Topic: ENGINE PLUGIN: Clipboard v0.4

[Snarky]

By popular demand: a plugin to support copy/paste, integrating with the Windows clipboard!
This plugin allows you to copy text from other applications and paste it into an AGS game, or vice versa.

The plugin provides two methods:

Code: Adventure Game Studio

1. bool Clipboard.CopyText(String copyString);
2. String Clipboard.PasteText();

Calling Clipboard.CopyText(copyString) will put copyString on the Windows clipboard (returning true if successful), accessible to other applications. Calling Clipboard.PasteText() returns the current text content of the Windows clipboard as a String (or null if none) that you can use in-game. Pretty simple.

As with all AGS engine plugins, you have to place the .dll file in the AGS engine folder, then activate it in the IDE from the project tree before you can use the methods. It should be unnecessary to state, but for the record: the game must be designed and created to use the plugin, you can't just drop it into the folder of a finished game and expect it to do anything.

This is my first AGS plugin, and my first C++ project in many years. It works on my machine, but I'm not 100% sure it will work on every Windows machine – in particular on older Windows versions. If you could try the demo and let me know if you experience any problems, I'd appreciate it.

The code is available on Github. (In the demo game, the example of how to use it is in TextField.HandleKeyPress(), starting on line 538.)

Download Clipboard plugin
Download Clipboard demo

Change log:
v0.4
-Initial release (untested except for on my own machine)

[Riaise]

I've just had a quick go with the demo and it works fine for me on Windows 10.

[Vincent]

On Windows 7 it's working like a charm! Great work as usual Snarky!
Some extra notes aside: Should Ctrl+Z remove the previous paste text and Ctrl+Y add the latest text copied?

[Snarky]

I've just had a quick go with the demo and it works fine for me on Windows 10.

On Windows 7 it's working like a charm!

Good! I'm on Win10, so I thought that would probably work, but I'm very happy to hear it's working on Windows 7 as well. Hopefully that means that it's not terribly dependent on the Windows version. Thanks for testing!

Great work as usual Snarky!
Some extra notes aside: Should Ctrl+Z remove the previous paste text and Ctrl+Y add the latest text copied?

Thanks. Sure, undo/history would be useful to have, but it wouldn't be part of the plugin, but rather something you implement in your game logic. I'll think about adding it to the TextField module.

[Vincent]

You are welcome Snarky!

Thanks. Sure, undo/history would be useful to have, but it wouldn't be part of the plugin, but rather something you implement in your game logic. I'll think about adding it to the TextField module.

In fact, I was thinking that it could be implemented in the TextField module as well instead of in the plugin itself after I had a look into the code on Github.

[Gurok]

Sorry if it wasn't clear, but I was talking about your TextField module. Give people a little credit, Snarky.

[Snarky]

Fair enough. I've moved your post over to the TextField module thread.

[cat]

A bite late, but I just saw this and

[Dave Gilbert]

This is SO COOL. And would have been super useful on my current project (no more copying debug info manually!). Will definitely use it in the future.

[Snarky]

Hmm. Testing it on a relatively untouched Win10 VM, this plugin turns out to have a dependency on some platform dll from Visual Studio that isn't universally deployed: probably (some version of) msvcp or msvcr. Without it, any game that includes the plugin will fail to run. I'll investigate more to identify the dependency and see if it can be bundled with the plugin.

[Baguettator]

Hi !

I found this nice plugin, but my question is : will it limits the possibilities to play my game using this plugin if the game is played on another OS than windows ?
I mean : MAC users or Linux users could play the game ? Or it will not run ?

The commands to copy/paste are not essential for the game, it's just a "luxure" for those who could use it (windows players, so).

[Snarky]

Yes, the plugin currently only works on Windows, and games compiled with it won't run on Mac/Linux. However, if you take a little bit of care, you can simply build it once for Windows, disable the plugin, and build it again for other platforms. For this to work, you should wrap all plugin calls within #ifdef CLIPBOARD_PLUGIN conditions, like so:

Code: Adventure Game Studio

1.   #ifdef CLIPBOARD_PLUGIN
2.     String s = Clipboard.PasteText();
3.     if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(s))
4.     {
5.       lblContent.Text = s;
6.       return true;
7.     }
8.     else return false;
9.   #endif
10.   #ifndef CLIPBOARD_PLUGIN
11.     return false;
12.   #endif
13.  

[Baguettator]

Thanks Snarky for the help !

Could you please explain me how to install your plugin in AGS, so ? I use 3.5.0

[Snarky]

Check out the manual, "Other features | Plugins."