Socks the Fox – The wannabe hackery furry cutie

HackMUD: acct_nt

Posted by Socks the Fox in The Playground on May 28th, 2024

Thanks to Thor streaming the game a bit, I’ve recently gotten into HackMUD. It’s a pretty cool game where you need to solve puzzles to collect resources, and can use JavaScript to help do it for you. There are a bunch of different kinds of puzzles, but one of the main ones you’ll encounter happens when you go after NPCs or other players to try and take their stuff, called locks. These are where the scripting really shines, because you have a limited time to solve them and they are often extremely repetitive (for example, “find the code word, then find the proper pass digit from 0 to 9”). In addition, the solutions to these locks will eventually change, called a “rotation.” I’ve seen 15 and 30 minutes thrown around, best to err on the side of caution and assume the shorter time.

One of the more confusing ones out there is a tier 2 lock, called acct_nt. This lock generates it’s solution based on *your* transactions. Part of why it’s confusing is that there is a lot of information out there that is either correct but awkwardly explained, or partially correct, and some that’s outdated or just plain wrong. However, we can glean some useful information on how to consistently solve the lock based on a combination of in game and out of game information.

The Playground: AoW Title Screen Part 2

Posted by Socks the Fox in The Playground on September 25th, 2017

I, uh… kind of forgot to write part 2 of the series. So here it is.

Last time, I talked about the audio side of things. This time, we’re painting pictures. Writing the audio library myself was probably not the best choice if this was going to be a released project, but doing so ended up teaching me a number of key fundamentals for manipulating binary data in JavaScript, which would prove invaluable for the graphical side of things. I had actually come up with a couple of approaches to how I’d do this, with the first being to extract all the image data right from the game files and converting them to PNGs, then using those with HTML/CSS to build the page.

The Playground: AoW Title Part 1

Posted by Socks the Fox in The Playground on April 12th, 2017

I loved the Age of Wonders games as a kid. Amazing graphics, beautiful music, and so much attention to detail. I still have my disk, which became a very fortunate thing for this project. Shockingly, it still installs and runs just fine in 64-bit Windows 10 (albeit with some minor prodding to settings). The title screen doesn’t particularly like my 1920×1080 screen resolution (the sliding background painting doesn’t loop properly) and the smaller maps are pretty much completely visible on such a large screen but other than that it holds up very well.

But enough gushing about my favorite game. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here to learn, and learn I very much did. This project ended up teaching me a number of things about JavaScript that I legitimately did not know about before. The main two things I learned about were the Data View API which allows JavaScript to peek into binary data, and the Web Audio API which allows the browser to play arbitrary sound. Additionally, I dabbled in C++ a bit for this project for extracting graphics from the Age of Wonders ILB format, thanks to documentation found on the Jongware website as well as a little bit from the AoWRead documentation. This proved invaluable to help me get things set up, and eventually I was able to export even complicated composite images as PNG files (via the STB image writing library which I chose because it’s silly easy to use and I already had it due to work on the STB image reading library). Once I’m finished writing the articles, I’ll put the project in my Demos and Examples page.

The Playground: Learning Things By Doing

Posted by Socks the Fox in The Playground on April 3rd, 2017

I am going to start up a new series called “The Playground.” The idea of these articles is for me to pick a project, and walk through everything I needed to learn to actually get it done. This could be for any number of platforms or languages, but mostly I’ll be focusing on web development projects at first. My hope is that these articles will inspire others to try new ideas, and help them learn these APIs and features to create amazing projects.

I’m already getting started on my first set of articles, an HTML5 reimplementation of Triumph Studios’ “Age of Wonders” title screen. Perhaps someday I’ll even implement other parts of the game as well (I have some ideas about different aspects of the game that could be improved by a modern internet infrastructure).

Starting Fresh

Posted by Socks the Fox in Administration on February 17th, 2017

Hello, and welcome to the new SocksTheFox.net! I plan to use this site for examples of work I’ve done as well as posting useful information I’ve learned while exploring web development. There’s a lot left to do, but I hope to fill this place with all kinds of neat software and info!

One big change I’m making over the previous iteration is removing some of my more informal, personal stuff. I figure there are plenty of other websites I can share all that on, and this will let me keep this space clean for people that don’t care for that content. I’m also removing some of my old content related to cracking and reimplementing the Minecraft authentication system simply because it’s so outdated and doesn’t even work anymore, and because Google would probably frown upon that content with the advertisements.

I certainly hope to have this place be more active as I learn and grow as a developer!