The Icon Bar: The Playpen: Fun things to do with computers
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Fun things to do with computers |
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Phlamethrower (10:30 11/11/2009)
filecore (10:56 11/11/2009)
tribbles (20:35 11/11/2009)
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Jeffrey Lee |
Message #111932, posted by Phlamethrower at 10:30, 11/11/2009 |
 Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot stuff
Posts: 15100
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Thinking about how simple guitar hero/etc. games are and how you can just hook a few light sensors and servos up to a microcontroller to make a device that scores 100%, I thought: What about doing the same for a more complex game like an FPS?
Sure, there have been loads of bots written over time, but they always seem to have direct access to the game data - either to the full state of the game on the server or just the filtered state the client sees. And there have been a couple of instances of bots based around neural nets, but again I think they relied on processing the game state rather than any specific machine vision techniques.
So what if you were to take a beagleboard, a webcam and a USB cable? Connect the webcam to the beagleboard so it can see the monitor, connect the beagleboard to the PC so it can communicate, and write a HID gadget driver so it can control the game (almost) like any other human by sending key press & mouse movement events. With the right machine vision software you'd be able to write a generic bot that could map out its environment and play any FPS. Even something simple like sitting in one spot and turning and shooting anything that moves should be possible (as proven by the paintball sentry gun that someone made by fixing a couple of motors and a video camera to a paintball gun). And of course you can easily add an audio cable to the mix so the beagleboard can hear its surroundings as well.
Something for me to fiddle with in my spare time, then (i.e. about 10 years from now!   ) |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #111933, posted by filecore at 10:56, 11/11/2009, in reply to message #111932 |
Posts: 3867
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A nice hands-on that I've been playing with is this, might give you a few ideas: http://www.bit-tech.net/custompc/howtos/605250/control-games-by-moving-your-head.html |
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Jason Tribbeck |
Message #111956, posted by tribbles at 20:35, 11/11/2009, in reply to message #111933 |
 Captain Helix
Posts: 929
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Years and years and years ago (well, nearer 20, to give a better gauge), at school we had BBC Masters, and for the earlier years, there was a typing tutor program that had words scroll in from the right, and you had to type in the letters before they hit a "force field" type thing.
The better you got, the closer the field got to the right hand side, and I think the words also got longer.
Since it was written in BASIC, I modified it to automatically insert the letters into the keyboard buffer.
So I was able to impress all the pupils who had used this software as to how good my typing skills were (I'd just press random keys on the keyboard to make it look like I was doing it right).
Eventually the field goes beyond where the letters start from - which made it a little bit difficult... |
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The Icon Bar: The Playpen: Fun things to do with computers |
