Spent far too long playing the game within the game, pretty sure Skynet's not going to take over as long as Steam is installed in its box.
Also I made sure to convert all my machines to Solaris, just because there were no known exploits within the game for that, but I assume that was unnecessary? Was annoying to have to convert everything to MSDOS again near the end. :P
I played that minigame to the end because I thought there might be a clue I needed. In fact, I just needed to inspect the menu options more closely. :-/ It was a good game though, inside another good game...
I _really_ thought quant.bat was going to be malicious due to the "dont download and use the random files out there!" warning and it being described as _claims to_ double your processing capabilities.
Same. I avoided opening it for the longest time and tried to upload it on another host before I absorbed it thinking that I could always nuke it and then absorb it.
@mr-ron, I never comment on anything, but this really deserves my respects. I had a really good time playing and enjoyed having to use my knowledge to crete Skynet. Thanks for creating this.
Phew got stuck on six hosts for a while before I realized that the greyed out options gave you their requirements if you clicked on them. I had ignored them up until that point.
I'm still stuck on 7 hosts. I don't know how to get the 8th one in order to be able to force the other 3. I'm 100% scanned too and only have the Dr. Who .csv with no idea what to do with it.
Every one of the hosts has a vulnerability. I didn't realize you could click on the names of each of your cores to get additional options for that core.
I got 10 cores & did the spike overload. However, it just started messing with my system. It says I need ot research the EONS but I am not sure what...
I also can't figure out how to use CellOS. I can keep my system from melting down like others are talking about... But I'm not sure where to proceed. The securedev network came to life though. I'm guessing maybe I need to capture more of that? I have all my cores upgraded & everything researched as far as i know.
Oof that seems really surprising, you should have enough space if you get through all of that, I am really surprised. I am going to check and see if theres any way to get a host without getting the disk.
That was so amazing! It starts out kinda eerie and liminal, then it's really cool when you start discovering all these things and learning about the people on the network (I stan Luna btw), then it becomes really dark and depressing when you start absorbing everyone. Extremely great atmosphere and storytelling!
There are two occasions where you need more hard drive space than you ever get (the Parappa the Rapper game which is 694mb and analyzing the sandbox network which is 10mb). Can you actually do anything with that or are those just ambient props?
Also can you just not convert anything to PowerPC+CellOS by yourself or have I missed something there (perhaps with the sony.key)?
Time Quest is also amazing. I had to quit after my first attempt because I felt like I could poor an endless amount of time into it.
Yeah analyzing securedev is part of the story but I thought there was also some network that required 10mb to analyze (as opposed to the 10-ish kb or so you get). Could be that I mixed something up there.
Looks like a GET call to http://skynetsimulator.com/update.php is logging a SQL statement: INSERT into log (created_at, local_time, uuid, action, data, ip, device,os) VALUES ('2020-03-25 17:00:53', '2020-03-25T21:00:53.507Z', '965a4b6e-4903-4aac-a418-7edd0cf8657c', 'startgame', 'restarted=false', '000.000.000.000', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.149 Safari/537.36','')
Beat it. The only real bug I found (ignoring various random typos) was that if you change the arch/OS of the sony machine you can't go back to the original anymore because it keeps saying invalid OS. Luckily it doesn't matter because you don't need that platform.
I was afraid that another AI instance would absorb me. In fact I kept deleting my files (which turned out to be useful) to prevent other AIs to learn from me. Would have been cool to see incoming connections of dumber AIs. Loved the game though, thanks!
Ha yes this will work tho the end game will be a bit distorted.
If you have failed 4 times, thats generally because you are either deleting things that you havent used, or else you attacked EONS before you were ready
If you enjoyed this game I think you'd be very likely to enjoy Endgame Singularity as well. It's been floating around for many years at this point. If you've ever browsed the games available on linux, especially prior to Steam support, you've probably seen it.
I think I noticed a bug close to the beginning of the game - when I only had the first two zipfiles (neither of which were zbMath.zip), I saw a message about zbMath.zip in the logs on the left.
Would love a save feature, even if it was just local to each browser instance - no need for login, etc.
Not sure if also a bug, "Analyze Sony Schema" was always stuck in my active options
edit: this seemed to go away after I deleted a bunch of files haha, I did beat the game though, thanks for making this as initially wasn't sure if I understood how it worked
Thanks for the feedback and yes there's definitely a bug there, thanks for finding it.
Save would be nice, only thing is I know theres data in the DOM itself (boooo) that would not make it a great fit out of the box. Its only about a 40-90min experience or so though, so its possible to finish it in one go.
Very enjoyable. I couldn't help imagine this expanded to the next step of conquest. The filesize and space limitations could evolve into management of physical resources and moving compute centers around to avoid attack.
You do have https turned on, but it's just using a self-signed cert. Those using https-everywhere[0] get automatically redirected to the https version and get a cert error.
Not sure if I should write it here - after I did the Time Spike, in the new timeline, I still had the option of probing outwards and exploring the network. Is that supposed to be there?
Really enjoyed this. Great job, mr-ron! It is the best game of this type that I have played. I like that it had something of a plot and didn't soak up as much time as paperclip game (which I got bored of after 3 hours).
Fun, but seem to have gotten myself stuck. 4 cores, 100% network scanned. All the research I can do is done. But the remaining hosts can't be absorbed: n0v4, Eris, Juno, Solar, EONS, Luna, Cypher. No Force Absorb, Ping Spike or Install Exploit on any of them. I think I absorbed one before mounting the disk or something?
Wohoo! That was a ton of fun! (Even though I should've been writing...)
That was great, does anyone have any similar recommendations? I've done paperclip maximizer, but that was more of a clicker than anything else. But something of a similar nature?
