Facebook Farmville automation

[TimeHorse]

... I don't think I will waste my time on blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries because it is just so much effort and over 26,000 plots have to be farmed for blackberries.

105,052.50 crop-hours to be precise for blackberries. But, I've done Raspberries without a dense farm and Blackberries are coming in about half the time with a dense one and blueberries shouldn't be as hard as those too. Acorn Squash is actually the next most time-consuming crop with 9 1/2 hour reaps and 95,910.00 crop-hours, though for shear updates, Ghost Chilis are only slightly better than Blueberries with 12,600 vs. 16,800 reaps required but take up to 75,637.80 crop-hours vs. 67,233.60 for blueberries.

[hockeyhound]

Well, dialogs always appear in the center of the screen, but you're right that "Accept" could be calculated relative to the seed dialog. However, the multi-tool button is always at the bottom of the screen and in full-screen mode this is positioned differently than the dialog. So where as the Multi-tool could be calculated, the dialog offsets are on a different set of offsets.

Running these scripts in full-screen is just asking for trouble, because as you pointed out earlier, once you get a popup, it switches away from full screen automatically. I don't see any problem with requiring that the user get out of full screen mode before running the script.

And as far as I can tell, when not in full screen, the numbers I posted are consistent.

[hockeyhound]

I see they've just released the Sweet Corn seeds, which are pretty much the same as the Sweet Potatoes.

I plan on checking them out tonight, but does anyone know if the no-wither for these types of seeds can be overridden by the xml? If so, they would be a kick-ass replacement for the withering soybean delete.

[TimeHorse]

Running these scripts in full-screen is just asking for trouble, because as you pointed out earlier, once you get a popup, it switches away from full screen automatically. I don't see any problem with requiring that the user get out of full screen mode before running the script.

And as far as I can tell, when not in full screen, the numbers I posted are consistent.

Agreed. Your numbers pretty much agree with mine, though I like using one pair of offsets for all buttons since they're evenly spaced and this means fewer magic numbers. After all, the [page, row, column] array values are going to be numeric so it's easier to just say $seed_x = $first_seed_x + $pos[1]*$seed_x_offset; $seed_y = $first_seed_y + $pos[2]*$seed_y_offset.

As for the position relative to the multi-tool, I personally find windowed more useful but that's mainly because I hacked the gameSettings to set the defaultZoom to 0.33. Otherwise, my (now 22x22) farm doesn't fit on the screen. If I didn't hack gameSettings, I would probably still prefer Full Screen since those popouts aren't all that common and are accompanied by nasty in-game dialogs anyway but at least I could fit it all on screen. If I play like this, I just make judicious use of the {PAUSE} button ({CTRL}+{FN}+{RIGHT} on a Mac with Virtual Box) whenever I see one of those dialogs, even when running windowed. I personally think we should all use Fiddler, but then throwing that in with my script as a requirement seems a bit much.

The long and short of this is, let's just focus on the seed selection and then maybe the accept-button as offsets like you calculated and worry about calculating things relative to the multi-tool arrow later. After all, if we can get PixelSearch working, the full screen vs. windowed argument may become moot so why waste cycles on getting things relative to the multi-tool when we may just be able to get the dialogs and multi-tool all calculated through a PixelSearch.

In fact, it may be wisest to calculate all dialog coordinates from the center of the screen/dialog since they are always centered. No matter where the temporary training point be for seeds, relate that to the center of the market dialog and then calculate all offsets from that. Same for the Accept button. That will be a robust solution that will work regardless of screen orientation.

Either way, I need to change the list of seeds again since Red Corn has finally premiered -- in a rather strange place for the market screen! It's the second crop listed in the gameSettings but forth in the market list. I wonder how they got that to happen, as there doesn't seem to be any indication in the XML as to how to get cornred to appear later than its ordinal position in the market.

Oh, and finally, here's a hint for the levelers among you:

If you want Exp for Coins, you can do no better than Red Corn. It's a 6-hour crop, so harvesting is quick and easy (sweet seeds were a day), but if you want speed, go to the gameSettings.xml file and change:

<item name="cornred" type="seed" subtype="vegetable" buyable="true" giftable="false" license="7" expires="false" gift="flagsweetseedsredcorn" code="RD" experiment="fv_sweetseeds" >

to

<item name="cornred" type="seed" subtype="vegetable" buyable="true" giftable="false" license="7" expires="true" gift="flagsweetseedsredcorn" code="RD" experiment="fv_sweetseeds" >

And set its growTime to 0.00000000261.

