Topic: CRYPTIC - (Who will be the first to solve it?) (Version1.1)

[Leon]

Wow. I'm really, truly impressed. Kinda sad, too! I was hoping it would be longer that before someone beat it I suppose that makes you the first. I guess I'll give the award to whoever the first one is to send me each answer, just to make sure they've done it.

Don't bother.. you can read them already..

[LRH]

Awwwwwwwwww. Well gosh, that's no fun. Oh well.
I guess I'll have to make a sequel that's twice as hard >: D

[Leon]

Please do... I can't wait!

I must say, 19 was the hardest. I stumbled upon the answer by accident while Googl'ing...

[david]

Hey Leon go and try the Doors game i mentioned meanwhile 

[Vukul]

Much feedback on the very first day of release - including the H&T section - is a good appreciation of your game by itself
Very good and brainstorming game, Domithan, I must say. That's really the game when you feel you achieve something when solving each next riddle.

Didn't play Doors mentioned meanwhile, but in me Cryptic evokes the feeling close to playing the 11th Hour

[Dualnames]

Gonna try it out!!

PS: Domithan there's only one time I've seen Leon stuble in a game...

[LRH]

Gonna try it out!!

PS: Domithan there's only one time I've seen Leon stuble in a game...

Don't worry, Dualnames. I've already started thinking of riddles for the next one, and hopefully it will be enough to at least trip him up a bit. I actually quite like having the challenge of coming up with something tricky enough to rival his talents

[Sythe]

Please do... I can't wait!

I must say, 19 was the hardest. I stumbled upon the answer by accident while Googl'ing...

Leon, did you really finish it?

No help from Mr Debugger??

Found another bug... When you press F9 to restart, there's no way to give an answer. Since you don't have a mouse cursor and the keys won't work you have to crash the game and start all over. Effect is the same but not very elegant... ;-)

Yeah you just hit escape then guestimate where the cursor should be in order to click the No button.

But you'd only have trouble with this if F9 were the cycle key on your debugger

[Dualnames]

Please do... I can't wait!

I must say, 19 was the hardest. I stumbled upon the answer by accident while Googl'ing...

Leon, did you really finish it?

No help from Mr Debugger??

He never played HHGTG as the original and he got stuck once in the game, because it wasn't hinted at all by a programming glitch..that says it..

[LRH]

Also, I've killed debug mode. Quite impressive...

[Sythe]

He never played HHGTG as the original and he got stuck once in the game, because it wasn't hinted at all by a programming glitch..that says it..

I think it's fine to have good skills with a debugger; but I didn't post the solution even though I had them within 45 minutes. Seems like the sort of thing you might want to hold off on considering the work that goes into producing a game.

Also, I've killed debug mode. Quite impressive...

Wouldn't have stopped me, I was using a real debugger.

[LRH]

Well, yes. To be honest, I was hoping it would take a bit longer for the answers to come out without the community having direct access to them within the first day, especially since there's no other form of gameplay to Cryptic other than its riddles. However, I do understand that this is the internet, and where there's a will, there's a way. I hope that most will try their hardest before looking up the answers, though.

[david]

sorry guys, but can somebody explain me what the debugger is?
stupid question, maybe but i would like to know 

[Sythe]

Well, yes. To be honest, I was hoping it would take a bit longer for the answers to come out without the community having direct access to them within the first day, especially since there's no other form of gameplay to Cryptic other than its riddles. However, I do understand that this is the internet, and where there's a will, there's a way. I hope that most will try their hardest before looking up the answers, though.

Here's how I'd go about making it virtually uncrackable. I don't know that much about AGS itself, but turn off any debug modes in the game / change it to release mode. Make sure your uncompiled game script isn't being written into the release executable.

When you write your riddle answer checking code, use a hash function (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function).

Then compare the hash of the player's answer against the hash of the real answer.

Otherwise anyone can put a breakpoint in the main event loop and watch the stack for the correct answer to pop out.

This way they could only get the hashcode of the answer by interrogating the CPU during play, which isn't of any help.

[Sythe]

sorry guys, but can somebody explain me what the debugger is?
stupid question, maybe but i would like to know  

A debugger is a low level machine-code control tool that very naughty programmers can use to hack anything.

Screenshot: http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/9020/debugging.png

[Leon]

Alright... I'll tell you.

I've finished the game myself.  But I'm too proud to cheat. If you want I can tell you how I found/know the answers myself.

But there's a much easier way to cheat this one: Domithan, read, weep and learn for the next one!

Spoiler: ShowHide

copy the .exe and rename to .txt. Open the file with notepad and search for a part of the riddle. The answer is written there as well.

Domithan, you've explained the solutions in the same rooms as the riddle, making the text visible and very easy to combine with the riddle. For the next you might want to encrypt your texts or make them as objects/images  instead of text strings.... Texts of objects are compiled different and not (completely) readable.

[LRH]

Ah very good advice, thanks, I'll be sure to encrypt the sequel as much as possible. In any case, I don't consider this game a lost cause, I'm sure many will play it through trying as hard as they can to not look up answers, or at least ask for subtle hints in the hint section.

[Sythe]

Spoiler: ShowHide

copy the .exe and rename to .txt. Open the file with notepad and search for a part of the riddle. The answer is written there as well.

Ha, that's sort of funny. I did pull the literals from the executable and from memory several times, but never spotted that.

[Leon]

Don't get me wrong. It still took me about 7 hours to finish. I started right after the release and was constantly working on the puzzles, either on or off screen, in mind or on paper. Had good fun. But as with a lot of adventures as well, when you've played them a lot, you recognize the meaning of the riddle. It's more the trivial things that take more time.

I happened to know #12

Spoiler: ShowHide

because of my honeymoon (btdt) and my appreciation for the work of Arthur C. Clark.

I stumbled upon #19. No clue at first and this one took about 1½ hrs of googl'ing. What I like about that is that you find a massive amount of sites (totally unrelated but) with a wealth of information for general knowledge (or ignorance).

The numeric puzzles are fairly easy (there are not much possibilities) and having a musical background (in a previous life so it seems) helps as well. Being trained as a system engineer solved the tick tock.

Having a large general knowledge, spending (way too many) hours on internet and gifted with a healthy interest in almost everything (and remembering a lot, even the most useless facts...) it's always a pleasure to play these games.

[LRH]

Well, in any case, I'm glad you had fun, I'm already starting to write and design the next (which I'll try to make a lot better, both in the riddles and the presentation, I know not everyone likes the clunky black background/white text guis.) which will take a while, but hopefully will contain something to slow you down a bit.