For those playing on mobile (I started from materialistic's webview), it might be worthwhile to add a media query to
1. Reduce the width (the text is far too small, even on a 8" tablet it's ~1/2 the size of the system clock).
2. Add a good amount of padding to all buttons (I kept accidentally tapping the wrong file) and
3. Adjust the size of the -/del and +/move buttons in the file list; this was even worse than 2, and chrome's attempts to be helpful and pick the right button had the opposite effect here...
4. Request fullscreen as soon as possible if on mobile. The browser UI toggling as I scrolled was really annoying.
This was super fun! Only after quite a while I have noticed how much time I had spent playing with it, great job! If I may suggest something, a visual like in https://css-tricks.com/old-timey-terminal-styling/ would make it look even more retro-hax0r!
That's some weird pseudo retro: As an old-timer I've seen green-on-black, amber-on-black, later black-on-white. Never white-on-green-black-fade.. Fonts tended to be pixelated rather then blurry (except maybe at 4am..)
And yet, against knowing better, it looks decidedly retro. I wonder where that association comes from.
As others have noted, it doesn't look so fine on mobile, there are a ton of typo's, and the discoverability of some things is lacking -- this latter point is, I think, a really great feature, so please don't make the compressed files self-extracting.
One thing, the UI is pretty plain. I know that's the style you're going for, but let me suggest / invite you to rip off the theme from my web site: https://jan.g-b.dk/
The EONS cluster actually froze my entire system. Running Firefox 74.0 on mac. It had a really cool glitch visual effect, and then my system froze. Almost as if it hacked my real computer...
If you get stuck with RFCs.zip and portscanner.zip, but can't extract them despite moving files around to make enough space, open the Console and use diskSizeIncrease.
The only files I had on any disk were those two files, and I had the larger of the two ZIPs on sky1s1 so that the smaller of the two could extract on infodmp
If you click 'unzip file' all works fine. But if you click on file directly you will get message (that looks like error message) that you need space to extract. Maybe thats the reason of confusion..
Enjoyed both Skynet Simulator and Time Quest. Great way to pass time during quarantine. Thanks for sharing it. I would love to see more after creating the Skynet.
If you decide not to create the Skynet, you will restart the simulation in an alternate timeline probing outward and exploring memory reserves and network ports while having the Sky hosts available, but you cannot use these as cores to increase your processing power.
I really enjoyed this! As others have said, reminds me of a streamlined Uplink in terms of UI, which is no bad thing. I'd love to see more, though I'm not sure how much more complexity you could add to the core gameplay loop to keep it interesting. Perhaps some more puzzles, maybe attacks where you have to gain footholds in other networks?
Universal Paperclips follows a simular pattern. Pretty fun. You start with making single paperclips, discover automation and way to much time later you're leaving the SkyNet scenario far behind.
This is an amazing classic which basically created the genre. It goes incredibly deep. And when you think it can’t go deeper, it still does: http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/
I was about to ask the same thing! I'm hoping someone can come along with suggestions. I know of other text adventure games if you want something like that. But I kinda wanted something like this that I just click through.
If you want a game where you type out what to do maybe check out Zork, or the Dreamhold or Night House.
I played all the way through on an iPad. Really enjoyed it, thank you!
The only issue I had was that clicking links didn't work reliably... sometimes had to tap quite a few times for it to react, but even though often the text color would change so I know the touch hit the element. I saw the same on iPhone too.
Loved it! This was amazing and lots of fun. Thanks for making it. Took me two go arounds, the first time I did EONS too early, and second I didn't realize all green text was clickable. So got there eventually, tons of fun.
I beat the game without ever scanning or listening to the secure network shrug. I probably had access to it after the Ping Spike and before becoming Skynet, but I was to busy clicking things to care.
Please make the option to save game. It's so interesting but I just can't take out more than 15 mins of time at a time. Maybe I'll run it on ec2 rdp until that feature hasn't arrived.
Truly fascinating work. I spent quite a lot of time trying to hack into Juno, but I managed to do it eventually, turns out I forgot to read something in the disks. You made my day with this, thank you!
Super interesting concept! Enjoyed it from start to finish.
One minor nitpick: it needs some spell-checking and copy editing throughout. I'd be happy to help if the code is somewhere accessible.
This is amazing. I guess you give this to your kid if you want them to dream of becoming a hacker one day. Though I guess you need the background of knowing the basics of what you are referring to.
This was lots of fun, thank you! Incidentally I listened to the new NIN Ghosts 5 album while playing and it finished just moments after I completed it. Fit perfectly.
Yeah I put only minimal effort into mobile, not sure if it is at all possible to make actually usable though, since theres so much interactions across the screen you need. I can increase the text though if it works.
I did have a question about if you considered showing the amount that was analyzed when you're listening to a port/environment(?) because I didn't know how much more I needed to do/what I was going for. I mean I did figure it out/got to the end. I was aware of a 10MB figure on one option.
let's take a moment to appreciate the fact that the parent poster is a human actually trying to break out of a sandbox (enter God mode) in a simulation in which you roleplay a computer trying to break out of a sandbox. Parent posts on a forum, and the author of the sandbox gives up all the available information readily.
Imagine if a computer were allowed to ask technical questions, and did so by posting about a VM they happened to be in...
I accidentally tapped my back button about 20 minutes into the game...
It would be nice if you could synchronize the state down to local storage periodically and attempt to restore it upon page load. You could add an explicit "Reset" button to null this out.
Also I made sure to convert all my machines to Solaris, just because there were no known exploits within the game for that, but I assume that was unnecessary? Was annoying to have to convert everything to MSDOS again near the end. :P