This tutorial is manily aimed for people that use mIRC alot and like scripting. The new version of D2Helper (1.14+) includes DDE-support, which enables D2Helper to send DDE-events to any DDE-enabled application whenever a game join/drop occurs. Some basic DDE skills would be good to fully understand everything, but just following this tutorial will get it working as well.

The great thing about DDE is you can use it for anything, even implement in your own software. Using it in mIRC gives you endless possiblities like making D2Helper auto-say !games x when you find games, or make it message/notice you when a game is dropped with game/pass in mIRC so you can immediatly rejoin, etc..

If you are a PWE/CoOp-maker, then redirect your users here or instruct them to set D2Helper properly so it can automatically report game info and counts to you or your channel.

Step 1 - Setting up mIRC

mIRC has DDE enabled by default, but if you use some script or something, then you might have to enabled it, by entering Options (Alt+O) then going to Other/DDE. Service name can be whatever you want, although the default is "mIRC" and that's what we'll be using in this tutorial. Also,make sure your DDE delay isn't too high, anything below 500ms should be fine.

Make sure DDE is enabled in mIRC.

Step 2 - Understanding D2Helper DDE Functionality

D2Helper will by design only raise events when a "Hot" game is dropped or joined, meaning you have to add the ip number(s) to D2Helper. Game join/drops which are not on a "Hot" ip will be ignored by the DDE handler. Also, games already in a hot ip when DDE/Hot is Enabled will also be ignored (until they drop or something else happens).

DDE Join/Drop events will always be raised whether it was the player that joined/left a game or if it was automated by another process (like a bot, or if the server dropped the game or crashed). This is because D2Helper can only catch difference between in-game and not-in-game. For D2Helper to be able to know if it was the player that did something, then hooks/injects have to be used, which will make the process detectable and D2Helper doesn't use any of these techniques.

Note: in v1.15 you can choose for DDE to ignore events on active window.

Step 3 - Examples of D2Helper configuration

Common scripts used in mIRC channels make use of commands such as "!games x" and "!lock". This is how you could set up D2Helper to say "!games <ammount of hot games>" to any channel whenever a hot game is found/dropped.

Example illustrating !games implementation.

Step 4 - Other examples

You can specify multiple mIRC commands by separating them with the "|" char. Although the |-char can be used by mIRC to separate commands, I recommend instead to create an alias in mIRC like /gamefound and put that in D2Helper instead. That alias could in it's turn take arguments passed from D2Helper such as total games, game name, etc..

A few other examples:

OnJoin: /msg #pwechan Found another %ip =D | /msg #pwechan !games %hot
OnDrop: /msg #pwechan No! I lost a game! | //msg $me Quick, rejoin %game // %pass!

To see all available variables, press the "Variables" button in the "Hot" tab of the Options-dialog in D2Helper.

Step 5 - Done!

Well, that's basically it. I hope this will work for you. If you have further questions about mIRC commands and scripting, please search google.com.