Rogue and Tetris ported to . . . . . Diablo II?!?!

lord2800 writes "While Diablo II is nearing the end of it useable life-cycle, it would seem that Diablo II hacking is still alive and well. Diablo II hacking pioneer Syadasti (Mike Gogulski), has recently ported and released both Rogue and Tetris for Diablo II. Since Blizzard has not yet released their upcoming patch, is it left up to the open source programmers to breathe some life into modern games, with a little retro twist. A quote from the author: Finally, an answer to the question "what the hell do I do while my bot is running?" Play Tetris! Grab yours today at from Otaku-Elite. Requires bind.d2h and d2hackit. Self-documenting. (tetris.d2h features an autopilot mode as well, so if you get as tired of playing Tetris as you are of playing Diablo II, well just turn that puppy on and let the computer play for you) Syadasti (Mike Gogulski) is also the Head of Research for the d2jsp Development Team which, among other things, has embedded a Javascript engine within Diablo II to facilitate the creation of AI "bots" which can play the game on their own, "thus freeing the user from the tedium of playing with ... er ... for ... himself," he says."

Comments

Progressquest

[Frank of Earth]

thus freeing the user from the tedium of playing with ... er ... for ... himself

Why bother playing at all? I gave up playing mud for Progress Quest

Nobody can beat my level 66 battle finch!

Re:i guess this answers the question..

[cei]

Sure. It's not even particularly new. (ok, hacking totally diffferent platform styles into an existing game MAY be...) but back in 1990 I was using the level editor that came with Arkanoid 2: Revenge of Doh to build self clearing boards of increasing complexity. Since all the angles in paddle/ball games are predictable, you could arrange bricks in such a fashion that releasing the initial ball from center, far right or far left would clear the board without further player input.

Disappointment

[Per Abrahamsen]

I hoped it was classic rogue implement as an ordinary Diablo II quest.

Trivial....

[jukal]

Now, a real challenge would be to port Diablo II to run inside .... The original tetris. Or even better: port tetris to run inside the bricks - ohh, but that's already done.

LONDON, England -- A newlywed man has been jailed for four months after playing a game of Tetris on his mobile phone during the flight back from his honeymoon

Tetris for Diablo 2 might be ILLEGAL

[yerricde]

Unless they got permission from The Tetris Company LLC to use the TETRIS mark, this mod may infringe on Elorg's registered trademark on TETRIS for video game software.

• Previous discussion of The Tetris Company's activities
• Discussion showing that TTC owns only the exclusive right to the name "TETRIS" and not to falling tetraminoes

That's been done better: Dark Rain

[Qbertino]

Dark Reign II has an official add-on that lets you play a Tetris Clone called "Dark Rain" when you're in a warroom waiting for a match.
*That* is cool.

Potty break, or Core Wars

[yerricde]

Using a bot to play a game is pretty lame.

Not always. What if you really have to use the restroom? Slashdot previously covered an effort to have the game take over for you during a potty break, which is better than pausing an online game.

I was working on a CS bot at the time too. It never saw the light of day after I realized just how lame it was.

Ever heard of Core Wars? That was one of the first popular bot vs. bot games. You wrote a program, and your opponent wrote a program, and both programs ran in the same memory space. First program to segfault loses.

Re:Potty break, or Core Wars

[Loki_1929]

"Using a bot written by someone else to play is even lamer. That just shows you have no skill in any manner."

From the point of view of an outside observer, I can see this point. However, one of the things I used to do when playing Quake II: Weapons of Destruction was to hop on a server where at least a couple of bots were running around. It used to annoy the hell out of me when I found what was obviously a bot playing on a server (firing rail shots without facing you, etc), but once I started to get a bit better in the game, I began using them for practice. It's like playing against the best players in the game any time you like; after a while, that's the level on which you're playing. Once you become a difficult target for a bot, you become an nearly impossible target for a human. And if you've only got two or three chances at most to kill your target, you learn to fire accurately and quickly. The end result was that I could log on and cream some of the best players in the game at the time. It was even more fun when logging onto a server with 15 or 20 mediocre players and slaughtering all of them while they complain about how you must be a bot, because no one can move like that and fire that accurately. ;)

Props to RAV, we were young and cocky, but hot damn we were good. :)

so, what language are these things in?

