The Internet Roadtrip Pathfinder
There’s an internet web game slash social experiment thing called Internet Roadtrip that started a few months ago, where players collectively “drive” a car on Google Street View and can vote for which directions to go in. Here’s the website if you’d like to look at it before reading the rest of this post: https://neal.fun/internet-roadtrip.
I was introduced to it on the day that the game launched by my friend Mikarific — who also happens to own the Discord server for the game. I thought it’d be fun to reverse-engineer and create a bot for, so I decided to join the Discord and start investigating how the game works.
My first idea for something cool that I could make was a bot with a built-in pathfinder that could make the car go wherever I wanted in the most optimal way possible. To do this, I’d have to reverse engineer Google Maps, then figure out how it’s used by Internet Roadtrip, and finally I could actually make the pathfinder. Surely this can’t be that complicated, right? Shouldn’t take longer than a couple of days, right?
Reverse-engineering Google Maps
Unfortunately for me, Google Maps wasn’t as well-documented as I’d like, so I ended up having to reverse-engineer a lot of things (
...