Playing Video Games One Frame at a Time - Ólafur Waage - NDC TechTown 2023

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This talk was recorded at NDC Techtown in Kongsberg, Norway. #ndctechtown #ndcconferences #cplusplus #gaming #softwaredeveloper

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Video games are hard and as I age my reaction time has gone down. But I'm also a programmer and I can write tools that solve this for me.

This talk will go over what it means to play video games with the assistance of tools and show a few examples of how this can be done using C++.

From games that support creating tools to injecting your own code into a game.

This is an introductory talk on this topic but it will cover a few lower level systems interactions. No video game knowledge is needed.

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I love how you are basically describing a Tool Assisted Speedrun engine, but it's a debug tool.

ericbright

Love his comedy sketches on the clock app. Didn't realize he was a conference speaker! Now I've got to track down all his talks! 👍

davidrahn

I just started studying computer engineering myself and my goal is to become a game developer, however as I am living in Norway, I know the industry is not that big here and I’m having doubts about whether or not it is a realistic dream. I never knew you worked in tech, and you also mentioned having worked in gaming, which is really exciting to hear, considering you’re nordic. Do you mind sharing any amount of information regarding what you did and/or tips that you might have? Would love to just talk to some norwegian/nordic game developers who have made it just so I know where to begin.

Star_Dude

Found the link in bio under reels in your bio, was instantly hooked up. Do not regret. Great presentation, enjoyed it very much.

AndrejBuday

i'm just now learning to code in my free time and found this talk so fascinating and motivating. thank you!

BrandonFifer

Well done for this talk. Interesting even for a non programmer.

justamobile

Nice talk. Level 3 of the talk reminded me of the "metamod" (and previously "admin mod") of Half-Life, from 15+ years ago.

lifeincycling

Let's not forget how it paved the way for next gen mods, on software written in 1993. It's one of the first FPS game engines, and it can still be edited for todays tech. (Total Chaos) is one of those projects.

DerekDumas

Saw this on an instagram reel and came to see if it's good, cheers to the speaker

scoggo

This was amazing! I ended up working as a DevOps Engineer precisely because I played so much with game bots when I was younger. The best one so far was the open source Botty for Diablo 2 Resurrected that also used OpenCV. They made something very impressive, but unfortunately it is archived because people abused it online.

mischavandenburg

the way I solved match 3, is simply simulating all the moves, and checking the expected score after each, then simply sorting them. that makes it slightly better compared to just doing the closest to the bottom, as it will actively rate multiple matches well.
going 2 layers deep is actually fairly fast, there's only 224 possible moves (the inner 6x6 gems have 4 moves, the sides 3 and the corners 2), squared that's around 50k simulations maximum, which isn't that much for modern computers, but half of them are redundant (swapping 3, 4 and 2, 4 is the same as swapping 2, 4 and 3, 4) and most of the moves aren't valid, so in the end you end up with way less (less than 1000, but most likely around 100 or less) you could go deeper, but at this point you've got a lot of uncertainty from new gems falling, though going up to 5 might be valid if you're aiming for a high score, and you can probably still compute each move in less than 10s.

satibel

So you essentially made your own TAS (Tool Assisted Speedrun) tool.
Awesome!

A TAS is when you use a tool to assist you at speedrunning the game. Sometimes it's just slowing down the game, but more often you are pre-planning perfect inputs that you give to the game, so you end up with the theoretically best speedrun. (Sometimes the inputs are so rapid that it's impossible for a human to perform without assistance, but sometimes it helps human players in finding new strategies.)

mrt_

Amazing! I was hoping to catch this talk at NDC Oslo earlier this year, but it got swapped with something else, so I missed it >_<

inzyster

Thanks for sharing mate! I feel like the goal in Level 2 was a bit different than the rest, because you actually built a program to solve the puzzle by itself.. I was expecting you to do the same for vvv 😅 Loved it!

ashleyhilbert