Spring RTS Engine

This is a simple widget to show the currently playing song title from winamp while playing spring.

It's in beta mode so it currently requires manual update of songtitle from winamp. You can customise what keycombo does that in winamp -> options -> Preferences -> Global hotkeys -> General: copy title. I use ctrl-alt-shift+8.

Requires Spring 97 or newer (or latest dev).

Here's a screenie:



It's also possible with same technique to control winamp from spring, but I didn't add that yet. Not sure if people want to.

If somebody finds a way to send a keystroke from spring it's possible to handle the song title updates automatically. Is it somehow possible to send a keystroke such as <sendKeys>{{CTRL}}{{SHIFT}}{{ALT}}8</sendKeys>?

Holy shit I thought I was the last remaining Winamp user!

Btw, this is really fucking awesome. I hate not learning information about songs I really like because I'm busy playing a fullscreen game, this changes that. If I still played I'd definitely be using this. Good stuff.

Winamp user here. Most keyboards these days have media buttons for play/pause/next and all the rest. I use that if I'm in Spring.

Also this might have been more exciting 40 years ago before most people started using dual monitors. But still, nice work Jools, I will try it for fun and the code will be interesting to look at.

I also have dual screen setup but if I click on the other screen while spring is in fullscreen, it will alt-tab spring. Maybe it gets better with 97 where you can play spring with wíndowed mode instead.

CarRepairer wrote:Most keyboards these days have media buttons for play/pause/next and all the rest.

Is that a fact based on some survey or is it speculation?

I also use winamp and the media buttons while I'm ingame, I think most "home" keyboards/laptops have them.

Jools wrote:

CarRepairer wrote:Most keyboards these days have media buttons for play/pause/next and all the rest.

Is that a fact based on some survey or is it speculation?

I will admit it's anecdotal, but I own a ridiculous amount (actual number) of keyboards and nearly all of them have media buttons

This actually piqued my curiosity and I suddenly wanted to get an idea of how much crap is laying around so...

Keyboard that came with an HP media system (PS2!) - yes
Keyboard that came with an acer desktop - yes
Keyboard that came with a dell system - no
My main backlit gamer keyboard - yes
Apple brand thin keyboard - yes
MS bluetooth keyboard - no
Handheld smartphone sized BT keyboard - yes
iPad sized BT keyboard - yes
Wireless keyboard with touchpad - yes
Wireless handheld keyboard for media - yes
Keyboard in macbook - yes

That's two no's. The real question is why do I have so many keyboards.

I have two: one business keyboard, simple and good. Has no multimedia keys. The other one is logitech, old, causes BSOD on windows, has multimedia keys, but they are only supported until win2k, not even winxp.

You can still bind any keys to specific functions on any keyboard with things such as autohotkey. That's why I think there is no big use in making play control buttons on the widget.

But it's another thing to display information about song playing. Yes, I have a voice command that says it when I use the start trek like command "Computer: identify music composition". But it only works well if the artist is English language one, and voice recognition has other issues as well. So it's convenient to show this also visually. But maybe the widget should fade away after the first few seconds in a new song to not be in the way.