[TC] Maxed Hyperion Vanguard - a simple way to insanity. (spoilers)

nponoBegHuk · Post by **nponoBegHuk** » Tue, 26. Apr 11, 22:31

So, I started from scratch a little more than a week ago. 50% of my plan was getting all the possible ships in the universe so I installed patch 1.2.1, and already got my Marlin Hauler (linky), ready to move on to patch 1.3 and.... it was the time to complete the other 50% of the "scenario" - getting a "perfect" (250.3m/s) overtuned Hyperion Vanguard

Armed with the forum knowledge, I knew I wasn't facing an easy task but still hoped to be lucky.

1. At the start I just reloaded manually until (after 100 or so reloads) I noticed that it was too time consuming.
2. Then I created keyboard macros to simplify the process - one key turned in the quest and opened hyperion properties and the other just reloaded the previous savegame. I even managed to play World of Warcraft once on the computer I have close to mine, just had to press 1, look at the screen and press 2 each time I heard "Connection to local trading network established".
[ external image ]
After 2 days and 1000+ reloads I noticed that I had to actually play to keep maintaining my list of ship sources, so I decided that that was a moment to act more drastically.

3. Armed with AutoHotKey, I developed (well, not developed, more of kludged) a script which reloaded the game automatically, and saved the screenshot of a ship speed and the game itself to be able to reuse them later
[ external image ]
4. After running it for couple of hours I found out that checking hundreds of images was putting a lot of strain on my eyes so I had to find some kind of software solution to reduce the time needed to check results. Found a trial of a decent OCR software and used self-made (self-kludged once more!) application to sort the files
[ external image ]
5. Ran the script on 3 computers overnight, including home PC, my PC at work and even a co-worker's workstation. The results here:
[ external image ][ external image ][ external image ]

Well, I must say that if you happen to get a 250.3 one after 30 reloads, you shouldn't play lottery, ever. It's impossible to win twice!

Anyway, I'm not giving up, I don't want XML edits or mods or hex-edits or whatever. Game MUST give me one at some point! (also, this post will be a good statistical reference)
I have 16 more computers at work which I could use to bot my way up to the prize but I don't think my boss will be happy about the electricity bill

So what do you think?

P.S. By the way any ideas of the image format which would allow me to compare two image files just by searching binary matches in their body instead of using OCR (which is slow and my trial software limits daily recoginitions).

Lelouch · Post by **Lelouch** » Tue, 26. Apr 11, 23:27

Dude. You restarted the Hub plot in order to get a single - mostly crappy - ship. At this point you already crossed the threshold.

Welcome to the club.

Flozem · Post by **Flozem** » Tue, 26. Apr 11, 23:37

Been there... I learned the keyboard shortcuts, so something good came of it.... but I settled for 223m/s after like 4 hours of trying.

Venereus · Post by **Venereus** » Tue, 26. Apr 11, 23:51

I gave up pretty early and then settled for a posted save game.

Progress-M · Post by **Progress-M** » Wed, 27. Apr 11, 00:10

Hum, are you aquiring all these ships in a single game or just in general?

ephemeron · Post by **ephemeron** » Wed, 27. Apr 11, 01:40

I'd say you're at the exact point where madness and brilliance meet.

Have you manually checked the instances when the OCR didn't recognize the speed? Given that your setup seems to have worked almost all the time, I'd be curious as to what led to "unrecognized".

deca.death · Post by **deca.death** » Wed, 27. Apr 11, 01:56

.
.
so what do you ask as? is it insane? it clearly is. but don't let that bother you. we are all insane in one way or the other. what i dislike about whole described ... procedures is that are all ... impractical. i would say your whole approach is faulty. it's not about ship, it's about a pilot. give me any vessel and i will make max of it. you know what bomber is the best? first one you can cap. any type is good. if you need one distinct characteristic, go for the looks. i refused to buy springy for a long time because it was too fast for my taste, thus unbalanced. i like my hyperion with his speed of 169 m/s. it feels like real ship, fast exactly as it should be. M6 should not be faster then fighter. it tears the fabric of this game. you want to go 250? sit in mamba raider. you could play the game instead of raping it and have more fun in the process.

Progress-M · Post by **Progress-M** » Wed, 27. Apr 11, 02:29

deca.death wrote:it tears the fabric of this game

Oh nooo, the vanilla M3-M6 continuum has been borked! Ruun! Save yourselves!

Monthar · Post by **Monthar** » Wed, 27. Apr 11, 04:08

I gave up after spending several hours a day for a few days reloading, finishing the missions, checking both ships. So instead of going insane and using all sorts of external programs, I just figured out how to edit the xml file to give max engine and rudder for both ships. See my post in this thread. http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... 73#3575973

Why did I do this after managing to get one HV at 230 with a 209 AP and another at HV 223 with the AP at 226 the hard way? Because I knew if I ever managed to get the HV at 250 I'd still end up reloading because of low turn rate or an AP that wasn't also maxed. Besides, I think it's rather stupid to have the max possible speed and turn rate be randomly generated since you can't buy enough tuning to achieve those numbers with a basic ship, which makes it possible to end up with a reward that can be obtained much easier by capturing the HV with any other game start. Randomly generated stuff should only be used on the other aspects of the reward, such as the weapons load-out, marines and missiles, since those things can be obtained regardless of what game start you play, by either buying, manufacturing or looting them.

