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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.)

Jul-1-2013 08:28

@Dixon: If you have any special characters in your password, make sure you save the file as UTF-8 (there's a dropdown in the bottom of the Save As dialog in Notepad), since it might not be read correctly if you don't. Also make sure there aren't any extra spaces on the line (on either side of the = character, or at the end of a line). Other than that, I don't really have a good explanation why it wouldn't work.

@DevilishWings: You are correct - it uses IE as the rendering engine, and since Microsoft tends to do quite a lot to preserve backwards compatibility, it should be quite resilient to OS upgrades. (Of course, that's not a guarantee, so you still need to pay attention.)

Jul-1-2013 08:45

Welcome back Pidgeot :-)

Jul-1-2013 09:26

Hey, Pidgeot :) The first time I used the program (a few days back), it worked fine; however, ever since then, it seems to have a problem connecting to the Internet, even when I can play on all my other normal browsers just fine. The messages I get are:

Navigation to the webpage was canceled. And when I refresh it:

This program cannot display the webpage.
This could be a problem on my end, maybe, but anything would help a lot at this point; thanks!

Jul-1-2013 11:05

@Bela: Something on your end is preventing the browser from accessing Sleuth.

The helper uses Internet Explorer; make sure you can use that "on its own". If that works, then I don't have any explanation why the helper wouldn't.

If IE on its own doesn't work either, then you'll have to see if other sites work, check proxy settings... there are many possible reasons why it might fail, I'm afraid, and I don't have any brilliant way of figuring out which one is affecting you.

Dec-9-2014 13:44

Is there a Mac version?

Dec-11-2014 01:31

There is not a mac version.