Is the .exe compiled only for 64bits OS? EDIT: Forget it :S But for some reason I can't execute it in my virtual machine
Also, a virustotal report: https://www.virustotal.com/es/file/789346d50f4a8f7e8ca1d687e3051a66a1edf3095aa01d2822bdcdb43379fa97/analysis/ (not mine, someone was faster than me sending the file :P)
Comment has been collapsed.
It's Win32 console application compiled with whatever the default settings are for Visual Studio 2008 in Release mode. I'm not sure what you're trying to run it on, but if it's not Windows I know it won't like system("pause"), though I don't know if it breaks or just ignores it. Again, lazy old me didn't want to bother figuring out how to do it cross-platform. I was also too lazy to relearn how to handle string input so it'll break fantastically if you try to hand it letters when it expects numbers.
Comment has been collapsed.
Well I got all the clues but I have no idea how to put them together.
Comment has been collapsed.
You need all of them to continue, and the program will loop until you've done this. Once you've gotten to the end you should have everything you need to figure out the password. It's not just brute force. As q00u says there is a logic to the order; it's up to you to figure out what that is.
Comment has been collapsed.
There are other options for permuting the clues that you might want to consider, too. I don't want to overstep my position as a participant and give away hints the puzzle creator did not want to be revealed, but I will say that I noticed a pattern in the game's clues when I entered each clue onto a separate line in Notepad. Even then, it's definitely not obvious, but this might help you, too. Good luck!
Comment has been collapsed.
Besides replacing the clues and the password with "XX" what else is missing from the source?
The giveaway is public so it cannot give an URL when solved, so how does it work?
I've already played the censored version and got all the clues, but while I do want to participate I don't have a VM to run it in.
Comment has been collapsed.
Will we know if we've reached the last step? I've been through a few steps now, and seem to have been lead to a nonsensical phrase, which Google informs me is related to an anime about which I am unfamiliar. Is this phrase supposed to lead me further, or did I get lost in your maze?
Comment has been collapsed.
I'm baffled. Wikipedia informs me it's the name of a book, and I was hopeful that I might have found a new path when I found that there was only one thing written in that book, but trying to apply that knowledge to the puzzle's information has lead me into nothing but dead ends. Thanks for the puzzle, but I'm getting too frustrated to keep bashing my head against a brick wall right now. I'm going to take a much-needed break, and hope that inspiration strikes while I'm away. Any hints to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated; I see some people have managed to finish the puzzle, so there must be something obvious I am overlooking...
Comment has been collapsed.
Any more hints on the phrase? I've reached it but I'm not sure what to do with it.
Comment has been collapsed.
So we're supposed to get to a phrase from the clues?
Edit: Got to the next step. That page helped. Thanks!
Comment has been collapsed.
well I turned up a blank page cough and a 404 but I'm still confused as hell
Comment has been collapsed.
I'm...not sure how you even ended up at a blank page or a 404. You shouldn't, as they're not a part of the puzzle. You may be taken to some places that don't immediately make sense, but there should always be some clue to point you in the right direction.
Comment has been collapsed.
ok so i got frustrated with the repetitivness at the gate but now that I know the answer I can't get back where I enter the password even though I have gone through every page to get the clues
Comment has been collapsed.
Bump for solved. Had to take a 7h nap before I got to the last stage. Thanks for this awesome puzzle.
Comment has been collapsed.
At first, I was baffled as to why you would post that link, but I think I get it now. Thanks for the chuckle. Your puzzles are some of the best I've seen around here, so if you're stuck at the same place I am, tevemadar, I at least I feel as though I'm in good company.
Comment has been collapsed.
I hope I'll get white-listed in time before GA ends or was I deceived and end of the puzzle was really not an end at all...
Comment has been collapsed.
Well, I've gone from baffled to straight-up frustrated. I've learned more about pulling out image metadata than I think I ever wanted to know, and I've wasted hours looking for some clue in all the wrong places. Though I did find some new ways of hiding text data in image files, those techniques did not seem to be used here. But I did find out that the image was edited with GIMP on a computer owned by somebody named *****, so that's something, I guess. Thanks for the puzzle, but I wish I could have found the solution before the time expired.
