The story of ExPing
Few years back when I was a hardcore gamer I was suffering a huge problem called slow unstable internet, as you might know the one thing MMORPG players hate is latency (or as we called it "lag") , on top of slow speed, random disconnects where leaving my character moon walking in front of the enemy's army and I wouldn't realize it.
I had to have a command line open with ping -t to constantly monitor my ping on the side but as you might have seen the size of command line is too big, and there's lots of unneeded information I don't want to see, plus it was hard to read from the corner of my eye while I was making some night elf cry killing him over and over.
I needed a compact window and I had enough coding skill to write it. it showed me my ping in colors and beeped when my internet got disconnected, it even could log my ping for the times I wanted to call my internet provider to nag a little.
Nowadays I don't play online games no more and my slow, expensive and unstable internet connection is not that important anymore. but it might be useful to the newer generation of gamers.
here's where you can download it if you are not reading this post on utopian.io
How to use:
- Download and run the
ExPing.exe - It will ask if you want to log your ping, choose either
- It will ask you for the IP address or website address you want to ping, enter anything you'd want and hit
ok
It will start pinging showing your ping in colors from green to red, showing only the time it took for the ping package to travel to the destination address and back.
How to compile .au3 files
In case you want to compile the script into an exe file yourself, you can download and install Autoit from AutoIt website then download the .au3 file from the repositories, Open the file in the editor and go to tools > compile menu, it will generate an executable file in the same folder for you.
Future fixes and improvements
The program work as it is but there are few things I wanted to fix and add but since I stopped playing online games, I never had the motivation to spend some time on it.
- Memory usage fix: Right now the numbers are made by adding a new text, those texts accumulate over time and cause the program to take lots of RAM if not closed and re opened every now and then
- Add adjustable color levels
- Smaller window
- Stay on top
- Pause and resume
- Adjustable ping delay
- Removing some of the old text from the log
- More log settings
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors