Full Tilt Poker's GUI has a box of text that keeps reporting on the state the current hand. I wanted to be able to parse that text but do not know how to gain access to it, so if anyone could point me in the proper direction, I would appreciate it greatly.
Image with the GUI and text box: http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/6660/ftpbox.jpg .
This neat analysis of harvesting data from an online Poker GUI interface is a pretty nice read; they suggest, for accessing the text, API Hooking with something like detour.
They also suggest the much-more-painless method of reading the actual log/hand history output that most poker clients write to the disk in real-time.
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Before I get shot down on this one, I realize that the 'how' answer for this question might be slightly debatable, however I'm more interested in the 'what'.
In a nut shell I want to know which methods I can use to interact with a PC video game interface. I want to create a program that can extract data from a video game market interface.
My first initial thought was that I would need to programmatically take screen shots and then use some Optical Character Recognition software to extract the text. Then run whatever operation on the extracted text to derive my incites.
Then I was thinking it might just be easier to have a bunch of mini screen shots that I just use to find matches on certain sections of the screen. When a match is found, I would then know what the text is on the screen, without having to actually 'extract' it.
For those out there whom have done this, can you point me in one direction or the other? Perhaps there is a method that I am completely unaware of.
If its the case that this question is not suitable for this forum. It would be much appreciated if you could direct me elsewhere.
Edit: I should probably add that I'm not looking to spend a fortune on this project... so any free software would be the best. Perhaps that's a tall order.
I'm starting to think Sikuli is the direction I'm going to go. Open Source image recognition software, integrates with Python, Ruby, Java, JDBC, JavaScript and more.
-- Expanding on the question --
There are basically 3 categories of tools:
Recorder while you manually work along your workflow, a recorder tracks your mouse and keyboard actions. After stopping the recording, you might playback (autorun your worflow). The recordings can usually be edited and augmented with additional features.
GUI aware the tool allows to programmatically operate on GUI elements like buttons. This is based on the knowledge of internal structures and names of the GUI elements and their features. Some of these tools also have a recording feature.
Visually the tool “sees” images (usually retangular pixel areas) on the screen and allows to act on these images using mouse and keyboard simulation. There might be some recorder feture as well with such a tool.
SikuliX belongs to the 3rd category and currently does not have a recorder feature.
Answer in progress...
In games with moddable UIs, like many MMOs, you could create a mod that streams data through a series of black and white squares that could be read with optical sensors. From there, a microcontroller could deliver the data back to the PC via USB or wifi.
My approach as a noob. First determine if OCR 100% needed, I think this plays a role in speed.
if possible:
-run game in window (allows for trouble shooting and easy troubleshooting)
-is there a high contrast option for game? Will help Sikuli find things
then you plan out your scenarios:
You have to create different functions for different situations. A lot of gaming is "do you see this?" Then "do this" until that is gone.
Start with small parts you want to automate then build on them. Making sure your parts can scale in case small change need to happen, they will. For instance you want to open the menu if you see an object, lets say a tree.
Assume you have some sort of walking algorithm.
setROI(region1) #focus here for tree
if exists(tRee):
click(loCation) #you could hit the shortcut key to opening the menu
click(iTem) #if the item moves in the menu then you may need to scroll to find it first or you can change the ROI and start seeing if sikuli can differentiate your item from one you dont want to click.
You would get that to loop into other actions and proceed. Goodluck.
I tried to sign up, but I was unable; perhaps a problem from my side. Hopefully I'll get an answer as anonymous.
I apologize for the grammar/syntax, but English isn't my native language.
Recently I lost my job, so I have enough spare time to try something fun. I decided to create a simple text RPG game for me and some friends. It will very close to the board games like Talisman, Dungeon Run, and HeroQuest, using dice and a simple attribute/skill system. So no 3d graphics. The only 2d element, if I decide to include it, will be a map
that will allow the hero to move between locations. Currently I'm using Windows XP SP3, for the game I use wxDev-C++, and although cross platform would be cool, I don't really care.
