c# - Send Key Strokes to Games using Direct Input

Question

I can send any windows application key strokes with PostMessage api. But I can't send key strokes to Game window by using PostMessage.

Anyone know anything about using Direct Input functions for sending keys to games from C#.

Answer 1

An alternate way would be to hook the DirectInput API directly - Microsoft Research has provided a library to do this already: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/detours/

Once you hook into the API, you can do whatever you want with it. However, it's worth noting that in recent versions of Windows, DirectInput for mouse & keyboard input is just a wrapper around the Win32 windows messages. DirectInput spawns a thread in the background and simply intercepts window messages before passing them along back to the application. It's one of the reasons why Microsoft no longer recommends the use of DirectInput - and it means that messaging APIs like PostMessage should work just fine.