hey if any Fedi beings know about Windows #ReverseEngineering I’d love some advice or help!

I’m trying to figure out how the anti-save-scumming system for a game called Teleglitch works. here’s what I’ve figured out so far:

• when you make a save, the game also secretly hides information about the save somewhere (the information seems to only consist of “the next save that the user loads should be for level XYZ” or “there should be no savefile. if there’s a savefile, it’s invalid”. all other edits to the savefile are accepted by the game as correct - including edits that instantly freeze the game)
• when you try to load the save, the game compares the secret information with the information in the savefile. if the information doesn’t match, the savefile is considered invalid and the game refuses to load it
• the savefile is stored in a Steam Cloud directory called C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\«some numbers»\«more numbers»\remote
• the secret information is definitely not stored in this directory (I made the whole thing into a git repo and used that to “rewind time” to make 100% sure)
• the secret information is also not stored in the game’s directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\TeleglitchDME) (same thing - I made it into a git repo)
• I’ve checked every registry operation and every file I/O operation using Process Monitor but I’m 90% sure that Process Monitor is missing certain important things that Teleglitch is doing - maybe because it’s delegating tasks to {another process / a subprocess}? but Process Monitor can’t even see Teleglitch write to the Steam Cloud save directory mentioned above
• I tried looking through the executable in Ghidra and the savefile code is definitely in there somewhere, and I’ve been able to kinda make sense of some of it, but I’m not very good with disassembly / decompilation. I’d love some help with this if anyone is interested. it looks like it was probably written in C++ and I’ve found some very good places in the executable to start looking for savefile behavior but I’m baffled by a lot of what I’m seeing - I think a lot of it was automatically added by the C++ compiler

anyway I would love some advice on what to try next. I’ve tried to summarize just the most important parts of what I know about Teleglitch’s behavior, but I can explain more if anyone is interested!

@kasdeya i think visual clarity is becoming increasingly devalued as indie/AA studios try to make their game stand out in the sea of saturation. on one hand, i appreciate that developers are valuing the impact of player action but i think there are other ways to do it that don’t sacrifice visual clarity. techniques like hitstop, exaggerated animations, and good audio design go a really long way in this department without flooding the screen with 76 simultaneous particle emitters.

i wonder if some of it isn’t also in line with the high-adrenaline gameplay that a lot of them are going for – i find that a game can sell a really impactful action if its given time to do so. i know it’s possible to do in a fast game though – for example, the ko effect in smash ultimate: sidechaining or lowering the game volume in combination with an animation with heavy anticipation and time slow/stop on impact with a pronounced sound effect. this same technique is used for the entire match but it’s much, much subtler until the (usually) very last hit.

@tempest to be honest I’m not sure how people are able to make sense of this, but games like this are very popular so I guess people are able to

I’m wondering if it might be a neurotype thing because I have difficulty processing novel information quickly as it is, and get easily overstimulated. so maybe others whose neurotypes let them process information quickly and handle more visual information at once would find this easy to play and understand what they’re seeing. maybe that’s what the difference is between me and those who like this kind of game

it definitely makes sense, too, that familiarity would help a lot. I’m not sure if {these games are especially unreadable to me, so I don’t play them} or if {these games are especially unreadable to me because I don’t play them}. it’s probably a mix of the two

but yeah I would love if games started adding the ability to tone down the visual effects. I haven’t seen that in a game yet AFAIK but it would definitely help me try a wider range of games than what I currently play

I think a really good rule of thumb for too much juice is: pause the video at any frame and measure how long it takes for you to identify:

• where the player is
• whether or not the player is attacking
• whether or not the player is taking damage
• which threatening things (enemies, hazards, attack hitboxes, etc.) are near the player

if you can’t tell all of these things almost instantaneously then the game is too juiced

when I call a game “over-juiced” this is the type of shit that I’m talking about

no other MMO I’ve tried has even come close to capturing everything that WoW did right. I took WoW for granted for a long time but trying other MMOs like Guild Wars 2 has shown me how incredibly well-designed so many different parts of WoW are by comparison (especially the combat system and the theming of every individual ability and how they all combine together in a way that’s mechanically and thematically satisfying)

someone should force Blizzard to make WoW free for everyone so that I can play it without supporting Blizzard

(I know private servers exist and I like Tauri but it’s not the same idk)

Big Hitters that aren't Square! Pick one

If you are in the US and have a post-2010 laptop that works* but which you're not using, please DM me with some info about it. There's a trans person in my network who needs a laptop and can do their own linux install.

