is released on the create of comments, attribution, share a like, 3.0 license.