I have some experience in C++ (currently using wxDev-C++), but I'm far from being called an expert or even a great programmer. I was about to start writing parts of the code, but I decided to check if creating a GUI for the game is possible. In some forums, many suggested I use Qt, CEGUI or wxWidgets, but most examples I saw are grey boxes that are
indifferent at best, when I want something that fits better in a fantasy setting. I don't claim I would do better, but I want a GUI that is more fantasy related.
What I want from the GUI:
1. A "cool" Gui with decent graphics. I could even create an image to serve as a mask in Photoshop, but the GUI builder will have to support imported images.
2. A relatively large textbox in the middle (with a scrollbar) that will display die rolls, damage and options.
3. The ability to display dynamically values (like the change in the health after each action without requiring to refresh manually)
4. Display an icon or a small image of the character in the area where I display stats/abilities.
5. Open new windows created with tha same GUI builder to allocate points, buy/sell things and open a map.
About the map in the game: I decided to create a map in photoshop. When the hero decides to move to another location, a new window will open showing the map. I thought of 2 possible ways to move between locations: 1) Create hotspots on the image and select one by clicking on the name of the location.(I dare not think about the complexity of this so we
move to idea #2) and 2) Have the image as a backgroung to a grid with vertical and horizontal coordinates. When the hero selects a new area to visit, he clicks on the area, but what he really does is click on the grid, which returns the two values (x,y) of the location and informs the game about the area the hero wants to visit.
Yeah, yeah, I know it's too much, so what I'm most interested in are the 1-3. I know that even if they are possible, it will propably take forever, but as I said I have spare time, and I like learning new things. I apologize for the size of the post, but I decided to post as many info as possible so you know what I want.
If any of you has used Qt, CEGUI or wxWidgets could you tell which covers most of my criteria? I saw some great stuff build with CEGUI, but I don't know if it is too hard to learn?
Thank in advance.
I know my answer comes pretty late, I only recently started using stackoverflow fairly recently, but maybe this response will help anybody.
CEGUI fully supports skinning widgets using XML. Our CEED editor (WYSIWYG) fully supports layout editing, but the skinning editor (LNF editor) is not finished as of now (11.11.2014), the development version supports exchanging images however and changing sizes and proportions, but more advanced adjustments have to be done in XML.
CEGUI has an imageset editor, fully supported by the CEED editor. Creating imagesets (sets of named subimages, with position and dimension inside a big texture atlas) is supported there. Additionally there is a way to create imagesets from just a bunch of jpg/png/... files using a tool. You would have to ask for specifics in the forum though because it is not integrated into CEED yet.
So basically with CEGUI you are free to make whatever fantasy GUI you want. Skinning simple elements like buttons and progress bars isn't much work in XML anyways. Without the finished editor, some more advanced widgets are more work to skin, but many skins have already been created done this way and some of them are even publically available in the forum and in the CEGUI stock files.
StaticText widgets supports what you want, you can even use images in there or change fonts and colours in the text if you want. Scrollbars are supported too.
I am not sure what you mean by this. You have to specify this.
A simple "Generic/Image" widget is available in CEGUI for this purpose. You can use precreated images or even RTT textures.
You can create and destroy windows in CEGUI without issues.
Regarding the map: I m not sure what you mean, but getting the position of a click in respect to an image (representing the map) is possible in CEGUI.
CEGUI is not particularly hard to learn. There is always the forums and the chat if you got questions. For an Open Source project it is quite well documented so if you read all of the API docu, and look at the supplied samples in the sample browser, you should already get quite far. And for everything additional there is the forum (search), the IRC chat and a community wiki (mind the targeted versions of an article there though)
For a project like yours, CEGUI seems perfectly suited (this is what it was created for in the first place). Qt is not really optimal for games for numerous reasons. wxWidgets I have never used.
