Google TechTalks: Crypto Strikes Back!

Gamasutra: Dirty Coding Tricks

"When the schedule is shot and a game needs to ship, programmers may employ some dirty coding tricks to get the game out the door. In an article originally published in Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine earlier this year, here are nine real-life examples of just that." Read More ...

What a day ...

Man i m still shocked about what we have learned today. Our admin version of fps-death got leaked again and this time an admin of xj gave it away to someone who submitted a bhopscript demo to xj and then gave it to kayne who released it. Those people made him and other admins trust them. Since this is inexcusable he ll get kicked out today or tomorrow and we ll have to find a new admin who is doing his work and we can trust in.

What we learn from this is that you can t secure a program from leaking by giving it to as few people as possible ... still the temptation seems to be too big. So for future analysing programs there has to be a system that we know exactly who is using what and when and bind programs to computers even for people you think you can trust absolutly and of course an emergency shutdown so noone can use these progs after a leak. To do this and make it as hard to hack as possible will be a lot of work but it seems to be necessary.

Win 7 activation cracked 85 days ahead of general release

Image credit: user “arabmed” on mydigitallife.info forums

Looks like things haven’t changed all that much since Windows XP.

Small update ...

Well the last weeks were full of interesting and new things i learned, while working on kcac, and i can t really talk about them ... except that the next kcac version will be on a whole new level and in no way comparable with the old one. We are a team of experts now with gangien helping me out on the coding side and emti designing the artworks. Here is a preview screen of the current version:

I had to cut out the interface development completely for now because it would have taken too long. So we re working with winapi now to get the prog ready to use as fast as possible.

On the positive side you ll be able to record demos on servers once we released it.

Also there was an interesting story: While i was working on getting some data out of steam.exe we need for kcac i ran into my password saved in plain text in the memory ...

After investigating this a bit more i came to the conclusion that everyone with basic knowledge about reading other processes memory can read my steam password if he wants to. I talked about this with Soulfather and he sent a mail directly to his contact at Valve. Let s hope they ll take the appropriate actions.

Now about the fast demo-checker: The code is finished and i started with adding maps but since my focus is on kcac and i have to learn a lot for university atm i ll pause the map adding for some time. You can get an updated test version here. Ofc the interface will get a redo for the release. Once this is done it ll get the correct record time on all maps from the record list. So this will become the #1 tool for public demo checking.

River flows in you

me playing "river flows in you" on my keyboard: link

Fast demo checker pre-release!

Here is a test program for the demo-checker i m currently working on.
The loading code i wrote myself is streaming the demos with an 1mb buffer so it doesn t need more ram than that buffer to load demos. And it is really fast ;)

I ll release the code of the file-loading class with an explanation how it is done later.
The interface is not done yet but i ll add one when i m done with e2D and will officially release the prog after that.

You can download it here: Link

Note: This prog is not finished yet! I still have to change the average fps and server time to get the official results.

About my time in World of Warcraft

I was playing WoW very active from release to 2006 and was in a preety good raiding guild too. It was called Dagordacil and was one of the best guilds in Germany and the World at that time until the most people went inactive because of the udpdating policy of Blizzard at that time to make things unbeatable until they had developed the next content.

But anyway the reason i m writing this here is because i got a lot of questions recently on how i learned to read the demo format. And i m going to tell the whole story here now.

When i was playing WoW there was a guy around called Dopefish and he released movies about exploring areas noone else showed before him. This movie was mostly made on private servers but nontheless inspired me to start exploring WoW myself. Those vids are still around on youtube:

I started to learn how to wallwalk and that stuff, but still we were going on the ground ;)

Some time later Dopefish released his next movieNogg-aholic. And this movie blew everyone away at that time! It was recorded on live servers only and introduced the model changing to WoW: (And yes i m posting all 5 parts of the movie here. If you haven t watched it yet do it now! ;) )

Well contrary to his comment in the end of the movie this wasn t goodbye for him in WoW and when he came back he founded the community Nogg-aholic. The best people in editing WoW were together there and when i found that site there were secret groups inside that community and one group in which only the best of the best people were recruited in (not more than 15). I had already written a tool to move adt files around (those are the files that make the outside world of WoW) so they invited me to talk with them in the channel called #secret-meeting. I even met someone there i already knew from kreedz and had caught cheating: akg. But at that time i wasn t good enough to get in directly so i had to go it the normal way.

For every step (i think it were 4) there were quests you had to solve. The first three were really easy and with some time, luck and google you could beat them. But the last one was so hard that either you know what you have to do and solve it in 1 day or you re smart enough to learn it in 2 weeks or you ll never solve it. There were people there in the step below this who where trying to solve it for months but could never do it. Anyway it took me like 3 hours and i found myself in the last group before the secret-meeting group.

We were only 3 people there and got access to sites and help from the people above us to learn new things. And what we started to do there were things i thought would be impossible to do before that time. One of those sites was wow-dev and in that time i learned how to reverse engineer nearly every file format.

After some time we decided to make a movie to showoff our skills. It is called lowcost-flightpath (recorded on official servers only) because we managed to hack the ships so we could fly around with them. They liked it so much that they decided to invite us to the #secret-meeting group. And that was when we started to learn the real things. And we could do anything we want in WoW at that time. Like fly around spawn objects, move objects build paths in the world and i even wrote an anti aggro hack so you could run through dungeons with level 1 and no monster attacked you.

