help needed writing a hook in directx9 : Developer's Corner

Hi,
I'm playing Final Fantasy XI as part of a research project - believe it or not - and I need to hook into directx in order to extract info directly from the game. Does anyone know if this is possible? For instance, I'd like to be able to have some utility (possibly in the form of an XUnleashed plugin) that would allow me to directly put my list of items or equipment into a local database. I know how to do the backend database stuff, but I need to figure out how to interface with directx 9 in order to extract this information from the game. Any help or referrals to tutorials on this subject would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

What you are talking about is not a directx9 hook, but a memory reader that reads the inventory in memory stored in the game.

There is no easy way to do this, save for finding some hacking tutorials on how to disassemble/reverse engineer software.

isn't there a way to access windows that are opened in a directx program? I know that in non-directx applications, you can query the operating system for the window handles and access them externally. Is there something analogous to this with directx apps?

alternatively, do you think there might be a way that i could get it to log this info in a text file (which I can then parse)? Does directx keep any kind of log file of the text data that it writes to its apps? Or, i know that FFXI keeps some logs of chats and stuff...might there be some way (using scripting probably) to dump the info of the desired window into a private /echo chat line by line, which FFXI automatically logs for you? i.e., position the "cursor" on an item and then use some scripting command (though I don't know what it would be) to automatically type out the contents of the cursor's selected item. some creativity may be necessary, but i feel like there's got to be some way to extract text data from a directx app without reverse-engineering the software... though i could just be plain wrong

Nope, and nope.

If it were that easy, you would see plugins doing just that.

ok...one final idea...

i know that XUnleashed has a packet sniffer plugin. do you know if the ffxi data is all encrypted? if not, i was thinking maybe i could use that plugin and then parse the netlog file...

if none of this turns out to be possible, i'll just use Horizons instead of ffxi, which already incorporates its own elaborate logging so the data is already there waiting for me

Just an idea.... feel free to laugh if you like.

I was wondering if he can intercept the DirectX LoadTexture calls and look at the file names loaded to get an idea of what is being drawn.

Possibly also hook the DrawString command to see what text names are being drawn.

It would be painful, but it might give him a bit of insight into what is going on (and it would still require him to flip to the inventory page).