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Automate Activation of Game Key for Steam Client


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I know right away that the title of this is going to set off the spider sense in the mods and the users that want to be mods, trust me this does not break the rules or I would not be posting it.

Here is the scenario.

When you buy a new game from a 3rd party site like Humble Bundle or IndieGala you will get your key that you need to go activate with Steam to claim your game.

These bundles have 8+ keys sometimes and I hate having to spend 10 minutes manually walking through the process of clicking, pasting, nexting, through all of the GUI to activate them.

I have tried to automate the activation process it but there is no "window info" on anything and worse yet there does not seem to be any keyboard commands I can find that interact with the client  gui (other than Big Picture mode, and in that mode I can't find the "activate game" feature)

I can't be the only one here that has looked into this, and wonder if the programmers/devs and such out there know crazy black magic methods I do not know to do this, even if it means bypassing the GUI completely. 

To be clear once again, I am asking how to automate the Steam GUI to activate games I have purchased.  Not game automation :)

Regards,

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A mod will have to weigh in on this. I'm not sure on where I stand on this. It is for Steam itself and not a game but then again the whole point for Steam is a game launcher and I believe a mod will have an issue with that.

Question: For the Steam TOS - does it say anything about automating it? I can tell you if it does, then the mod WILL lock this thread. If I was you - I would check that and report back.

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Not to be rude Bert, but the reason I put the extra time into explaining the situation was to avoid having any posts like yours starting any discussion about the politics of the matter.  A mod has the rights/authority to make decisions on this and we have no need to publicly discuss.

I am a mod on WideScreenGamingForum.com and fully respect and understand the roles that a mod plays in a large well developed community.  I am also a regular user of Autoit and work in IT for a living.  I know that automating the GUI for Steam is no different than automating the GUI for any other program that we as techy people would like to do to save time and make things better for us in day to day life.

I have seen enough threads where the mods were ok with automating game related things like a game servers console because while it was game related it, in itself was not game automation.  This is how it should be, games are not evil, but the powers that be do not want AutoIT tied to botting and other sketchy usage.

This is a clean, well thought out request that does not violate the AutoIT rules, and those are the rules we should take into consideration.

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I do not mind a discussion, but the common courtesy at any forum is to have a discussion about the matter at hand, not to be off topic and as a mod those are the things I tell people not to do.

All of us here, no matter how many post we have or how much rep are just users.  We have no rights to tell people what they should/should not post.

I know that being a long time member with a ton of posts does carry weight.  Over at NoteBookReview I have over 20K post and have been a member for 10 years, but I am still not a MOD so if I saw something that should not have posted I would report the post, not publicly try to argue or start an off topic discussion with the poster as its the mods job to lock the thread and notify the user of the issue not the senior members. 

See how this goes, the first person started and now its a downhill chain reaction?  The flame war like behavior only decreases the chances of getting any actual productive information in this thread and brings out the worse in people.  As I ghost this forum on the regular I though of most people here to be adults and quite mature and would know better than to do things of that nature.  But I do know we have a lot of "wanna-be-mods" always looking to get in the last word unfortunately. 

I'll step away and let this go where it goes.  I feel my case is strong in what I am asking about that it does not break the rules and if I am gone you guys can keep posting away and I wont be here to respond to keep the argument going.

 

Regards,

Edited by ViciousXUSMC
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Not to be rude Bert, but the reason I put the extra time into explaining the situation was to avoid having any posts like yours starting any discussion about the politics of the matter.  A mod has the rights/authority to make decisions on this and we have no need to publicly discuss.

I am a mod on WideScreenGamingForum.com and fully respect and understand the roles that a mod plays in a large well developed community.  I am also a regular user of Autoit and work in IT for a living.  I know that automating the GUI for Steam is no different than automating the GUI for any other program that we as techy people would like to do to save time and make things better for us in day to day life.

I have seen enough threads where the mods were ok with automating game related things like a game servers console because while it was game related it, in itself was not game automation.  This is how it should be, games are not evil, but the powers that be do not want AutoIT tied to botting and other sketchy usage.

This is a clean, well thought out request that does not violate the AutoIT rules, and those are the rules we should take into consideration.

I'm not offended in the least. If anything I'm impressed with the work you put in before hand. Sorry if I offended you. I was offering a suggestion for you so that what I suggested would be covered. I know TOS is a thing for us and in reading your first post I did not see that mentioned. My post was actually meant to help you. My apologies seeing I was a bit clumsy at posting my intent.

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No problem, thanks for the reply.