Edit: Privacy. Sorry.
Comment has been collapsed.
I don't know enough about image metadata to know exactly what I was looking at, but I did learn (last night, actually) that PNG files have multiple places in which one could hide text. Imgur probably strips EXIF information from all pictures, but not other data specific to the PNG format, like iTXt data.
And I am sorry if I offended you by stating your name on a public forum. I thought that giving a first name and last name would be crossing the line, but I thought giving a (relatively) common first name would be harmless enough, while still showing that I gave a sincere effort in searching for a solution. I didn't even know that it was your name, just that that was the name of the person who owned the computer on which the image was edited. Again, I sincerely apologize if I offended you in any way; it was not my intention to ruin your sense of anonymity on this forum. (I hope you understand.)
Comment has been collapsed.
Figures. If I use the gimmick again I'll have to be less lazy and think of a more secure way of doing it. Oh well, I did fully intend for that entire first section to be skippable, either by people taking apart my EXE or requesting the full source code from me. I was surprised no one asked though. I did say I'd help people out with that in the OP. The real barrier was supposed to be the image trick.
Comment has been collapsed.
edt: my fault. I took the sourcecode and put it in C. Didnt take the exe from the downloadpage. -_-
Comment has been collapsed.
The solution has been posted if you're sill stuck.
Comment has been collapsed.
Alright, let's start with the complete source code. You receive the following clues:
The first thing to do is to figure out what to do with them. SG puzzles often use ItsTooHard or SG URL identifiers, but this is too long for that...right? But what if you remove the second letter from each of the pairs? Then it matches up perfectly with the length of an ItsTooHard URL. So the next thing to figure out is what order they need to go in. I mixed the cases of the second letter in an attempt to confuse people, but the cases don't actually matter at all. You just need to put them in order. I originally tried making the letters colored but found getting certain colors impossible in the console. Do you see where this is going now? The letters stand for colors. Organize the pairs in the order of the rainbow (ROY G BIV). The first letter with no pair actually goes last.
Once you've done that you can plug it into ItsTooHard to get this. The answers there are straightforward, but this is the probably the most difficult part of the puzzle. It requires that you look at things a little closer than usual. I very clearly direct you to click (this is important) on the image, which is larger than the preview on the ItsTooHard page and has legible letters in it. The same color puzzle is presented to you, in simplified form. Something should be seeming wrong right about now. If you successfully solve it you'll be taken here. If you google it, you'll see that the meaning of that phrase is to take a u-turn. You've gone too far. Go back. Look at the Link. Puzzles sometimes make you turn a direct link into an imgur page link. If you do that with the full-sized image, you get nothing. But the small Link and large Link image are two different images! Change the link format and you get this.
But you're not done yet. I had one last trick in my arsenal. Everyone knows what to do with a five character ID. That's a giveaway link, right? I used one in my diversion too. But it's not. If you do that, you get nowhere. You've done something wrong. So what could that be? Well, discussions use the same ID length. I've never once seen anyone give a five character ID leading to a discussion, so I was hoping this would catch some people unaware, though if you've gotten this far you can probably figure that much out. Anyway, it lead here, where I left instructions on how to get whitelisted.
Comment has been collapsed.
I'm guessing he probably had something else written where it now says, "Edit for people from the future: Future puzzle is closed!" that gave further instructions on how to notify him that you had completed this puzzle. The puzzle on the link itself seems to be for an older puzzle that he had posted a few months ago.
Comment has been collapsed.
Thank you for the solution. With 20/20 hindsight, I think I was doing too much work. I figured out the "U-turn" clue, but I kept looking for some information hidden here, and didn't consider taking a second step back and looking here. I went looking for evidence of steganography, or assumed that you might have hidden something in the image's alpha channel, but I kept hitting a brick wall (for obvious reasons; I found nothing because there was nothing to find). Still, I was able to learn something new about hiding messages in image files, even if it wasn't what you were trying to show me, and I definitely love to learn new things. Thanks for the puzzle and the giveaway, and I look forward to trying your next puzzle!
Comment has been collapsed.
