no more secrets

[acorn]

The NMS Network program was pretty cool, but I was very disappointed that there was no linux version . That said, I was able to run all parts of the NMS network program on my Linux laptop (using Wine) with the exception of the Java App (which I needed VMWare + Windows2K to run). Ironic since Java's main selling point is it's cross platform ability. Actually I did have the Linux JDK. It was just that the NMS network was not able to run the jar file through the Wine environment. (yeah, I know, who cares - but hey, I was assigned to be the team Nerd and by golly I'm gonna live up to it! )

Nice work!

-Acorn
_________________
http://www.rawbw.com/~acorn

[DaleNeal-GC]

Hey Acorn,

As the coed astronomy team nerd, I too was annoyed at having to reboot my computer to playtest the console app/text adventure clue (I guess I should have tried Wine) and had considered porting it to Linux. Unfortunately I was too busy hacking on the phone server and gc utils.

Somewhat ironically, Victor Cramer's "sequencer" was the one part of the console app that I did work on, so it does work in Linux. You probably could have let the console app extract/decrypt the jar file and then manually launched it outside of Wine, but ymmv... =)

-Dale
_________________
AnEelLad

[red]

As a former and (hopefully) future GC.... I like the idea of giving the teams backup sources of information. Encrypting the clues and embedding them in the console is a neat way to do it.

Any chance you guys might be willing to share your work on this front?

[adunar]

Hey,

I originally developed the console app that became the NMS Network for the CRANEA game back in 2005. I'm happy to let anyone use the code, although the version I have is older and probably buggier than the one they used in NMS (they added an inventory command and perhaps some other things?).

Currently the console app is not very GC-friendly, since the adventure description file has a particularly opaque format (see http://cranea.adunar.com/adventure.txt), and changing settings like the command prompt format or synonyms requires recompiling the C++ project. One of these days I want to improve the console app so anyone can just write an XML adventure description file, feed it into the text-adventure-generator program, and produce an encrypted text adventure... but sadly I haven't got around to doing that yet.

For last year's Stanford Racing Boosters game I developed a web proxy that teams installed on their laptops, as another technique of giving them access to information and clue backups while out of internet range. When they accessed e.g. http://www.google.com, the web proxy would redirect the request to encrypted files on their own computer... so they had "fake Google" as well as URLs they could type in to retrieve compromised clues.

The web proxy approach worked pretty well, although there were a few teams who called in because the installer didn't configure the browser's proxy settings properly; also, I only made a Windows version (although it shouldn't be too hard to port). If you're interested, let me know and I can send you the code.

[adunar]

In case anyone happens to stumble upon this forum who is interested in using a NMS Network-style console program / text adventure in future Games or Puzzle Hunts -- I recently cleaned up the code for the console app (read: rewrote from scratch) and posted it to SourceForge along with some documentation and examples:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cranea/

It should run on all sorts of platforms now, although I've only confirmed that it works on WinXP, Linux, and Solaris (i.e., all of the platforms that I have easy access to).