What is the backstory behind why the company stopped selling this software? Has anyone asked the author or company about it? Would it be worth asking them to release the source since it's been so long since selling it?
Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
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Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#22What is the backstory behind why the company stopped selling this software? Has anyone asked the author or company about it? Would it be worth asking them to release the source since it's been so long since selling it?
Wollay and most software development he does is intermittent at best. The Cube World community went 6 years without an update. He will occasionally (every few years) post screenshots and teasers on social media, but it seems very clear that development of his projects is whimsical. I don't think anyone at this point would be surprised if he tweeted out tomorrow that he's done developing Cube World.
It also seems that Plasma was never actually sold. It was a preview that just required a free signup.
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#23This is part of a larger pattern of fairly weak attempts to confuse a reverse engineer that made it frustrating to figure out what all the opcodes did, and there were many duplicate opcodes that were just implemented in different ways. Since the code presented in the article didn't look like handwritten Asm (and if it was, it would've probably been even more insanely obfuscated and greatly confused IDA's decompilatio…
I doubt the compiler would optimize out multiplications like that, as floating point math is not necessarily associative. You'd have to pass -ffast-math to get the compiler to attempt to optimize that out. It looks like typical compiler output to me.
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh that brings me way back. Got my start in dev idly editing websites in Macromedia Homesite and Freehand and Firesomething. I figured Adobe already killed off the MM stuff.
Macromedia Fireworks, I liked that one!
Freehand, Fireworks and Director all great Macromedia programs killed by M'Adobe. RIP.
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#25This is part of a larger pattern of fairly weak attempts to confuse a reverse engineer that made it frustrating to figure out what all the opcodes did, and there were many duplicate opcodes that were just implemented in different ways. Since the code presented in the article didn't look like handwritten Asm (and if it was, it would've probably been even more insanely obfuscated and greatly confused IDA's decompilatio…
Historically, Germany has had issues with crackers.
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh that brings me way back. Got my start in dev idly editing websites in Macromedia Homesite and Freehand and Firesomething. I figured Adobe already killed off the MM stuff.
Macromedia Fireworks, I liked that one!
It was brilliant. I blame the emergence of flat design on the death of Fireworks ;-)
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#27I've reverse engineered a number of content encryption schemes. It's always a ton of fun, and you get to see the large amount of psychological warfare at play at the higher tiers. A very common trick that I've seen in a lot of Japanese games, for offline material, is to combine a hashing system and encryption. That is, the game will attempt to load "main.script", which is a custom bytecode scripting language. The fil…
Indeed, it's often more fun than playing the game itself; but then again, I'm someone who has been taking things apart since I was very young (and not surprisingly, got into trouble a few times for it...) I suspect RE is something that's closer to what those in the other sciences do, i.e. analysis and thinking more about how/why things are the way they are, rather than what they can build; which is why not a lot of d…
That comparison was really insightful to me
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#28Whoa, this editor was quite amazing! If you have two minutes, watch the "Photo Texturing" and "Photo Editing" demonstrations:
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#29I've reverse engineered a number of content encryption schemes. It's always a ton of fun, and you get to see the large amount of psychological warfare at play at the higher tiers. A very common trick that I've seen in a lot of Japanese games, for offline material, is to combine a hashing system and encryption. That is, the game will attempt to load "main.script", which is a custom bytecode scripting language. The fil…
Indeed, it's often more fun than playing the game itself; but then again, I'm someone who has been taking things apart since I was very young (and not surprisingly, got into trouble a few times for it...) I suspect RE is something that's closer to what those in the other sciences do, i.e. analysis and thinking more about how/why things are the way they are, rather than what they can build; which is why not a lot of d…
I've previously described physicists as reverse engineers of the universe (and biologists as reverse engineers of nature) :-)
They really are much closer disciplines than most people might imagine.
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#30This was amazing to read. Reading stories of reverse engineering and cracking long-dead programs are interesting enough, but then being able to buy the domain and re-implement the authentication servers from just what the client expects?! I'm staggered at the skills needed to do that.
It's amazing what people can accomplish... Gives me hope that old video games will one day receive the same treatment. Way too many of them lost online multiplayer after the game company moved on.
Unfortunately, this is only possible because the obfuscation used is just weak obfuscation.
Once you throw real public-key encryption into the game, which is what any competent company trying to avoid cloned servers should be doing, there is no way to create alternate servers just from game data. You need to at the very least patch the game and change the key.