Then just plow-plant-wither to your heart's content!

[hockeyhound]

The long and short of this is, let's just focus on the seed selection and then maybe the accept-button as offsets like you calculated and worry about calculating things relative to the multi-tool arrow later. After all, if we can get PixelSearch working, the full screen vs. windowed argument may become moot so why waste cycles on getting things relative to the multi-tool when we may just be able to get the dialogs and multi-tool all calculated through a PixelSearch.

Fair enough. I may write something that just does a plant, using my idea. I like to separate the harvest, plow and plant steps anyway because my script can select all the plots at once, and then I can go do something else while farmville catches up.

Either way, I need to change the list of seeds again since Red Corn has finally premiered -- in a rather strange place for the market screen! It's the second crop listed in the gameSettings but forth in the market list. I wonder how they got that to happen, as there doesn't seem to be any indication in the XML as to how to get cornred to appear later than its ordinal position in the market.

We may have a problem here. I noticed the same thing - the weird location of the Sweet Corn - but then when I visited one of my other accounts, it was in a different place. Here's a screen shot:

And it's consistent. For some users the corn is in the forth slot, and for others it's in the second. Same standard xml for all of them.

Edited November 13, 2009 by hockeyhound

[ToysRUs]

What should be the zoom value for 1x1?

[TimeHorse]

What should be the zoom value for 1x1?

That shouldn't matter. The zoom just effects how things appear on screen in a line-drawn expansion; the plot and other sizes are digital in that the server uses a specific 90x90 grid (with 22x22) for the location of all objects. Normally, farm plots take 4 in the X and 4 in the Y under the grid coordinate system, but the hack with all the buzz at the moment is to make the seeds 1x1 and thus get 16 in the space of 1 for, at this time, a maximum of 87x87 plots.

I just find $zoom = 0.33 convenient because it allows me to see my entire 22x22 farm in the flash window for farmville all at the same time. Normally, 4x4 plots are offset by 50 in the x and 24 in the y relative to the screen as in going along the diagonal and at $zoom = 1.00. Zoom here is just a multiplier the game uses to expand the view. So, the size of a 1x1 plot at the unmodified default zoom is 50*2/4 or 25 in the x and 24*2/4 or 12 in the y. Reduced to 0.33 zoom, this makes a 1x1 a mere 4 1/8 pixels in X and 1.98 pixels in y. This means that a computer is much better at click them than a human!

Now, in my script, you have 2 new variables:

Global $seed_size_x = 4
Global $seed_size_y = 4

That can be changed independently based on your settings in gameSettings.xml. Set them to 1x1 to change my clicker to click in a 1x1 pattern rather than the standard 4x4 click. This isn't perfect, mainly because the clicker only supports 20x20 grids. I'll try and make it 90x90 in the next iteration in line with the true co-ordinate system of the game. In the meantime, you can change the defaults at the top of the file to any obscure number:

Global $script_size_columns = 90
Global $script_size_rows = 90

At some point, I would really like to confirm that the game's grid treats its first coordinate as to the Northwest direction and the second to the Northeast, or if it's the reverse of that. If anyone knows, I'd appreciate the insight.

[TimeHorse]

Fair enough. I may write something that just does a plant, using my idea. I like to separate the harvest, plow and plant steps anyway because my script can select all the plots at once, and then I can go do something else while farmville catches up.

We may have a problem here. I noticed the same thing - the weird location of the Sweet Corn - but then when I visited one of my other accounts, it was in a different place. Here's a screen shot:

And it's consistent. For some users the corn is in the forth slot, and for others it's in the second. Same standard xml for all of them.

Actually, the typical way I used my script with sweet seeds is to select the entire play area (20x20 at the time), set the multi-tool home, the [southmost point on the] westmost plot, set the seed to sweet seed's buy and then set repetition really high. I'd also tweak the timeouts after plow, plant and reap to be effectively near zero via the fast click compensator:

Global $fast_click_compensator = 0.33

I find 0.33 is really good when the PPR times are near zero; this translates to 20x20x0.33 or about 132 seconds delay between cycle, which is about the time it takes for the game to catch up per cycle on my computer. Finally, I'd trap my petit mec because I don't like to trap him in the farm center because that's prime planting space. Then it would just click click click and rack rack rack and burn coins like nobody's brother! It was fairly automated but of course you still have the problem with the leveling but I'd disable the notifications like neighbour help so those weren't too difficult and just required me to stop by every so often to check on things. But with PPW, it would click on the accept button in the course of things anyway so it really could be left to it's own devices as long as you weren't looking to get all the repetitions you had originally programmed.

