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Jan-30-2007 12:13

Hello, fellow Sleuths!

Over the last two months, I've been working on a brand new Sleuth helper. You might not think that sounds all that special - after all, great helpers are already available - but what makes this one different is that it's automated!

What it does is monitor your progress in the game, and extract relevant information from the pages. The information is stored and analyzed, in order to help you determine who did it, and who didn't.

It's heavily inspired by Evita's JavaScript-based Sleuth Helper, so a special "thank you" goes out there.

The application is made with Delphi 2005, and should run on any machine with Windows NT/98/ME/2K/XP/Vista and Internet Explorer 4 or later. Additionally, source code is included (ZLib license) in case someone wants to port it to another platform and/or language (such as Java).

The program can be downloaded from http://download.birdiesoft.dk/SleuthHelper.exe (330 KB), and a screenshot of the program can be seen at http://download.birdiesoft.dk/sleuth_helper.png.

Please take a look at the help file before using the program (it's very short), so you are familiar with how the program works.

(Disclaimer: The application depends heavily on the current structure of the game pages, and changes to this may break the program. Although the application is designed in such a way that it should fail entirely if something goes wrong, this cannot be guaranteed. Use of this program is entirely at your own risk, and any cases lost because of errors in the program should not be blamed on the program or the author.)

Sep-14-2007 15:33

That's more or lesss correct, however, all that really needs to differ is the web browser itself. Since it's a component, there's very little code specific to it - almost everything is wrapped away in the TWebBrowser component, and only about 20 lines of code make it do something that's necessary for the concept to work - most of the related code is specific to IE, and can be omitted.

As a result, porting to a different system really only requires that you have a way of showing a web page, a way of knowing when a page has finished loading, and a way of getting a string containing the HTML that is shown in the browser. The code that doesn't deal with the web browser is essentially platform independent, allowing for what is essentially a direct port.

Though I'd gladly make a version for Linux and Mac users, I'm afraid I don't have any experience with GUIs outside of Windows-only stuff. If someone wants to team up with me in order to do that part, I should be able to do the rest without much trouble, more or less regardless of what programming language they can do the GUI in.

It could most likely be done as a Firefox plug-in as well, but I wouldn't want to make it there - in part because I don't use it myself. I'm also not sure if you can get at the unprocessed HTML within a plug-in, and if you can't that could make it a bit more troublesome. However, you are most welcome to give it a shot if you want to - that's one of the reasons source code is included.

FWIW, I haven't forgotten - v1.15 is still planned for release soon, but there are a couple of things I need to take care of first.

Sep-16-2007 02:39

I know, I know. I write here a lot with suggestions. But I get ideas for the next little improvement here and there and.... I just can't keep my yap shut!

Annyway, here's another one. Could there be something where I tell the Sleuth helper that there will be one less person for this case? I ask this because I've gotten into the habit of switching cases back and forth with some people in my agency and It's pretty annoying to pay the fortune teller twice for the same case. (counting the other detective, thrice) Just something to click on to force-feed it some knowledge I know beforehand.

As always, I love the sleuth Helper. It is so much easier to compare people with this thing. Quicker too.

Sep-23-2007 07:32

Ouch.

I couldn't take a screenshot this time buddy. But my contact, the Barber, said a PE matched a suspect with a fake alibi.

I accused.

I paid Shady. :(

Ouch. It was a LOT of money.

Sep-23-2007 12:04

That's not a bug with the Sleuth Helper - that's a Sleuth bug.

Sep-23-2007 15:21

Sleuth robot now takes down information automatically, with a Firefox plug-in.

Sep-24-2007 21:56

I am going to have to keep using the old Slueth helper( even though that means a lot of Alt Tabbing) because I have to ask everyone the same question twice. The box on the bottom collects all the info but the game itself seems to forget what it told me. So I have to ask the same questions again. Also when I move on to a new case I get answers that were relevent for my previous case. It is a really cool program I just wished it worked better for me.

Oct-7-2007 08:37

I keep getting the program marking the evidence off under the wrong column and then if it starts to do it right again it gets confused. Anyone else getting this problem? It's been happening to me for a few days now. I also don't think the checking for updates thing at the beginning is working.

Oct-7-2007 13:03

I've noticed that sometimes the helper knows things before it should, if this is possible.
Usually I assume it makes deductions that I have missed, but once it greened out a suspect. He had a fake alibi and was a possible match to more than one PE. I clicked on him to see if I could figure out why he couldn't possibly be guilty and he was dead. He wasn't dead before or I wouldn't have been able to click on him.

Not complaining. . . but it was a bit odd.

Oct-8-2007 02:54

Had more or less the same thing happen to a case I opened from someone else.

I opened the case and whent straight to the case tab to click on each person so the helper would know their information. Thing is, when the whole page loaded I didn't need to click on anyone because it somehow got all their information anyway.

At first I was psyched, thinking this must have been because of some update. I thought It simply opened up all of their seperate pages without letting me know. But it hasn't happened since and... I find myself being disapointed. It was a neat thing that happened, even if it didn't make sense.

Oct-8-2007 15:14

Laura: Unless you actively get an error message, it's working. If you get an error, you can't contact any of the mirrors, for some reason.

Dredd, Dave: I can swear I don't do any auto-checking - it's just become a bit quick to jump to conclusions starting with v1.14.

I've been very busy, so I'm very late as far as updates are concerned - but I can see I need to get v1.15 out ASAP, since v1.14 is causing problems. Therefore, I'll go through the code one last time sometime during this week (hopefully tomorrow), and then release it as quick as I can. I might have to remove parts of what v1.14 added, because so far, I've been unable to spot the bug. (Don't worry, it'll still keep the checkerboard effect ^_~)

I suppose you deserve a sneak peek at what's to come, though, since there are things beyond bug fixes - and in that regard, I'd like to congratulate Dave, since he correctly guessed one of the new features. You will indeed be able to reorder suspects now (although it's a manual process).