Project SIKULI is out!

Looks pretty slick doesn’t it? Well if you cant be bothered listening to my ramblings, you can download it straight from the MIT website here.

Instead of devoting this post into how much i love it. Im doing to do slightly the opposite. And tell you why Project SIKULI makes me chuckle a bit inside.

I guess i have to take you back to my youth. I must have been 13/14 at the time, and i was into all the usual waste-your-life type games. Runescape was all the rage back then and to say the least, it was mind numbingly boring. It basically involves doing repetitive tasks over and over again, so you can gain just that one more level. Nowadays people think they are more advanced playing WoW, but its the same shit, different graphics.

Anyways, back then. We needed some sort of automation or “macro” to do the work for us. The game of Runescape became less about how long you could sit at your computer before your mouse button gave up on you, and more about how you could beat the system.

And then along came SCAR

It is basically what MIT has done, but in a different wrapper. And infact dare i say it, slightly more advanced. While MIT has made something that is easy to use, it is also fairly simple concepts, and i dont think you would ever be able to get to the level of customization that a SCAR script had.

SCAR works on a slightly different basis to Project SIKULI, in that it takes your images that you give it, and converts them into “Bitmap Strings”. Almost like a text version of your image. And then from there it worked with it, and found it on screen no problem.

Where am i going with this? Well, if anything it makes me laugh that what we were doing 7 or so years ago, is now “new” technology. Not just new, “cutting edge”. Forums around the web are ablaze with praise for this application, and yet, i can guarantee you none have heard of SCAR. It all comes down to the marketing no matter the product.

If i came to you out of the blue, and said, whats better, an application developed by MIT, or developed by high school kids. What would you say?