I Wanna Lockpick TAS

This project aims to create a TAS for the game I Wanna Lockpick. The most important files are located under tas/: they contain the actual inputs for different parts of the TAS and are written in a special language to denote different inputs.

The TAS language

Uppercase letters indicate pressing a key, lowercase letters indicate releasing a key. The table below shows the different mapping of letters to keys:

Letter	Key name
L / l	Left
R / r	Right
U / u	Up / Interact
D / d	Down
J / j	Jump / Select
Z / z	Undo
N / n	Restart / "New Attempt"
S / s	Skip
P / p	Pause
C / c	Camera
X / x	Action / Master Key
B / b	Exit Level / Back
W / w	Warp
A / a	PDA
E / e	Run Switch
F / f	Run / Fast
O / o	Walk / SlOw

To indicate wait times, simply write them as a number, e.g. write 30 to wait 30 frames = 0.6 seconds.

Comments can be initiated using # and go until the end of the line.

If you want to run multiple things simultaneously, you can use parentheses ("(...)"). Everything within parentheses will be run in parallel, i.e. it doesn't wait until the stuff inside the parentheses is done.

But most importantly: use $ followed by the name of a TAS to "insert" it at the current position.

Examples:

# moves right for 10 frames
R 10 r

Jj 1 # small tap

lrudjznspcxbwaefo # releases all buttons

# a double jump at the same time as movement
(
  J 10 j # first jump
  1
  J 10 j # second jump
)
L 10 lR 20 r

# runs everything in the file "cool_other_file.txt"
$cool_other_file

The server

In order to run a TAS or to control an IWL instance in other ways, you can use the IWL TAS server located in server/. Additionally to adding the GameMaker code in server/gml/, you'll also need to compile the GameMaker extension contained within server/gm_text_server/ into gm_text_server.dll which adds several networking commands to GameMaker.

The server is a text-based TCP server running on port 13785 with the following commands:

end_frame: Makes the server not process any more commands in the current frame.

block: Puts the server into blocking mode: The server sends a frame message at the beginning of a frame and only continues processing the frame after end_frame is encountered.

unblock: Puts the server out of blocking mode: The server now runs at 50 FPS again and will run commands as soon as possible.

location: Print out the current room id as well as the player's position and velocity, if possible.

obstacles: Prints out a list of all obstacles (objects derived from objBlock) in the format <object_index> <x> <y> <xscale> <yscale> <bbx> <bby> <bbwidth> <bbheight> where bb refers to "bounding box".

get_inputs: Prints out three lines containing the buttons held down, pressed and released respectively. The buttons are encoded according to the table above where uppercase letters mean "held down / pressed / released" and lowercase letters mean "not held down / not pressed / not released".

set_inputs: Overrides the current inputs with the next three lines. The lines are encoded similarly to get_inputs with the exception that omitted letters are not overriden.

curprev: Prints out two lines containing the buttons held down previously (in the previous frame) and currently respectively. This time, the buttons are encoded using a number which acts as a bitmask: The order of the bits is exactly the order of buttons presented in the table above where "Left" is represented using the bit with value 2^0 and "Walk" is represented using the bit with value 2^16.

Clients

The clients are located in clients/src/ and are all currently written in Java. These clients exist:

iwltas.cli.Playback: Plays back the inputs provided to stdin. To run TASes from files, you can use $ (see above).

iwltas.cli.Recorder: Records inputs from the game and prints out the commands to stdout.

iwltas.gui.Visualizer: Opens a window that allows you to remotely control the game with keyboard input.