Screen triggers

A trigger makes a session react to the screen: watch for one or more things, and act when one shows up. Auto Clicker and Key Presser both have one; only Auto Clicker offers Click it, because a click is the one action that can be placed at a found target.

In Auto Clicker's guided setup this is the Something that shows up on screen path — see Auto Clicker. The full form below is what Advanced and Key Presser show. It asks two questions, in order.

1 · What should ClickTray watch for?

Up to sixteen targets, of four kinds. Every one of them is another search on every check, so add what you need and no more.

• Capture a picture — drag a box around something on screen. ClickTray keeps that picture and looks for it again later.
• Add pictures from files — the same thing, from images you already have. Handy for something animated: add each frame.
• Add a color — a color to find anywhere in the search area, rather than at a fixed point.
• Watch one spot — one exact screen coordinate and the color it should be. The cheapest check there is, and the right choice when the thing you are watching never moves.

Each target shows as a large card: the captured picture itself, or a swatch with its color code. With more than one, the trigger fires on whichever is found — which is how you cover a button that has two states, or three different things worth reacting to.

Where to look

Follow a window picks a window and uses its rectangle. The search area and every click move with this window as you move or resize it, which is the setting that stops a trigger breaking the first time somebody drags something.

Draw an area is a fixed box you drag once.

You want one of them. Without a search area every check scans your whole main screen, which is slow and more likely to match the wrong thing — and the panel says so rather than letting you find out.

In Advanced, the first target you add sets a search area for you: a captured picture uses the box you dragged, and a picked color gets a 400 × 400 box around where you picked it. That is quick, but a picture that later moves outside that box stops being found — use Follow a window or Draw an area for anything that moves.

Make sure ClickTray itself is not covering that area. The trigger sees the screen as it looks. If the ClickTray window sits on top of the game, the trigger sees ClickTray and finds nothing. Move the window aside, or click into the game after you press Start.

2 · What should happen when it finds one?

Three actions:

• Click it — clicks wherever a target is found, on every check it is found, unless you turn on Click each thing only once (below). This replaces the panel's own Where to click settings. (The guided setup's Every time it shows up is the click-once behaviour.)
• Keep running while one is there — starts straight away, and ends the run the first time no target is on screen — including immediately, if none is there when you press Start. It does not wait for the target to come back.
• Stop when one appears — runs while no target is on screen, and stops the moment one shows up.

In Click it mode each card has its own Click choice — Left click, Double click, Triple click, Right click, Right double click or Middle click — or Use run settings to inherit the panel's. That is the left-click-this, right-click-that case, and it is per target rather than global.

Two more options in that mode, both of which exist because of a specific failure:

• Click every one it finds. When several targets are on screen at once, click them all in turn instead of just the first. Costs a little more per check.
• Click each thing only once. Click when something appears, then leave it alone until it goes away and comes back. Without it, anything that stays on screen gets clicked over and over — including something that merely looks like your target. Something that moves counts as new again. A thing has to be gone for about a second before it counts as having left, so a hit flash or something passing in front does not make it look new.

Match: Exact, Close, Loose

Every card has a Match setting. Close is the default for pictures and colors; a Watch one spot card starts at Exact. Set a card to Loose if it is not being found, and to Exact if the wrong thing is matching. A color needs more slack than a picture, so the three words mean slightly different amounts for each — you never need to know the numbers.

Allow for size differences appears in Advanced once you have a picture. It applies to every picture in the trigger, and it is the setting to reach for when a capture that looks right finds nothing:

Test detection

In Auto Clicker's guided Review step, Test detection looks once and draws what it found on a snapshot of the search area, with a count on each card — Nothing is clicked. It is the fastest way to see whether a trigger works before you hand over your mouse.

When a color is not found, it names the closest color actually in the area — for example "The closest color here is #A80010 — 26 off on green" — with a Use button that switches to it and tests again. A near miss usually means the eyedropper caught the thing next to your target, so using the real color is better than loosening the match, which would catch both.

How often it looks

The search runs at a low, fixed rate — five times a second. Searching a large region for a picture is the expensive part, which is the whole reason the search area matters.

Screens, scaling and DPI

This is the failure mode. A trigger is stored with the resolution and display scaling it was captured at. Replay a setup on a different monitor, or after changing scaling, and the coordinates no longer mean what they meant. ClickTray warns you when it spots the mismatch — it never silently blocks the run.

A captured picture is matched at the scaling it was taken at, so a scaling change is the most common reason a picture trigger stops firing. That is what Allow for size differences exists for.

What usually goes wrong

It never fires. In order: run Test detection; make sure ClickTray's own window is not covering the area; check you set a search area; set the card to Loose; then, in Advanced, try Small differences. A capture that is mostly background is also worth redoing tighter.

It fires on the wrong thing. Set the card to Exact, or capture a target with more contrast in it. A large flat area of one color matches badly everywhere.

It clicks the same wrong thing forever. Turn on Click each thing only once (in the guided setup, Every time it shows up). A trigger that latches onto something the right color but the wrong object never stops matching it, because it never stops being there.

Clicks land somewhere unexpected. In Click it mode the trigger owns the click position, and the Where to click settings are not used. That is by design.