[kisrael]

So are these written in some clever macrolanguage, or are they external modules using some kind of plugin, or what? Obviously the games don't look very Diablo-y (save for the font), and it seems the programs are just using some kind of console feature as a text display.

I guess my Diablo experience is pretty limited anyway, all I remember is cow-orkers playing it in '97 and the one shopkeeper who'd say "wot kin I DEWWWW fer ya?"

Re:so, what language are these things in?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's how it works. There is a clever hack called d2hackit. The way it works is very complicated but to put it short...

1) Gain access to the running diablo ii process
2) replace the diablo 2 window's message handler with a dumby one to trick diablo ii into loading some assembly code.
3) The assembly code loads up a dll and therefore causes the dllmain function to be executed.

That's how the loader works.
Now, let's get an idea of how d2hackit works.

1) Patches variuos diablo ii functions so that it can intercept them and then run custom code. (replace an assembly call with a jmp call to your own code, execute... have another jmp call return it back to the diablo code.
2) Locates various functions for send messages, packets, etc... (makes them available so that the d2hackit can print messages to the user or spoof packets to the battlenet servers)
3) Creates a sort of command line system using the text message prompt.
4) implements various commands for loading up other custom dynamic libraries

Okay, now that you have an idea of how the hack actually inserts itself into the diablo runtime, let's evaluate what it took to get this example to work.

1) Locate the Diablo II call for printing text to the D3D context.
2) Port a text based tetris game to the windows api and modify it to print the text to the diablo ii window instead of to a terminal.

To all you /. computer geeks... you should take a look at some of the source code for d2hackit. Pure genious... definitely the route to take when you want to write some insanely cool hacks for your favorite games. However, it's not for the faint of heart!

Re:Golf Hack

[Perdo]

Actually it took only a few seconds. I used key express to record mouse movements and button presses. I tweaked the timing by hand later. There is no point letting a bot play that is not perfect. Perfect timing is one of the few things that computers have when it comes to games. Well, they can also play perfectly for two days straight to compensate for the randomness inherent to the game.... without getting bored.

The golf game was not even reasonably complex. It was just a driver distance game. Five commands: Begin the swing, Wait .975 seconds timed for cut/slice then click again, wait a second and "try again". A high score would inturrupt the macro with a fault, because an "enter you name" dialog box would appear instead of a "try again" button.

It took some coder a week to code and I broke it in a few seconds. Made me feel like an utter piece of crap. It would have been neat to have just one high score up there. But I had all ten, was playing 4 games every second with 12 instances running. What I did was DOS the game out of existance. Inelligant and Ignorant.

Speaking of Rogue...

[saddino]

has embedded a Javascript engine within Diablo II to facilitate the creation of AI "bots" which can play the game on their own, "thus freeing the user from the tedium of playing with ... er ... for ... himself," he says."

Interestingly, Rogue also spawned the first (AFAIK) game playing bot, Rog-O-Matic back in 1984. In a way, it really ruined the game, as top ten lists on mainframes all over began to fill up with "Rog-O-Matic" entries. However, watching it play (ultrafast) was mesmerizing.

I don't think it took advantage of the infamous arrow bug though... ;-)

Re:i guess this answers the question..

[tx_mgm]

limiting hours of play in MMORPGs, while it would accomplish what youre talking about, would NEVER be implemented by any subscription games out there. even tho it pains me to say it, there are a lot of people out there who play 20 hours a DAY. and if they can't play like that, then they wont play at all. its just how it is. game services like everquest and asheron's call want as many players paying as possible, so turning a good portion of their player-base away with limiting would be a horrible move.
what i would suggest is different servers for different style of players. have all the kids who play every waking moment of their lives on one server, heavy players on another, casual gamers on another...etc. and then ENFORCE it so that hardcore gamers wont go into casual servers and "0wn" everyone. like, if you're caught CONSISTANTLY logging more than x hours a week, you get booted up to a higher server, and if you use less, you have a choice to move down, that way if you take a week or whatever off, you can still run with the hardcore people if you so desire.
i dunno. sounds like a good idea to me. anyone else?

This was done for TRIBES long ago

[pjp6259]

One of the scripters for TRIBES built a hud that allowed you to play tetris during slow moments of the game. You can download it here . I don't think it was actually used much, but if your team was seriously destroying the opponents, then your defense might not see much action. There were also p0rn huds (called "swim-suit huds") which basically allowed you to setup a slide show in your hud area.