The script works by first plowing every plot, then planting every plot then, well with PPW, that's it, it just replows everything. Sounds to me that that's what you need, HockeyHound. If you have any questions about it, just ask here and I'll answer as best I can.

And ironically, if the random location of Red Corn was intended to obfuscate clickers, the virtue of mine requiring you to set the exact buy button directly as-is means in fact that you'd done nothing to defeat me WRT Red Corn and the famous §6.25 per Exp!

To start a repeat sequence, you just type {SHIFT}+{INSERT} or {CTRL}+{FN}+{UP} on my Mac.

Edited November 13, 2009 by TimeHorse

[ToysRUs]

I think the changes on gamesettings.xml does not affect anymore.. I have the latest xml (v7695).. Anyone can plant 1x1?

[TimeHorse]

I think the changes on gamesettings.xml does not affect anymore.. I have the latest xml (v7695).. Anyone can plant 1x1?

I had no problem setting up 10 adjacent 1x1s at the new southern corner of my farm, though I'm running v7699, which is in fact no different in the XML from 7695. Since gameSettings seems to always be at least the same version as the FarmGame...swf, I guess they updated the FarmGame and had to just up the gameSettings to be the same and not less.

Edited November 13, 2009 by TimeHorse

[TimeHorse]

Well, folks, it's taking, IMHO, me too long to make that new seed selection routine and what with Red Corn appearing randomly somewhere in the top row such that seed selection cannot be hard coded or even reliably generated from the XML (and I think it may be possible to modify my script to detect the current XML version and download the file and generate the up-to-date seed list on the fly, but I'm not tackling that just yet as I don't know where to parse the version number from that tool tip at the moment and there's no XML parser in AutoIt as I told Matthias -- hope you're okay Matthias and that you mum's doing well!)

Anyway, so since sweet seeds are back and HockeyHound is chomping at the bit to get at them and reach the coveted level 70 with 437000 Exp, I decided to see if I could come up with a fix for the infinite clicking in the current version and here it is!

Link removed, see next post

This version reduces the meandering of the mouse around the buy button once it's been clicked as well as before. I think that should fix the problems y'all have been observing. So, give it a try!

I also enabled up to 100x100 farm size and remember you can tweak the plot size so it can limitedly support a 1x1 farm but my test revealed on a 0.33 zoom that it's only about 66% accurate since it has about a 5x2 click area and that's hard to hit with all the round-off error possibilities and part of the problem is that setting the 'plow' area (step 2) isn't an accurate way of determining the correct home position. I'm not sure yet how to compensate for this, but it does work for the most part. I have a snap of the weird click pattern on my FB page, BTW.

Anyway, enjoy and please report any bugs you may find so I can tackle them!

Edited November 13, 2009 by TimeHorse

[TimeHorse]

I had to fix a potential bug in that last version so please use this version where I think I have corrected things. The other version may have broken deletions but I think this one should work.

http://timehorse.pastebin.com/f540f078c

[ewa8949]

105,052.50 crop-hours to be precise for blackberries. But, I've done Raspberries without a dense farm and Blackberries are coming in about half the time with a dense one and blueberries shouldn't be as hard as those too. Acorn Squash is actually the next most time-consuming crop with 9 1/2 hour reaps and 95,910.00 crop-hours, though for shear updates, Ghost Chilis are only slightly better than Blueberries with 12,600 vs. 16,800 reaps required but take up to 75,637.80 crop-hours vs. 67,233.60 for blueberries.

Yeah but you have not lost over 9000 blackberries (3 separate incidents) where FV just f'd up and would not let me in for a day or more and everything whithered... so frustrating I am scared to plant short crops because I never know when it will act up on this farm. Luckily it started working for me yesterday.

I did the farm expansion to 22x22 and tried your method for the 1x1 plots. With all of their connection issues it would take days and because the farm expanded downwards you could only get as close as 3 points to where your farm ended because the plow tool wont let you plow over the previous plots and I sure as heck am not deleting all those.

I wish I knew how to hack the swf file like the previous poster. He did more than just change bits because I have the original 5802 file and it is only 865Kb but the hacked one is 1226KB so he must have decompiled it and recompiled somehow. Even that method took a long time to setup my farm but once it was setup everything is golden.