* Short battery life or some broken USB ports are ok. Major dead components (or no USB at all) are too complicated to sort.

Fedi bots at night

just to clarify, here are some examples of what I mean when I talk about strong synergies:

• every time you deal damage to an enemy, you give them 1 combo point. when they reach 5 combo points, all 5 are removed and they lose 10% of their health
• you attack 3x as often as usual, but deal 10% of your usual damage

normally that second passive would be worse than useless, but here it lets you completely melt high-health enemies because you deal damage based on a percentage instead of a fixed damage number

• every time you attack an enemy, you have a 10% chance to remove all of their burn and inflict that many stacks of poison on all enemies
• every time you attack an enemy, you have a 10% chance to remove all of their poison and inflict that many stacks of burn on all enemies

now you have a strong incentive to spec into items that inflict as much poison and/or burn as possible, as well as an incentive to make sure that each attack hits as many enemies as possible (damage doesn’t even matter anymore - just number of enemies hit), so that you can keep scaling poison and burn exponentially

I guess I really like when a game’s upgrades/passives become a puzzle of “how can I play into this ability to make it extremely overpowered?”

@shijikori ooh omg interesting! I did try Dome Keeper in the past but I didn’t like it for some reason - I can’t remember what that reason was though. maybe it had a time limit that stressed me out?

I actually haven’t heard of these others though! Roboquest actually looks like it might be pretty fun - I’m tempted to try the demo

PlateUp! also seems pretty fun to be honest. maybe a little too hectic for me but idk - I might give it a try too

in the past I listened to a lot of story podcasts (audio dramas? idk the term) and they often started off nice and spooky and horror-y, but frequently they would just devolve into this kind of stuff which I couldn’t follow at all

admittedly, I am very very bad with names and I think that was a lot of the problem

this is how I feel listening to basically any plot involving intrigue

That Scene in a Christopher Nolan Film When You Give Up Trying to Follow the Story

@minmi aw thank you! to be honest I am curious about a few things if you don’t mind:

do you think it would be doable for me to get a data science / data engineering job as someone without a degree, but with a decent number of programming projects in my portfolio? one of them is actually a naive Bayes classifier that I wrote from scratch which I’m pretty proud of, and I think that is at least data science adjacent, right?

are there data science training programs that I could go through?

I guess I’m trying to figure out what I would need to do in order to be hireable in data science

@desea woahh omg I’ve never even heard of this game before but it’s so cute! I love it aesthetically

it’s also really innovative, as far as I can tell. bullet hells are not my genre at all but from what I understand they’re usually top-down shooters, instead of giving you more in-depth abilities like this. I briefly tried a bullet hell in the past and didn’t really like it at all, but I love managing my abilities in this game. it kinda feels like a simplified version of WoW combat

I played one game of the demo and died relatively early on. I had a hard time figuring out which areas I was supposed to avoid, which areas I was supposed to stay inside of, etc. - especially when they all started overlapping lol. but I definitely still had fun

in what I’ve seen of the demo so far though, none of the passives or upgrades seem to interact with each other - so I wouldn’t say that it’s doing the things that I like to see roguelites doing. but I wonder if I might start to see more strange and interesting passives/upgrades later in the game

also, I love that this game has co-op! I’ve been looking for a co-op game to play with friends

I think that I could really get into this game! I’m definitely going to keep my eye on it and I’ll probably get it once it goes on sale or once I have more money for games hehe. thanks for the recommendation!

@tempest ohh interesting! that explains why I didn’t encounter options that felt impactful - because I didn’t play for all that long and never really got into the social stuff, so I hadn’t unlocked them yet. I’m glad that the game does eventually give you interesting options though