Yeah, there are some methods I could have used to hide things, and even considered throwing in a few more dead ends in that picture, but that probably would have been taking it a little too far. :) I did want to make it difficult, but I figured that trick alone was difficult enough.
I ended up with five people completing the puzzle, which is about what I expected and geared the puzzle for (I had 77 people on my whitelist prior to this and aim to keep it under a hundred, so I couldn't exactly have 20+ people finishing like my last one). And doing this gave me an idea for a simpler puzzle with a new gimmick I might try out today. Anyway, hope you enjoyed the puzzle!
Comment has been collapsed.
Can't believe I missed something as simple as that. Is the puzzle for the whitelist still available?
Comment has been collapsed.
Well I mean you can complete it with all the information there so it's "available," but it'll just lead to a dead end now. The eden* giveaway ended, so I removed the instructions for whitelisting and am no longer accepting whitelist entries (for this puzzle, anyway). I'll keep this topic open for a while if people have any questions though.
Comment has been collapsed.
Thanks for the puzzle Zerathos!
I'd like to suggest something for your next puzzles, if I may;
When you're making a whitelist GA, and need to personally add people - please allow more time between the GA & puzzle deadlines.
I, personally, am checking SG for puzzles every few hours, unless I'm busy or at work - some people check it once a day & if they solve something here and have to wait for the GA creator to whitelist them - they might not even get the chance to enter the GA, since they're at work/asleep/otherwise indispensable.
I solved it for the sake of it (didn't even want eden* or Reprisal Universe, that was a whitelist GA as well & had the same ending time) and only got whitelisted around an hour or so before the deadline, I doubt that many participants (can) check here that often.
Comment has been collapsed.
Well I must say you had me stuck at the Anime phrase. Well played sir well played. Also it was rather simple to get the proper answer for the gatekeeper by simply decompiling your program!
:p
Comment has been collapsed.
He doesn't want to be called for his real name. Please remove his name from your post, thanks.
Comment has been collapsed.
yeah didn't see that since I hadn't read it thanks. Also if you do decompile it it shows you the directory tree where the uncompiled file sat on your computer which includes your name.
Comment has been collapsed.
35 Comments - Last post 20 minutes ago by entitygeorge
64 Comments - Last post 21 minutes ago by romana1994
19 Comments - Last post 45 minutes ago by Seibitsu
6 Comments - Last post 1 hour ago by Wok
15,402 Comments - Last post 1 hour ago by UN0W3N
4 Comments - Last post 1 hour ago by lostsoul67
46,824 Comments - Last post 5 hours ago by Karp55
199 Comments - Last post 8 minutes ago by gango89
57 Comments - Last post 9 minutes ago by Mikurden
83 Comments - Last post 31 minutes ago by adam1224
133 Comments - Last post 43 minutes ago by ImpartialJuices
30 Comments - Last post 46 minutes ago by Exodust
534 Comments - Last post 1 hour ago by Paliompoyzoyko
54 Comments - Last post 2 hours ago by TinaG
I've been holding onto a copy of eden* for a little while for a whitelist giveaway, but I've been wracking by brain over just what to do to make the puzzle for it a little bit different. After a few weeks of thinking about it, I finally came up with the idea to make this little text adventure game. You can audit the source code here if you don't feel comfortable running someone else's random executable. I've removed all the answers from it to keep people from cheating, but if you'd rather compile it yourself for security, or because you're on Mac or Linux (it may work there with something like WINE but I know nothing about non-Windows development), just add me on Steam and we can work something out. And yes, I know my code is terrible, I'm both out of practice and lazy. But I think I've tested all the bugs out at least.
Anyway, the clock is ticking, so you'd better get to work; I look forward to seeing how many people can best my challenges!
EDIT: Updated the link to fix a bug that could let you get stuck at the end without having all the clues. Thanks q00u!
EDIT2: Rules updated at last step.
EDIT3: A hint for the newcomers: if you don't know what to do with your clues, try looking at the character count. Doesn't something seem off?
For those stuck on what seems to be the other bottleneck, I would suggest you examine the Link very closely, be observant. Something fishy is going on there.
EDIT4: Solution posted.
Comment has been collapsed.