Nickracker is a simple windows utility to help you crack minotaur vaults in the Project Gorgon MMORPG. It periodically (Every half a second) takes screenshot of the game's window, using the same windows API that OBS uses, and then it looks at that image and tries to find an open window for a vault puzzle. When it finds one, it looks at the already attempted solutions and generates new guesses using the solver. The program has 2 windows: One is a normal window, and has some settings and information for users, and the other is a transparent, always-on-top, frameless and borderless window that is meant to sit on top of the game and act as a sort of overlay. When the program finds an open vault and generates a guess, it uses this overlay window to give the user a visual indication of which symbols it thinks will work best (The guess that the solver generated).
The solver has been run on all possible 20736 puzzles (In 269.78s, ~5 mins) and the worst case takes 12 guesses ([10, 11, 1, 2]/[11, 2, 4, 4]).
I have asked in the official discord, but have received no official response yet. Use at your own risk.
- Niph for PgSurveyor, which is what inspired me to work on this
- McBreezy for pointing out that the minotaur puzzles are essentially a specific case of Mastermind
- screenshot-rs, an MIT-licensed rust tool which has nice code for the modern windows 10 graphics window capture API
- wcap, C++ window capture tool which was similarly helpful
- This 2005 paper titled "Yet another Mastermind strategy" (Barteld Pieter Kooi) and this (This one has a great "Literature review" section) 2018 paper "Genetic Algorithms Playing Mastermind" (Oijen, V. van) which helped me understand the problem
- This mastermind solver in C
- This stackoverflow answer for click-through win32 windows
- This amazing stackoverflow answer about win32 window userdata
The code in this repository is available under any of the following licenses, at your choice: MIT OR Apache-2.0 OR BSL-1.0 OR MPL-2.0 OR Zlib OR Unlicense