Even after making the mini-mod, I still ended up reloading for another hour or two to get all 6 ISRGs, maxed shields and more than just the 3 PBE's on the AP. I finally settled on a HV with maxed shields, 6 ISRG & 4 Marines, 2 of which had several 3-5 star skills and an AP with 3 PBE & a FBL. The AP only had 1 25 MJ and 3 5 MJ shields.

If I could have figured out how to do so I would have made the max speed and rudder be the highest possible, while retaining a random number of installed tunings. In fact I'll probably mess with it some more later on to try to accomplish this.

Keep in mind, that even if you do change your mind on the edited xml thing, you'll still have plenty of reason to reload/replay multiple times due to the other random elements of the default loadout on these two ships.

kurush · Post by **kurush** » Wed, 27. Apr 11, 05:03

I would go Artmoney long before I spend so much effort developing those scripts and tools

I remember using two machines simultaneously for reloads for about an hour before acquiring something mildly overturned but this is as far as I would go.

deca.death · Post by **deca.death** » Wed, 27. Apr 11, 15:33

Progress-M wrote: Oh nooo, the vanilla M3-M6 continuum has been borked! Ruun! Save yourselves!

:)
he he you could joke and make fun of that as long as you want but that "fabric" is essential part of gaming experience. game world must be true to the rules itself provided. it's called consistency and virtually makes or breaks the game.

glenmcd · Post by **glenmcd** » Wed, 27. Apr 11, 17:14

I can help you with streamlining your process. The part you need to modify is with the screen snapshots. Everything else sounds okay. You need to crop these, so that it doesn't show background which would include passing ships etc. I created a macro in Paint Shop Pro, then use "batch process" to do the entire batch in a minute or two. With these much smaller .bmp files, I do a CRC on each, and create a text file that associates the filename with its CRC value. CRC is Cyclic Redundancy Check. Checksum is fine also.

Then use a macro or program on this text file to leave only one instance of each unique CRC value. So instead of having hundreds or thousands, you'll have just a couple of dozen - two for each base speed. Not just one, because sometimes you have an extra weapon in the loadout which causes everything to move down one line and thus the .bmp file is different. Run a macro over this short list of filenames, which creates a batch file / script, which will in turn copy just these files into a seperate folder. Call it "pics3". View this folder with Windows explorer, with view set to "large icons". It should take you less than a minute to view these and verify whether you have got your 250.3 yet or not. When you do, note the filename. Go back to the original screenshot folder, and note the timestamp value on that file. Then go to the folder in which you put all of your save files during the overnight run. You're looking for a .sav file with a timestamp of same or slightly later timestamp to the snapshot file. So sort by date and this will take you only seconds. When you find this, make a copy and place it in your save folder, load into TC and verify that this is indeed a 250.3 m/sec HV. If it is, then go back to your CRC+filename text file, and look for additional files with same CRC value as these will also be 250.3.

In all of above, the only repetitious task is viewing a couple of dozen large icons in a folder. Repetitions are related to unique speeds available and not how many times you tried for a fast speed. So it's quite good. You could eliminate this time also, by caching the CRC values of pictures of unwanted speeds and eliminating these as candidates. And this probably means anything less than 250.3. If you get the 250.3 then obviously it will take quite a bit longer to backtrace the matching .sav file, make backups, check for extras etc. But at no time do you need to look through each snapshot produced. After a completed run with no result, delete all of the intermediate files and you're ready to go again next night. Have two save folders and just alternate their names. You can do most of this in a tchvcleanup.bat.

All in all it takes me roughly a minute for setup and 3 to 4 minutes to do the 250.3 check and cleanup. I can do around 800 tries per night and have got a single 250.3 from roughly 6000 tries. The HV had minimum turn though so I'd like something better if I can get it. Meanwhile I'm using the first one.

Hope this helps. Oh, and don't worry about the insanity thing. It's just another way of saying "having too much fun"

nponoBegHuk · Post by **nponoBegHuk** » Wed, 27. Apr 11, 18:45

Thanks for all the replies and support!

@glenmcd I had something similar planned, I was already cropping with Image Converter Pro trial version command line processor:

Code: Select all

icpcl.exe -convertto png bpp:24 -source "C:\Users\Bob\\Documents\X3TC output\raw\*.bmp" -dest "C:\Users\Bob\\Documents\X3TC output\intermediate"-save_opt convert_subfolders:no restore_subfolders:no -oper Crop method:rect_pwh size: 330 400 280 80

However it was late so I left my set up running as is and went to sleep. When I woke up, there it was: savegame #2867, recorded at 10:35 at my home PC contained just what I needed:
[ external image ]

However, I still completed the process on the other computers today just for statistics' sake:

[ external image ][ external image ][ external image ]

So yeah, 11k reloads to get the ship, and the Perseus came untuned but who cares!

