steam offline mode - how to bypass dialog

MeMeMeMe · 23 May 2012 at 17:24

When you start steam in offline mode, you get this popup

Is there any way to automate the process of clicking the second button?

I run this on a media centre pc. When steam starts, it's in the background. When i launch a game from my media centre software, it won't start unless I manually switch to the steam window, and click that bu8tton. Quite a pain when using a remote.

I don't want suggestions about using a wireless keyboard or mouse; this has to be a task or batch file I can set up to run automatically when window restarts.

4ndy89 · 23 May 2012 at 18:04

You may be able to write some sort of script using Autohotkey, then automate the actions to a button press or something.

It might be worth posting this question on the autohotkey forums aswell.

uv · 23 May 2012 at 18:08

TinyTask will do it - record a macro that waits a minute, then clicks on the screen where that button is, then put the macro in your startup

MeMeMeMe · 24 May 2012 at 02:07

I tried to figure out how to do it with autohotkey and autoit, but their tools to identify windows so you can interact with them didn't work with that steam dialog. It was very frustrating. I did ask a question a while back on one of the forums, but got no responses at all.

TinyTask sounds very promising. I did have windows media center set to load on startup, which would cover the area of the screen where the steam dialog is. But I could change that, to click the steam form then start up WMC.

Hmmm this could work.

MeMeMeMe · 24 May 2012 at 02:50

I just made an interesting discovery. If you have that steam dialog active, and hit the close button, or ALT+F4, it starts offline mode just as if you clicked the offline mode button!

That's very weird behaviour, but helpful for me.

Edit:

So Autohotkey did the trick. Way back last time I tried, it wouldn't recognise the steam offline loader window, now it does. So this incredibly short autoHotKey script does the trick:

IfWinExist, Steam - Offline Mode
WinClose

I have that as a task set to launch 1 minute after windows boots up (thanks for that suggestion uv, and thanks for making me loook at AHK again 4ndy), and it seems to be working fine.