Posted: 8/11/2015 2:40 PM
Post subject: The Typing Of The Dead Auto-Assist
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DarkRuler
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Joined: 8/5/2015
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Hello. I'm new to the forums, and I've created a program that can play "The Typing Of The Dead" without human interaction. Every few frames the program takes a screenshot of the game, identifies text and the proceeds to recognize character by character. After knowing what to type, the program simulates key presses at high speed (300 words per minute). All I ever do is press enter to skip cutscenes. So far I have recorded gameplay of the first chapter, and I uploaded it to Youtube. The chapter is beaten real fast, with 100% accuracy and a very high score. Does this count as tool-assisted? I'm not actually playing the game with a tool that helps me, it's the tool that plays on its own... I wanted to share the video so as to show how the fastest and most accurate player in the world would play. Instead of making a single run, I want to upload chapter by chapter, and upload the trial modes too. Where could I post these videos?
Posted: 8/11/2015 5:18 PM
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Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Yep, that's tool-assisted, no question. A "tool" is simply any device or program that helps you play the game better than you could without assistance, so it includes even simple stuff like rapidfire controllers. A program that OCR's the screen and then feeds input into the game definitely counts. To make a submission on this website, you'd need to have reproducible evidence (in the form of an input file) to play the game back, which requires more general-purpose tools that may not be possible to use for this game, unfortunately. However, you could absolutely post your YouTube videos on the forums; I bet there are people that'd enjoy watching them.
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Posted: 8/11/2015 5:45 PM
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DarkRuler
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Thanks for the reply. I'll post the video links on "Other Games" when I have all chapters done.
Posted: 8/12/2015 6:13 AM
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Patashu
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DarkRuler wrote:
Thanks for the reply. I'll post the video links on "Other Games" when I have all chapters done.
You're playing the Windows version, right? So Windows is fine. By the way, for speedrunning the game, I think some parts of the game you want to fail or do slowly on purpose to trigger different dialogue. So that's something you could think about incorporating. There are human-done speedruns you can watch to learn the route.
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Posted: 8/12/2015 9:07 AM
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DarkRuler
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Patashu wrote:
By the way, for speedrunning the game, I think some parts of the game you want to fail or do slowly on purpose to trigger different dialogue. So that's something you could think about incorporating. There are human-done speedruns you can watch to learn the route.
That's something that's always bugged me about games with multiple paths. Sometimes the right path (the one you get for not making any mistakes) doesn't seem to be the best; it gives you less score than other paths, takes longer, etc. Your advice is good, but for the chapter speedruns I want to avoid mistakes. What I want to show is the fastest you can go with 100% accuracy and 0 errors, even though another path might be faster. I want to show how the tool is always accurate.
Posted: 8/12/2015 11:24 AM
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Patashu
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Ok, got it. Just making sure you're aware.
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Posted: 8/12/2015 3:24 PM
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GoombaHeart
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Could you not make it so the tool skips cutscenes too?
Shit tier TASer.
Posted: 8/12/2015 3:29 PM
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DarkRuler
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I thought of that. The program just has to press Enter repeatedly. I have to make an option to stop and resume the program at will, otherwise I can't navigate through the menu. Also, there's a part of the game where you have to actually answer questions (the Tower boss), so I'll have to stop the tool and manually type.
Posted: 8/12/2015 3:37 PM
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DwainiumB
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I thought I saw similar things when I saw this TAS a few days ago: Link to video
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Posted: 8/12/2015 3:56 PM
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DarkRuler
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Woah, that TAS is amazing. I wonder how he did it... Anyway, here's the first chapter I did on Typing Of The Dead, if anyone's interested. Gotta do those other chapters... Link to video
Posted: 8/13/2015 12:43 PM
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GoombaHeart
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Could you use hourglass with this for the manual input parts?
Shit tier TASer.
Posted: 8/13/2015 1:16 PM
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DarkRuler
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GoombaHeart wrote:
Could you use hourglass with this for the manual input parts?
Good tip, but I tried using hourglass and I get the message "The game crashed...". However, I just realized that the Boss with multiple answers shows the right answer when it's about to attack, so I deactivate the tool, and when it's about to attack I activate it again. As a plus I can always get the right answer.