I'll definitely use the CRC method if someday I start again with this madness. Shall someone need some of the scripts I used feel free to ask, I don't charge for them

EDIT: apparently .png images can be compared by CRC too. I crop them to this size:
[ external image ]

by comparing it to another .png corresponding to the savegame with the same speed, fc.exe says that no differences are found:
[ external image ]

the only annoying thing is the mouse pointer which tends to reset its position right in the middle of the screen each time the game is loaded, which is right on top of the "useful area". I bet it can be solved by cropping only the number part

Jawms · Post by **Jawms** » Wed, 27. Apr 11, 19:44

Wow.. You sir, Have too much time on your hands. Good job though!

kurush · Post by **kurush** » Thu, 28. Apr 11, 01:05

How about making your toolkit for Hyperion hyper-tuning publicly available?

Progress-M · Post by **Progress-M** » Thu, 28. Apr 11, 01:29

This is...quite impressive, 11k reloads.

I know nothing about scripting this stuff, would it be possible for an amateur to use these tools?

Note, you are indeed insane...but then, if we can benefit from your insanity, doesn't that make it okay?

Snafu_X3 · Post by **Snafu_X3** » Thu, 28. Apr 11, 01:37

You're a looney. Want me to send you a certificate?

A max speed Hyp isn't really that useful; I'd settle for a max /steering/ Hyp with only 240 or even 230 speed - it's much more useable as a playership

nponoBegHuk · Post by **nponoBegHuk** » Thu, 28. Apr 11, 02:31

To those interested in my scripts, they work but are not polished. I could share them but it would take several forum posts to explain how to set them up (and clean up the mess after), so... check back in 2 days (2 because tomorrow I'm busy and today it's too late:P ) for user friendly version.

I wish X3TC 1.2.1 could run in background! Will have to wait until hub's done for that.

glenmcd · Post by **glenmcd** » Thu, 28. Apr 11, 04:31

kurush wrote:How about making your toolkit for Hyperion hyper-tuning publicly available?

nponoBegHuk's may be okay; mine is too far off mainstream. Some of the programs I used I wrote in assembler for AmigaDOS, and run under the Amiga emulator "WinUAE". Sure, it's fast to write and fast to execute but not the sort of thing that would be easily tranported to another machine.

I've tried most macro programs and Macro Toolworks seems to be the most powerful when it comes to actually programming stuff inside. Variables, O/S interface, image capture / comparison etc. You could literally do away with everything else and write a single macro for Macro Toolworks. Initially, you start with no saved images. It does the steps to see how fast the HV is (a few key presses). With each step it can "look" at the screen and know when it can press another key. It captures a rectangle, compares to each that it's captured before (at this stage being none) and makes the decision to save in TC and rename the save file for later loading. The captured image is saved in a .bmp or .png file and then loops. So it would end up being able to immediately recognise whether it's seen this speed combo before, and only create the .sav file if not. With such logic, you don't end up with hundreds of any type of file, so there's no need to use CRC or checksum for streamlining. Macro Toolworks does the comparisons using video image comparisons live.

One could go further and create a stand-alone .exe from a Macro Toolworks macro, which would then be easily transferrable to other computers, along with ability to bind to a hotkey. It would adapt to whatever video settings you're using, clearing the cached images at session start. If anyone is interested in doing this here's a link to the MT webpage:
[ external image ]
I previously created a macro with MT that performed as an autopilot for helicopters in GTA San Andreas. It flew towards the red cross (RMB on map), which took into account side-winds in storms etc. The point here is that the image comparison tools in MT did that job and it can do this one. It would actually make a good bot for many games if your system is fast enough.

For anyone convinced that writing macros for a game is crazy, it is a pretty decent way of getting an introduction to programming and macros, without it being too boring or stressful. If you think skill-building in the #1 growth industry (gaming) is a waste of time, perhaps it's time to question that thought. It may just save you from job redundancy down the track.

Eisenkalle · Post by **Eisenkalle** » Thu, 28. Apr 11, 11:50

Snafu_X3 wrote:You're a looney. Want me to send you a certificate?

A max speed Hyp isn't really that useful; I'd settle for a max /steering/ Hyp with only 240 or even 230 speed - it's much more useable as a playership

Maxed out steering is not the problem. Getting one with overtuned speed AND STEERING is the real problem...

I explained in another post, my max steering (over standard) was something like 7.8 rpm (but with substandard speed, like 148.something). It is not comparable to any fighter class ship (20+ rpm), but one round more is better than nothing. That is, why I was so eager to perform so many reloads, when I got my 250 HV after less than 30 reloads.

Crazy & greedy people here

EDIT: Steering reference http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... 84#3566784

[TC] Maxed Hyperion Vanguard - a simple way to insanity. (spoilers)

At which point can I be considered insane?

[TC] Maxed Hyperion Vanguard - a simple way to insanity. (spoilers)