Posted on by caustik · 3 Comments

Fix for multiple monitors with fullscreen games

There’s a pretty annoying issue that happens in windows when you are playing a game in fullscreen on one monitor, and have a second (or third, fourth) monitor with other stuff open on it. If your game is playing at a resolution that is different than your normal desktop resolution on that monitor, everything gets all moved around on the other monitors.

To fix this, I wrote a tiny utility program which you can run before you start the game, and it fixes this behavior by calculating what the correct location should be for all your windows and moving them there. It’s useful if you like having IM windows open, notes or a web browser, etc. You can’t interact with those programs while you’re in the game, but at least you can *see* them (for example, if you have a strategy guide or map, etc open)

Of course, I’m not responsible for any damage this program does to your computer. I’ve tested it a fair amount, but it’s entirely possible somebody with an unusual setup could find a situation where you may lose a program’s window due to it being positioned in the wrong place.

Let me know if this is useful, I’ll try to improve it and turn it into a proper project.

fsfix

caustik

Posted on by caustik · 163 Comments

autoblitz + source code

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.

Posted on by caustik · 20 Comments

Game playing AI bot

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.

https://i0.wp.com/i42.tinypic.com/1zmi2yp.jpg

Posted on by caustik · 77 Comments

Cxbx Progress

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.

Battlestar Galactica - menu 2 Battlestar Galactica - menu 3

Battlestar Galactica - in-game (fullscreen) Battlestar Galactica - in-game (windowed)

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.