[renegades8]

Hi there,

I'm new to this forum but was looking for help on harvesting/plowing/planting my farm. I'm not exactly sure how to create a script so I'm looking for help. I have a 1280x800 resolution on Vista with a 22x22 farm. Could someone please create a script or atleast help me out in how to create one that will atleast harvest and plow my farm? I'm just not exactly sure how to figure out the specific pixels or anything so any help is appreciated.

[TimeHorse]

Hi there,

I'm new to this forum but was looking for help on harvesting/plowing/planting my farm. I'm not exactly sure how to create a script so I'm looking for help. I have a 1280x800 resolution on Vista with a 22x22 farm. Could someone please create a script or atleast help me out in how to create one that will atleast harvest and plow my farm? I'm just not exactly sure how to figure out the specific pixels or anything so any help is appreciated.

Try the one two posts above (#745303).

[TimeHorse]

Yeah but you have not lost over 9000 blackberries (3 separate incidents) where FV just f'd up and would not let me in for a day or more and everything whithered... so frustrating I am scared to plant short crops because I never know when it will act up on this farm. Luckily it started working for me yesterday.

I did the farm expansion to 22x22 and tried your method for the 1x1 plots. With all of their connection issues it would take days and because the farm expanded downwards you could only get as close as 3 points to where your farm ended because the plow tool wont let you plow over the previous plots and I sure as heck am not deleting all those.

I wish I knew how to hack the swf file like the previous poster. He did more than just change bits because I have the original 5802 file and it is only 865Kb but the hacked one is 1226KB so he must have decompiled it and recompiled somehow. Even that method took a long time to setup my farm but once it was setup everything is golden.

Actually, that's starting to happen to me now, but I think it's connection issues not anything sneaky on the server. I hear you on the collision issue, though! I tried the only valid link on this forum to a supposedly hacked swf and found it did not stop the plowing from colliding! In fact, when I plug it in, it causes constant resyncs with a g1 error every time I load it -- I can't even get to my farm. I don't know how anybody got that working but I've never seen it. I was planning to build a 5-plot margin around my expanded area and then pluck away at the original dense as I filled it in. Of course, if I could tweak my clicker, I could set it up, take a walk and Bob's your uncle!

Anyway, after a week I'm just short ninety plots of blackberries for mastery -- the same I was last night. I lost all my blueberries in terms of mastery but the land was not withered or fallow but plowed by the network tool, so go figure.

My goal now is to build a 5-square margin around the new edge of my farm with at least 90 squares, for the obvious reason. But, I also lost my 10 dense patch in the bottom, again IMHO due to server sync issues. I think what is happening is like Yoville, you're being connected to a random server from 1 machine, then another from another and the communication between those servers is buggy so stuff is getting lost. But the gift box seems to be more or less preserved with things you got from clicking walls and gifts so this might be a different server. Of course, I'm only speculating. The main thing is now I have to regenerate my 1-2-3-4 = 10 plots as well as 80 more!

Edited November 14, 2009 by TimeHorse

[aniq]

can some1 tell me what to use autorespond on fidler

and can some1 tell me the latest game setting

here is what fiddler looks like on mine (using v7695 game setting and nothing changes)

please help

[ewa8949]

Actually, that's starting to happen to me now, but I think it's connection issues not anything sneaky on the server. I hear you on the collision issue, though! I tried the only valid link on this forum to a supposedly hacked swf and found it did not stop the plowing from colliding! In fact, when I plug it in, it causes constant resyncs with a g1 error every time I load it -- I can't even get to my farm. I don't know how anybody got that working but I've never seen it. I was planning to build a 5-plot margin around my expanded area and then pluck away at the original dense as I filled it in. Of course, if I could tweak my clicker, I could set it up, take a walk and Bob's your uncle!

Anyway, after a week I'm just short ninety plots of blackberries for mastery -- the same I was last night. I lost all my blueberries in terms of mastery but the land was not withered or fallow but plowed by the network tool, so go figure.

My goal now is to build a 5-square margin around the new edge of my farm with at least 90 squares, for the obvious reason. But, I also lost my 10 dense patch in the bottom, again IMHO due to server sync issues. I think what is happening is like Yoville, you're being connected to a random server from 1 machine, then another from another and the communication between those servers is buggy so stuff is getting lost. But the gift box seems to be more or less preserved with things you got from clicking walls and gifts so this might be a different server. Of course, I'm only speculating. The main thing is now I have to regenerate my 1-2-3-4 = 10 plots as well as 80 more!

