DoctorGibbs' Perl Toolkit for Interacting with the There World

Part 6. Teleporting Your Avatar (and also interacting with main menu and webapps.prod.there.com)

In this section we will learn several ways to teleport your avatar. Of these, the most powerful involve interacting with There's server at http://webapps.prod.there.com (hereafter referred to as WPTC). Once we learn how to do this interaction, we will also be able to use other services from WPTC.

We will also use this section to show how to interact with the Main Menu in your There window -- also something that will be useful not just for teleporting.

So, this is an important section even if you are not interested in teleporting.

First let's consider the case of teleporting to a destination that you have bookmarked previously as a favorite place. That means that we want to simulate, one way or another, a click on the Main Menu choice Places/Go To Favorite/[YourSavedPlacename] . The most direct, and least elegant, way to do this is to send mouse clicks to the correct pre-measured geometrical place in the There window, for example as follows

sub TeleportToFavorite {
    my ($therewin,$favno) = @_;
    Win32::GuiTest::SetForegroundWindow($therewin);
    sleep 1;
    ($x,$y) = Win32::GuiTest::GetWindowRect($therewin);
    Win32::GuiTest::MouseMoveAbsPix($x+242,$y+613);
    sleep 1;
    Win32::GuiTest::SendMouse("{LEFTCLICK}"); # Places button
    sleep 1;
    Win32::GuiTest::MouseMoveAbsPix($x+242,$y+542);
    sleep 1;
    Win32::GuiTest::SendMouse("{LEFTCLICK}"); # Go to Favorites button
    sleep 1;
    Win32::GuiTest::MouseMoveAbsPix($x+356,$y+542);
    sleep 1;
    Win32::GuiTest::MouseMoveAbsPix($x+356,$y+612-23*$favno);
    sleep 1;
    Win32::GuiTest::SendMouse("{LEFTCLICK}"); # Teleport!
    sleep 20;
    Win32::GuiTest::MouseMoveAbsPix($x+100,$y+100);
    sleep 1;
    Win32::GuiTest::SendMouse("{LEFTCLICK}"); # click on main window
}

The better way to get to a bookmarked favorite place is to use the interface to the Main Menu provided by localhost:9999. The global URL for this (defined in TherePerlGlobals.pl) is
$URLmainMenu = "http://localhost:9999/ScriptHook/Invoke?Path=%2FmainMenu%2F";
with some stuff appended to define which menu choice you want. A subroutine for this is

sub MainMenuChoice {
    my @clicks = @_;
    my $click;
    my $url = $URLmainMenu;
# must take window focus, else MainMenu is unavailable
    Win32::GuiTest::SetForegroundWindow(&GetThereWindow());
    foreach $click (@clicks) {
	$click =~ s/ /+/g;
	$click =~ s/\'/%27/g;
	$url .= ($click . "%2F");
    }
    $url .= "activate";
    $req = HTTP::Request->new('GET', $url);
    $res = $ua->request($req);
    my $ret = $res->content;
    if ($ret =~ m/([^<]+)<\/ErrorCode>/) { return $1; }
    else {return 0;}
}

A few things are worth noting: (1) The double parentheses are of course because the subroutine is looking for an array as its single argument. (2) The array elements must be exactly a series of available menu choices. Your bumble bee might not be in a folder named "Vehicles" the way mine is, for example. Capitalization and spaces are significant. (3) I'm assuming that space and apostrophe are the only special characters in your menu. If otherwise, steal from somewhere the line or two of code to convert special characters to %xx notation -- I always forget how to do this.

A example of teleporting to a favorite, then, is

$errcode = &MainMenuChoice(("Places", "Go To Favorite", "Duda Beach"));

Now let's get to the fun part, namely interacting with WPTC!

Conceptually, all you need to do to teleport to a doid that is an allowed teleport destination (houses, PAZs, signs, etc.) is to hit on the URL
$URLteleDoid = "http://webapps.prod.there.com/goto/goto?obj=";
(appending a doid number) or on the URL
$URLtelePlace = "http://webapps.prod.there.com/goto/goto?placename="; (appending a placename that allows teleports). Sounds easy.

What makes it not easy is that your perl script is running in a window that was NOT spawned by the There client. The WPTC server knows this, and therefore requires AvatarName/Password authentication before it is willing to honor the request. (Actually it is very nice of the There-gods to allow such "foreign" requests at all. They could have required that WPTC requests come from There browsers without exception. Thank you, There-gods. We promise not to abuse the privilege!)

Don't even try to read any further unless you have installed the HTTPS patch into LWP, as described in Part 1, and verified that you can use LWP to retrieve https:// web pages!

So here is what is supposed to happen when you hit on a URL like $URLteleDoid above:

sub GetWebappsURL {
    my ($wptcURL,$avatar,$passwd) = @_;
    if ($wptcURL !~ m/^${URLwptc}/i) {
	return "First arg must begin with $URLwptc\n";
    }
    $req = HTTP::Request->new('GET' => $wptcURL);
    $res = $ua->request($req);
    my $response = $res->content;
    if ($response =~ m/]+URL=([^\"]+login\?)redirect=[^\"]+\"/) {
	$head = $1;
	if ($debug) {print "LOGGING IN.....\n";}
	my $loginARG = "sendAsLoginData=1&avname=$avatar&password=$passwd";
	$req = HTTP::Request->new('GET' => $head.$loginARG);
	$res = $ua->request($req);
	$response = $res->content;
	if ($response =~ m/Login Succeeded!/) {
	    $req = HTTP::Request->new('GET' => $wptcURL );
	    $res = $ua->request($req);
	    $response = $res->content;
	    return $response;
	} else {
	    return "Login Failed!\n";
	}
    }
    return $response;
}

use HTTP::Cookies;
$cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new(file => "lwp_cookies.dat", autosave => 1);
$ua->cookie_jar($cookie_jar);

$ua->agent("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)");

sub TeleportToPlace {
    my $place = shift;
    $place =~ s/ /+/g;
    $place =~ s/\'/%27/g;
    my $resp = &GetWebappsURL($URLtelePlace . $place, $myavname, $mypassword);
    if ($resp =~ m/<Value>([^<]+)<\/Value>/) {
	return $1;
    } else {
	return 99;  # unable to parse return value
    }
}

sub TeleportToDoid {
    my $doid = shift;
    my $resp = &GetWebappsURL($URLteleDoid . $doid, $myavname, $mypassword);
    if ($resp =~ m/<Value>([^<]+)<\/Value>/) {
	return $1;
    } else {
	return 99;  # unable to parse return value
    }
}