At that time the first version of Naxxramas came out so i hacked my way through it on the testserver and made the first video ever on spawning saphiron:

This movie was made for a WoW radio show called "WoW - Nacht" we had in Germany by wow-szene at that time and i was invited there to chat about the unreleased Naxxramas and about 50k people were listening :D

Well after all that i needed a break from WoW i stopped playing the real game and only continued to hack around a bit. I was invited in the radio show again to talk about Nogg-aholic but we were already going different ways. There was nothing left in WoW we could do and so Nogg-aholic went inactive.

From time to time when there are new things released we still gather again in #secret-meeting and the last big thing we did was hacking ourselfes on the private Blizzard server where they tested the addon Wrath of the Lichking. So i was already playing a Death Knight in April 2008.

Half the people of our group went in the gaming industry and are working there today in companies like Starbreeze (The Chronicles of Riddick, The Darkness) and  CCP Games (Eve Online). Malu05 is still coding on a Machinima tool so i ll just link his youtube channel here there are some amazing movies he posted.

I want to finish this post with a clip that was made by Dopefish for a project called NAC by nogg-aholics #secret-meeting and never got finished:

Project Natal

You remember the xbox fight scene in the movie "The Island" 4 years ago?

Well guess what, microsoft just presented something like that on the E3 yesterday!

Where is that web 2.0 everyone is talking about?

So it seems web 2.0 is finally becoming a reality by the end of this year!
Just two (not so short) vids that i think are worth mentioning here:

What will interfaces look like in the future?

Coleran Reel 2008.06 HD from Mark Coleran on Vimeo.

About GDI in Windows 7

Just want to head you to a very interesting post at the Engineering Windows 7 blog about how they ll change the GDI system there: Engineering Windows 7 Graphics Performance

This is a pretty nice thing since the gui-engine of kcac is working with GDI. I also just wanted to add that the concept of how the interface will work got finished last weekend and i m currently putting everything together so you can expect a gui-demo next weekend or week. With that version you can already start to make custom styles for kcac!

Another day, another fail!

So Valve decided to make a new beta-version in which they changed some things again. The duck-jump bug is fixed and the normal duck should work like it always did. So there are good things in it too!

But Valve wouldn t be Valve if they wouldn t mess it all up again ;)

They tried to add this:

* movement penalty now happens after 2 or more successive incomplete duck movements, not the first.

And failed again ...

The slowdown after incomplete duck movements is just random now. You can even get it in your first one or if you wait like 10sec and do another one it still slows you down. But they managed to add something else:

They changed the way stepsounds are calculated as you can see in those demos numb recorded: compare engines

So what they re doing now is calculating the next stepsound of players who are not moving and so will never actually make a sound ... genius! But it gets even worse. Now you can bhop without making sounds at all, if you manage to jump between those stepsounds, as you can see in this video: silent bhopping

Will Valve ever manage to fix the russian-walk bug without adding new bugs? I guess we ll have to wait for a few more updates before we can actually see what cs will look like after the final update. Until then we can still hope that it won t affect the kreedz community too much.

Save Kreedz! And ofc the normal cs too ;)

First welcome everyone to my blog!

I really thought I could open this blog with a different topic, but our all favorite game developer Valve decided to give the cs 1.6 community one more update to fix the "Russian walk" bug. Well it s still a beta but if this update would go live like it is now it would not only ruin the kreedz communities but all serious cs players. So I want to give a short overview of the changes in the update.

This time they tried to fix the bug by changing the gameplay not only for the bug they want to fix but for the whole duck behavior in the game what in my opinion is total unnecessary, because there was no one complaining about the duck before that update. Only because they are not able to fix something without changing a huge part of the game doesn’t mean that we, the players, have to accept it! But as the past shows us the cs community doesn’t really have a big influence on the updates anyway and that is what s characterizing a bad developer.

So what does this update change exactly?

1. The normal duck (why would anyone need that???)

While the duck speed is unchanged they changed how you accelerate after releasing the duck key: now you need 0.87sec instead of 0.32sec to gain full speed again.



2. The double duck (ok kinda expected)

While you didn’t lose much speed before the beta, it looks completely different now.

3. The duck-jump bug (wtf how could that happen???)

The normal jump slowdown is unchanged but the strange thing is if you duck during the jump the slowdown gets less. You can also improve this to no slowdown at all. This is a huge bug for normal cs and i can t think of anyone who could want this game mechanic. This bug will ruin the normal cs gameplay as well!



So to sum it all up: Instead of working together with people who already fixed the bug with no side effects they try to fix it themselves and fail miserably. They don t just change the whole gameplay what no one asked them to do, no they also add a new much worse bug with it ... good job Valve!

So what does it mean for xj and all other kreedz communities?

Well there won’t be any other way than resetting all wr demos there are and deleting a lot of maps which did cost the creators thousands of hours to make. Most people won’t see why they should invest so much time in a game that could change completely anytime with an update making their hard work useless and will leave. This will change the face of the community for ever.

So stand up and show the developers what they did wrong! I really hope they'd listen this time and will over think their decisions. I don't think they knew what a large impact that changes would have and just tried to help getting rid of that bug.