I'm writing a Java application to automate character actions in an online game overnight (specifically, it catches fish in Final Fantasy XI). The app makes heavy use of java's Robot class both for emulating user keyboard input and for detecting color changes on certain parts of the screen. It also uses multithreading and a swing GUI.

The application seems to work perfectly when I test it without the game running, just using screenshots to trigger the apps responses into notepad. But for some reason, when I actually launch FFXI and start the program, all of my keyboard and mouse manipulations just stop working altogether. The program is still running, and the Robot class is still able to read pixel colors. But Robot.keyPress, Robot.keyRelease, Robot.mouseMove, Robot.mousePress and Robot.mouseRelease all do nothing. It's the strangest thing-- to test it, I wrote a simple loop that just keeps typing letters, and focused notepad. I'd then start the game, refocus notepad, and it would do nothing. Then I'd exit the game, and it'd start working again immediately.

Has anyone else come across something like this, where specific software will stop certain functions of java from working?

Also, to make this more interesting-- Last year I wrote a very similar program using the same classes and programming techniques to automate healing a party in the game as they fight. Last year, this program worked perfectly. After running into these problems I dug up that old program, ran it without making any changes, and found that it too was having the same problems. The only differences between now and when it was working: I was running Windows Vista and now I'm running Windows 7, and several new Java versions as well as FFXI versions have been released.

What the hell is going on? (if anyone needs to see my source code, email me at [email protected]. I'm trying to keep it to myself.)