I suppose you were just the catalyst.  Walking into a gas filled room with a book of matches in your pocket.  No harm intended but greatly raising the possibility of an accident occurring. 

I have never seen TOS taken into account on any thread, I would think many request would be slowed down or even denied if so because TOS are usually such a grey area open to  interpretation, also TOS are usually not legally binding in anyway, you just offer the owner of the software to take action on your account/status for violating them.

Steam is not all games by the way.  I have my budget program on there that was actually a program purchased and installed via Steam :)

 

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  • Developers

Lets for the moment stick to the OP's question as I see no issues yet. :)

Jos

Edited by Jos

SciTE4AutoIt3 Full installer Download page   - Beta files       Read before posting     How to post scriptsource   Forum etiquette  Forum Rules 
 
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Dream of the future,
Learn from the past.
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First thing I'd do if  there is no bog standard window info is to try IUIAutomation. You will find that in Example scripts forum and it can access window elements that Standard AutoIt functions cannot.

AutoIt Absolute Beginners    Require a serial    Pause Script    Video Tutorials by Morthawt   ipify 

Monkey's are, like, natures humans.

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I dont think it matters. You should be able to goto the screen where you get your keys and pull them all into an array. You can then use shortcut keys to add them into steam. I have wanted to do this too but its a lot less work to just add the 8 keys then spend 4 hours making a script. BTW you should check out bundlestars, 

Get Scite to add a popup when you use a 3rd party UDF -> http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/scite/docs/SciTE4AutoIt3/user-calltip-manager.html

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Yeah cant find any shortcut keys or key interactions to work with the GUI.

At one point Humble bundle would "sync" to your account and you could activate them right from the site by clicking "claim key".  For some reason that feature is gone now or I just have not been logged in properly to use it.

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It still works. I use firefox to do it lately but I haven't done it for like 2 months now. You could pretty easily copy and paste the keys to a text file and let the script do the rest. That wouldnt take too much time. 

edit - it doesnt seem to work anymore.

Edited by computergroove

Get Scite to add a popup when you use a 3rd party UDF -> http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/scite/docs/SciTE4AutoIt3/user-calltip-manager.html

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Well I took a (short) look at IUIAutomation this weekend and got Autoit to find and activate the Steam Client window as the Info Finder tool pretty much gave me that part of the code.  It does not let me see any of the elements inside of the window like the "file" options.  I think based on some of the examples that this maybe normal behavior and I need to use the _UIA_DumpThemAll() to get my elements.

I ran out of time before I figured out all the stuff to plug into the code and how to find the results.  It will take some more time for sure but in the end I should learn a new valuable skill.

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I would start by pulling the html code into memory and using the string functions to pull out the combinations of ####-####-#### and putting them into an array or just processing them on the fly. You could use regex to get them as well.

Get Scite to add a popup when you use a 3rd party UDF -> http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/scite/docs/SciTE4AutoIt3/user-calltip-manager.html

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You may not use Cheats, automation software (bots), mods, hacks, or any other unauthorized third-party software, to modify or automate any Subscription Marketplace process

http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/

 

And TOS has come in to play in two discussions.  One was the services used for the GetIP functions, the other is the reason there are no YouTube threads.

 

,-. .--. ________ .-. .-. ,---. ,-. .-. .-. .-.
|(| / /\ \ |\ /| |__ __||| | | || .-' | |/ / \ \_/ )/
(_) / /__\ \ |(\ / | )| | | `-' | | `-. | | / __ \ (_)
| | | __ | (_)\/ | (_) | | .-. | | .-' | | \ |__| ) (
| | | | |)| | \ / | | | | | |)| | `--. | |) \ | |
`-' |_| (_) | |\/| | `-' /( (_)/( __.' |((_)-' /(_|
'-' '-' (__) (__) (_) (__)

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okay, for what i see here, theres some stuff u need to take in consideration, when you trying to do any kind of automation, first, windows have different levels of authorization (this aint so escalated on linux), second, when you scouting for info into a window with any scouter, this will need to have more access level that the program you are scouting, (easiest way of getting it around is the on info64x.exe that comes with the scifi ran with admin rights), third, steam have one of the highest security levels in the world, this doesnt mean you cant go around it, just be careful cuz this have potential to get you banned, since you are not involving only the TOS, also the EULA come to participate here, besides all the legal worthless stuff, you should be able to get all the steam app info, if not, here is a clue, its probably programmed on java

 

Hope i dont get i trouble for the answer but the kid is doing something i love to do haha   

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