You could be right about the servers. I was lucky enough to use that old .swf file when the game was still in the 5000 series and it worked for about a week. I could just click click click and plow anywhere.. even over trees. Of course I was dumb enough to try to let the script do the plowing for me and it was just slightly off creating about 2 hours of work to fix it. My farm was 38x78 with plots but i found i could expand one up and one over to make it 39x79 but it is sooo much work doing that. I have spent probably over two hours while I watch TV and refresh the page adding one plot at a time.

Good job on the blackberries. That one is the hardest to master because you have to farm over 26000 plots to get it. I think I can get it in a few days myself but it is so much work. I just planted 3000 myself. I hope they don't whither on me due to server issues You can watch the connections in fiddler to see if your farm actually did get farmed or not. If it is not constantly pinging the flashservices/gateway.php then you will probably lose all your crops. I always watch fiddler to make sure it is actually saving my work now.

With my new farm area I think I will just put a bunch of hay blocks and spell out something.

[TimeHorse]

can some1 tell me what to use autorespond on fidler

and can some1 tell me the latest game setting

here is what fiddler looks like on mine (using v7695 game setting and nothing changes)

please help

Since I'm about to discuss fiddler on this forum, I may as well give you some insight.

First of all, let's assume you downloaded gameSettings.xml. The latest version is 8506. Next, modify that file to your liking. Change things like plowTime, harvestTime, plantTime and walkSpeed to some really small values, like 0.0000001 or something. 0 might work, but I usually just make small fractions. I also recommend changing the defaultZoom to "0.33". Do this and you can verify your changes worked when the farm comes up really, really small.

Once you've modified the file, make sure your settings in Fiddler match the correct request:

For your match string, use: regex:(?insx)^http://.*gameSettings\.xml$

And for your replacement, use the "Find a file ..." option and select the file you just modified.

Remember to click the "Save" button at the right end of the Rule Editor if you make any changes.

If you have a modified FarmGame swf file, also add an AutoResponder for it. First, click the "Add..." button. Then:

For your match string, use: regex:(?isxm)$

And for your replacement, use the "Find a file ..." option and select the modified swf file.

Again click "Save" to save your changes.

Next, fire up IE, Safari, Opera, Sea Monkey, Chrome or Firefox.

Now, if you chose Firefox for your browser, you have an additional step. When you installed Fiddler, you also installed a Firefox plugin. Firefox does not use Windows INET services to connect to the Internet, it has developed its own low-level protocol (which is why Server Name Identification, SNI, works on Firefox for Windows but in no other browser. Normally, Fiddler sets a proxy in your Internet settings to redirect all Internet traffic through it, and since the other browsers all use the Windows services, they are all effected by Fiddler's autoresponder automatically. Not so with Firefox. However, remember the plugin I mentioned? That plugin created a button on the lower right-hand side of your status bar that should now say Fiddler disabled or words to that effect. Click it and Fiddler should now be enabled and you're ready to roll.

Now, go to Facebook and fire up FarmVille. You should see your farm all zoomed out, you avatar zipping across the screen and plowing, planting and reaping in no time flat.

Also play with the seed sizeX and sizeY settings to get your crops to go from 4x4 squares to 1x1 squares.

Have fun and enjoy!

Edited November 20, 2009 by TimeHorse

[TimeHorse]

Okay

I've had enough of people hiding information from us and working so hard to build our dense plots and I think we should pull our resources to find out a better way.

The hacked swf seems a dead end because it's no longer compatible with FarmVille and no-one here seems to have a proper decompiler never mind knows where to apply a collision disable hack! Not to mention that the game swf is changed frequently.

But there are other ways to create such a farm! At the network level! We've all enjoyed taking advantage of Fiddler for autoresponding our hacked file but fiddler can do more than just autorespond data. It can build fresh packets...

So, what I propose we pool our resources on is solving the mystery of what is being sent to the FarmVille server whenever we plow a new area on FarmVille. We should be able to figure this out; we know from our Russian friend that the game is on a grid system with (0, 0) at the bottom corner, (89, 0) at the far right corner and (0, 89) at the far left corner. In other words, x is to the NorthEast and y is to the NorthWest. It is using this information to send various plow, plant and reap signals to the server. If we can decode what it's sending for plow, and tweak the co-ordinates, we could theoretically plow anyway and with a series of these set up to fill our farms we could have an 87x87 farm in no time!

That said, I don't want to continue this discussion further in this forum for fear that FarmVille will catch up to us. Send me a private IM and I'll set us up a mailing list where we can discuss this idea further out of sight of Zygna. Join our private mailing list to get in on the discussions!

Edited November 20, 2009 by TimeHorse