That done, I needed to get the state of the board. This I did simply by looking at the values of a couple of pixels on the screen this pixel has this value only when in the main menu that pixel has this value when asking to start a new game or continue previous one that pixel has this value when in-game. Now that the bot can see the game and click on it, I needed to know which state the game was in. I'm fully aware I could have made the bot more robust and not get into such situations but this was good enough solution, and those out-of-control bot situations ended up being rather rare. Eventually I ended up setting up another administrator account on my PC so I can control-alt-del and switch users and then kill the bot from the other account. I experimented with detecting keyboard presses to kill the bot, but with the focus on the game this is rather tricky. There's a danger in doing controls this way, namely, while your bot is in control, there's fairly little you can do to stop it.

Mouse_event(MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTUP, 0, 0, 0, 0) Mouse_event(MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTDOWN, 0, 0, 0, 0) GetWindowPlacement(bookwormwin,&bookwormwinpos) To position the clicks properly, I needed to query the window's position. Sending clicks to the game was done via mouse_event (which is deprecated, but works, and is likely to be simpler than the currently-official method). Easy peasy.īookwormwin = FindWindowA(NULL, 'BookWorm Deluxe 1.13') īitBlt(pDC,0,0,WIDTH,HEIGHT,bookwormdc,0,0,SRCCOPY) To get the pixels from the game's window, I asked window to give me the window handle, got the device context for the window and after that I could simply bitblt the bits over to my bitmap. This gave me a win32 app with a windows bitmap I could poke directly. I started from the template in my ancient win32 tutorial (after fixing a few things that don't work anymore, mostly casting variables and resolving between A vs W versions of functions). These were pretty easy to solve, assuming you have experience with win32 programming. Input and Outputįirst problem to solve was how to get the image from the game and how to send mouse clicks back in. The rest of this article is relatively techical, so if that's not your thing, you can stop now. As a video is worth about 21.6 million words, see for yourself: I wrote a bot that plays PopCap's Bookworm Deluxe. Bookworm Deluxe Aimbot Or, cheating in a single-player game for a little fun and no profit whatsoever.

Bookworm deluxe game