I have a point-of-sale application written in Perl/Tk. I use X11::GUITest to do automated testing of it, driving the app via hot-keys bound to the buttons and other widgets (it's normally touch-screen driven). However, X11::GUITest doesn't have a way to "read" text back from the screen, so I resort to augmenting the app to write temp files as well as putting data on the screen. The test scripts then look at the temp files, not the GUI. But I'd love to extend X11::GUITest or make a new CPAN module that can scrape text strings from X11 GUIs. I'm not after graphics-to-text conversion; it's my (faint) understanding that somewhere in the depths of the X window system, label text and such are stored as text strings and rendered to bitmap form late in the pipeline (?).
Anyone have guidance on how to do this, or pointers on where to start?
Yeah, I know I should've adhered to better MVC separation and not actually test at the GUI level, but just below it; however reality got in the way and it is what it is!
The best way to do this is to make your program work with an accessibility framework like ATK (used in GTK applications) and then use that to query for the strings as a screen reader would have to for text-to-speech translation. This is the approach taken by the Linux Desktop Testing Project and dogtail testing frameworks. You get the bonus of using existing, well tested code and making your application more usable by disabled users (as may be required by laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act in the US and similar laws in many other countries).
If your application is using modern font frameworks, like libXft2, this may be your only choice, as those strings are only in the client application, not the X server, and the character to pixmap conversion is done in the client. (If your text is antialiased, it must be using these instead of the legacy X11 API's.)
Even with the legacy X11 API's though, the X server doesn't store the strings once the text to bitmap conversion is done, so there's no good way to query them short of intercepting them in that case.
The program listres lists resources in widgets, including label texts and I think the contents of text entry boxes. You may be able to use its output directly, extracting what you need, or you may need to look at the source and see how it's done.
I've got a windows app which draws charts from data points but there is no way to export the data points into a portable format. I tried using AutoIt to access the form controls values but they were concealed by draw functions. I thought with a memory viewer I might be able to view whatever container is storing the chart values, and extract it that way. However, I tried PrcView and HeapMemView but I was disappointed by their search features. I could not locate anything meaningful with these programs because the memory space was segmented so much that I could not tell where the chart data was stored. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to approach this problem?
Firstly try to find another source for the data; it'll possibly be a lot easier.
If there is no choice and this is something that I had to do then I would probably look at hooking the API and catching the Win32 MoveTo / LineTo, and recording / processing them, or possibly API Spying; either way it will be a lot of effort.
I am new to OpenGl, almost new to C++.
I am looking for some code that does the following things.
Open an OpenGL window (maybe using glut)
Rotate the view point when the user press the left mouse button
zoom when the user press the right mouse button
translate the point of view the user press the central button
Basically what I need is a very simple graphics platform in which I will plot results coming from my algorithms. I have tried using the glut library and some code coming from the web, but no luck!
This should be a basic project, can you please point me where to find it. It just seems unreal to me that a so simple project turns to be so hard to find, but I have been googling for hours and no results.
I really appreciate your help,
thank you very much
You're asking for a fair amount of code there. Basic, but not insubstantial. Even if we do provide the code to do what you've asked, I'm not sure if you'll be able to use it to do what you want. The Red Book is a "bible" of openGL programming of sorts and will provide you with many of the functions and how to use them. I found the entire thing online here. Look into Chapters 1-3 for your drawing and rotating. Also, Lighthouse 3D has some great tutorials for you to look at for mouse events (Link). Some knowledge of linear algebra really helps, but you can manage without it.
I don't think it directly implements everything you want, but you might want to look at the 3D graph control on Code Project. This is hardly unique though -- you might want to Google for something like "opengl activex" and look at some of the alternatives. I doubt any will directly implement all you've asked for -- they'll probably include most of the basic operations, but it'll be up to you to make the connection between the mouse operations and the actions in the window.