I am currently writing a game-playing ai program that needs to access the mouse, keyboard, and screen while running in the background. I've searched extensively so far with no results on how to write this. It needs to work on Ubuntu Linux.

What do you mean by access? Does it need to know when the mouse is moved, keys are pressed, etc? Or does it need to generate mouse clicks and key presses?

Normally I would assume the former, but because of what you're doing, I needed clarification.

Generate mouse clicks and key presses.

If you want to generate mouse and keyboard events from a program in the background, you can use the uinput virtual device driver. First make sure that the driver is loaded by checking to see if the /dev/input/uinput file exists. If it doesn't, load the module with

You can generate input events by writing to this file. A good reference for this can by found in the wminput project that allows the wiimote to be used as an input device in linux. Here is a link to the most relevant file in that project:

http://abstrakraft.org/cwiid/browser...input/uinput.c


As for reading the screen, the X windows system provides functionality to obtain a dump of any of the windows under its control, including the root window. Look at the documentation of the XGetImage() function in Xlib.

What about XSendEvent()?