eliten do you by chance already know the regions where the colored bars in vianiato are? that would save me some time otherwise i'll have to experiment. i'm gonna try making bookgen know if all 7 bars are colored or not (by detecting a X color in Y region), that way it will know if vianiato is thinking. This way, i can make it move a lot faster. So far i have it at almost 2 moves a second and that seems to be the limit with the CPU method (unless I can find a CPU meter that has a fast refresh rate. I have Task Manager set to "High" but i don't know what that is, probably around 500ms. Freeware meters seem to like 1 second i can't find any faster for XP). i see a mod must have deleted my thread, interesting...i don't recall any profanity, flaming, or illegal stuff of any kind taking place on it. I'm guessing you downloaded my app eliten it wasn't a virus was it? and it is related to a board game so it's not like it was irrelevant. Maybe because it could help a cheater? But they don't care about cheating, they have the ! system. Oh well i won't lose sleep over it. Not going to bed for another 10 hours that's why lol.
to eliten
Posted in
Other Board Games
to eliten
Whilst we allow the use of program play with some games, we do not allow someone to actively promote such programs in the forum. Frustrating as this may seem, it means that you will need to keep such discussions to another medium.
what r u talking about hes asking a question to improve a program that isnt advertising espiely when u cant down load it online any more b4 u respond try to actrally know what ur talking about
I don't know the coordinates, but can't you check that in MS Paint or some other graphics painting program? And did you want my 7x7 books?
msn messenger seems to not be working i can't log on :O so i'll talk here, though this will probably get deleted soon :S i'll copy this to wordpad in case it gets deleted lol. i found the coords it was easy indeed. The color method increases the max speed from 2 moves/second to 5. (i guess the colors don't change instantly, so i have to delay for 200ms in order for it to know the bars changed. I tried 150 and it didn't work. If you care about every millisecond of speed, you can try #'s in between 150 and 200 lol. In Version 1 i'll have an option to set the delay, because you might want it to move slower if you want to watch it play). The main advantage of knowing the colors is, in Version 1 i can give you the option of making BookGen make a winning move, losing move, drawing move, and even an Anti move. I came close to solving the inactive window problem. I was able to send mouseclicks to Calculator without activating its window. But of course vianiato has to be special, the same exact script didn't work on Vianiato. Reason: the simulated click will send a click at the control where the coordinates are. If there's no control, the click will be sent to the window itself. Apparently, vianiato has no controls (somehow the Solve button, etc. doesn't count as a control). So no matter what coordinates i plug in, it will be the same as clicking vianiato's titlebar, which does nothing (except activate it unless i specify not to, which i did). Reason: Vianiato has no ClassNN's to be found, nor control id's. In Calculator, the "5" button is identifiable as "button18". It constitutes a control, therefore a click within that region will go to that control. Might you or jops know how i can get around this problem? You might have had to solve this problem while making Napzin? Then again, in napzin you might not have used vianiato's GUI at all since you have access to the solver itself. But since V is closed-sourced (ewww), regular folk like me can't do that. You 2 think ur better than everyone else don't you? There is one command i haven't tried yet but i'm pretty sure it won't work. It will probably send the click properly, but not without activating the window. Granted, this isn't so important because you probably wouldn't want to run bookgen while trying to do other things, considering Vianiato uses 100% CPU while thinking. Then again, maybe setting Vianiato's priority to Low would solve this so maybe the inactive option would be useful afterall. and yes i'd like the 7x7 ply files :D
the CPU method would probably be able to move faster IF there were a prog that displays your CPU % faster than once per second. I have a feeling the CPU jumps faster than Task Manager indicates. BookGen doesn't actually calculate CPU %, it just copies and pastes from Task Manager, whose highest refresh rate is "High". At most "High" is equal to twice per second since that was the max # moves i could make using that method. But if it refreshed the screen every 10 seconds, i could make 10 moves per second. Depending on how quickly the CPU jumps when vianiato starts thinking. I'm guessing it jumps from 0% to 8% a lot faster than 1/2 second, therefore Task Manager is to blame. So if i find a free CPU meter that has a high refresh rate, i'll speed bookgen up again. Or if i figure out how to calculate CPU in a program, but that's doubtful lol all i know is fake programming, i'm just a script kiddie, as hackers would call it. Them condescending sons of [Adam].
ohhh so i can have threads on this topic as long as i don't put links, i get it now :p thats not so bad i'll tell ya another time undead Eliten, is it possible to combine 2 book files of the same ply into one? hm they're compiled so probaby not interesting they're in machine language or whatever, i would have thought a ply file could just be a bunch of numbers from 1-7. Though that might be less efficient. When it comes to programming i never was one for efficiency, lol notice in BookGen i use no "loops", "whiles", "fors", or anything like that, only "if", "label" and "goto".
separate program: displays an inputbox. If you type letters from a-g, it will convert them to #'s 1-7 and make those moves. You can mix #'s and letters. also, you can type commands. so far i've only added the commands "rand", "back", and "clear". "rand" makes a random move, "back" and "clear" are self-explanatory. more commands to come, then i'll merge the two programs. And i'll have that program automatically open vianiato, so then it will be like all 3 programs are just 1 program, "mega vianiato" lol
> interesting they're in machine language or whatever, i > would have thought a ply file could just be a bunch of > numbers from 1-7. Though that might be less efficient. > When it comes to programming i never was one for > efficiency, lol notice in BookGen i use no "loops", > "whiles", "fors", or anything like that, only "if", > "label" and "goto". Each position takes 8 bytes (one long) and the positions are stored by size. You can combine two books of the same ply if you put them in the right order as long as COLUMNS*ROWS + PLY < 62. They're encoded in this way for three reasons: it takes less space, it's quick to search (binary search algorithm), only one entry for each position. If you used numbers, you would have to save each anti that leads to the same position separately.
>You can combine two books of the same ply if you put them in the right order as long as COLUMNS*ROWS + PLY < 62. That will always be true then, correct? COL*ROW = 42, and the highest PLY is 19. Would it work if you took 1 ply7 file, copied the entire thing, and pasted it into another ply7 file? Would it matter if there were repeat positions? Though there's probably a way to search for and remove repeat lines. The reason I'm asking about combining ply files is, this would most certainly speed up the creation of comprehensive ply files. It would be especially helpful for 7x7 (i could can use 7 lab computers and combine their ply files). Book making could be a team effort rather than each person making their own. If enough people did it, it would be like we had a connect4 supercomputer :D
Just copying them together wouldn't work because the binary search algorithm requires that the data is sorted. It's trivial to write a program that combines two or more books though.