Steam Chat room Chat logger

Well, to keep the running updates going, here is another one.

Yesterday I was exhausted after work, so I figured I would eat some supper, play a couple rounds of CoD4, then stumble off to bed.

Well.... Steps 1+2 (Supper and CoD4) worked out well and at 9:30 pm I was thinking bed sounded like a good option. As i was going over the interweb before going to bed I remembered the whole "steam://friends/..." thing and I really wanted to try it out.

So, I opened up the AutoIt3 script editor, and was able to knock 14 lines of script (each line is pretty much a separate action) down to only 1 line (going to need to add 3 more lines to make sure the group chat opens.

The previous night I had roughed out, then polished how I wanted the logger page to look, so I then went about implementing that. (10:40 pm)

At 11:20 pm I was ready to do some test runs, and naturally discovered multiple major omissions in my code.

By 11:50 pm I had pretty much finished it off, so much for an early night...

In any case, Its pretty close to finished now, I would say I am at the 85% mark. I need to implement a few changes to the settings, maybe add a couple more options, Add some GUI changes, and implement the automatic logging (so the logger runs every 30 minutes or whatever the interval is set to)

*edit*
Oh, thats right, here is a picture of what the logger is going to look like:

MacNetron said:

If I read your last post on page2 correctly then the program is not launching steam chat itself and cut and pasting to notepad, but php-script parsing a webpage?

Click to expand...

No, that post was kinda hybrid confusingness.

It started off by listing how I used to do stuff: Find Group Chat Window -> Copy Text -> Close Group Chat window -> Open group chat window complicated way -> Open Notepad -> Paste Into Notepad -> Save Notepad and exit

Described the new method:
Find Group Chat Window -> Copy Text (efficient way) -> Close Group Chat Window -> Open Group chat easy way -> exit

The easy Group Chat opening method requires you know the Groups steam ID #, I could either make the user provide it, or provide the name of the group.

Then I described how I was looking around online and found some people wrote a PHP API script that among other things could find the steam ID #, and I was looking into how they did it, and saw it was just parsing a webpage, which I could do myself.

Deskalada said:

Hmm verry instersting.....
but i do belve there is a better way to go and do this

Click to expand...

Well, there is a "better" way but it requires much deeper knowledge about how steam functions. There is a guy who wrote a program that could intercept steam messages on the fly, but it was broken every time steam updated, and he vanished along with his website (www.steamextras.com its dead)

In other news, SteamLogger (ChatLogger v2 essentially) is alive and well, and running on my web server: http://caffeinesystems.ath.cx/Tf2mappers/

You can view the results at the log page, still some tweaking, but I wanted to get it up and running fast.

MacNetron said:

Biggest advantage with your approach is indeed that steam updates don't break it.

I concur with you that the better way you need to know more of steam itself. It would require to sniff packages send from and to the chat. One can argue that that is reverse-engineering...

Click to expand...

And I did look into packet sniffing for about 15 minutes or so (not long) and it looked like the packets being sent to / from the steam community chat window were encrypted, so I gave up for now.

I might look back into it in the future if I get ambitious.

The first post has been updated to a glorious compendium, compaction, and summery of my posts thus far (I think)

Yay! google indexed the chat logger website, you can try out some searches from here:

Click Me!

Or just go to google and do this "site:http://caffeinesystems.ath.cx/TF2Mappers <Query Goes here>"

Well, I have done something else. I decided that the website was getting enough hits to warrant being on its own dedicated server (I am already paying for super cheap web hosting for a couple of sites)

So the new site is http://caffeinesystems.com/TF2Mappers (looks pretty much the same, notice its .com instead of .ath.cx)

I will leave the .ath.cx version up for a while yet, but it is not being updated any more. If you have hte page bookmarked, please update the links with the new hosted page.

yeah... There are actually several things I have fixed in my latest version but I have not rolled it out to my logger computer yet because some of the changes I made caused the new version to really dislike the old versions saved settings file, and I actually use the settings file for more than just saving settings...

Another reason the update has not been rolled out to the logger is because I was working the last 6 months so during the weeks where I did not do much programming at work, I was more inspired to work on my hobby projects. This is my spring break now before I head back to school so I should get some inspiration to work on the program soon.