Posted: 10/15/2015 1:42 PM
Post subject: Keyboard Macro TASes
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MUGG
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Since everyone is probably ignoring the other topic I made, I'm going to make this one with a more significant title. To get to the point: I'm working on a keyboard macro that completes a Windows shareware game. I have not heard about anyone who has done this before so any ideas/thoughts? I feel like the game I'm trying to run is simple enough that desyncs are rare. The problem is that playback may not be completely consistent - as in, you have to insert some leeway sleep time for the game to execute a keystroke. I'm using Autohotkey (AHK). In this image you can see, I'm giving the game 20 ms to start level 1, and from there I do something every 2 ms. Do you think this could be something worth of publishing to TASvideos? After all, the game is being played back with keystrokes. (Probably I should mention I'm emulating the Windows XP in Virtualbox because I have no other means of running the game.)
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Posted: 10/15/2015 5:55 PM
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moozooh
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Macro-based TASes have been known for a while in Quake and Half-Life speedrunning communities. I wouldn't get my hopes up on publishing if I were you. It's a logistical headache to judge/verify (you need an emulator, fresh system image installed, AHK setup, and the game itself), not exactly trivial to standardize, and is guaranteed to be suboptimal due to lack of easy rewind and frame advance (besides the forced pauses for sync stability). I think your only solid option is to use Hourglass inside Virtualbox and hope it works.
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Posted: 10/16/2015 12:08 AM
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Chef_Stef
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I did something like this a long time ago for DROD (2005 remake edition) and also Beret, a friend's indie game. I used Java.awt.robot for the input since that was the easiest way to hack something together. I got through the first level in each game before quitting. I'll admit my approach may not have been the best but I remember running into lots of issues. It was indeed a huge challenge to get playback to consistently sync (DROD was better here because it buffers input) and creating the movie got tedious really fast - there's no visual feedback on what you're doing (you have to guess what keystrokes to put in) and you waste a lot of time replaying the movie checking and fixing sync issues. The end product was satisfying but it sure was a headache putting it together. If nothing else I'd want to avoid subjecting anyone else to the same. Things might be better with a more standardized toolchain but it's hard to completely solve all of these issues without just going the emulator route.
Posted: 10/24/2018 8:09 PM
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MUGG
Editor, Expert player (2314)
Joined: 5/15/2007
Posts: 3856
Location: Germany
Gameboy TASer of 2015 NES TAS of 2013 Gameboy TASer of 2011 Gameboy TASer of 2010
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