caustik’s blog

Since some folks have expressed interest in trying this bot for themselves, I decided to share the source code and binary

It’s not perfect, but you can tweak the source code (for example, changing how long rp_thread::sleep() is called, and where), and probably get some better performance. If you’re up for a challenge, you can also try to improve the code that decides on the next move! (if you do, it’d be great if you shared the changes!).

Anyway, here is the zip file. [ autoblitz-export.zip ]

The binaries are in the export directory. You will be asked for a “hWnd” (window handle), which can be found using the program “Spyxx” which comes with visual studio.

Every once in a while a silly idea grips you and you decide “Screw it, I’m going to do it”.

That happened with me with a game called Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook. My friends online have been competing for high score for the past few weeks. I got to thinking…”How hard would it be to write a program to automate playing this game..?”.

This is the result of that question. It took a few days at a few hours per day. Probably about 6 hours combined time. Right now the bot is able to play pretty well. It can do better than I can most the time (although my high score currently beats the bot’s high score). With some improvements, I expect that will dramatically change.

Anyway, here’s a video of the program in action.

Update:

The autoblitz bot just scored 258,400.

Updated the official Cxbx site, with an update from shogun: http://caustik.com/cxbx/

There was some amount of activity in a private branch in the Cxbx project recently..

I have been talking to a developer, Martin, who has spent some of his extra time fiddling with Cxbx. He was able to get some teaser screenshots from Battlestar Galactica. The game displays the menu, and even some in-game. I won’t get into too many details, but here are a couple screenshots.

I have not started to work on Cxbx on a regular basis — but I think this progress is very motivating, and it is tempting me to boot back up my development setup and take another look after a very long absence.

Many thanks to Martin for the contributions and for allowing me to post about his progress. Cheers.