

Getting Started Reverse Engineering the Diablo 3 Auction House - arange
http://larrystechblog.tumblr.com/post/21373715469/getting-started-reverse-engineering-the-diablo-3

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wladimir
_Once you have all this data, simulate mouse clicks on the next and previous
buttons to paginate and get more data. It’s all a tricky process, very hacky,
but you’re getting really valuable data._

If you go all the way to simulate mouse clicks, why not OCR the prices off the
screen? I guess that's somewhat simpler (I used to do it for a poker bot,
there's a few open source screen scraping tools available). Maybe there's more
information available in memory than is shown to the user, of course.

~~~
JD557
I'm not sure how easy it would be to do OCR due to the weird font the game
uses. The numbers seem easy enough to read though (Way better than the ones
used diablo I/II), and I guess that's what count. If they changed the font to
the old one it would probably not work though, since the '5' and the '6'
characters where pretty similar.

~~~
wladimir
Well, the advantage that screen scraping has over paper OCR is that the font
is completely deterministic and there's (usually) no degrading effects. Even
if '5' and '6' are pretty similar, there must be some pixel that can be used
to distinguish them.

What _could_ make it more tricky is if alpha transparency is used for both the
foreground and background. Still, the complexity isn't anywhere near "real
life" OCR.

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_bjn
This guy is a badass.

