wow, this is not a problem I run into that often: the game I want to reverse engineer is, in fact, easy to dig into, with lots of easily decompiled classes!
except I can't read any of them, because they're named in Finnish.
class HuoneenNroPaivitysScripti
class KakkosTalonTapahtumat
class MrspookKontrlScript
so instead of just doing "if (current_room=='kitchen')", and showing different strings for "kitchen" depending on which language the user selected, it has to do:
meaning that every time they add a new language, they have to update the logic in a bunch of places or it'll cause basic game functionality to fail in some languages
oh I'm sure that's just a badly named member and it won't be used terribly. scrolls down
this.numbersToChooseFrom = new List<int>((IEnumerable<int>) new int[46]
{
0,
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
....
@foone I did, in fact, come here to say that this and prior messages look like decompilation artifacts.. But, ok, if you say so! C# decompilers work well, is that what I am hearing?
according to google translate, this AikaEteneeJaJotainTapahtuu coroutine means "Time Moves On And Something Happens" which is a perfectly valid name, I guess.
oh god this reverse engineering tool (dotpeek) doesn't let me leave annotations/comments.
that's going to make this basically impossible for someone with as much ADHD as me, even before we get to the problem of "I DON'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE THIS CODE IS WRITTEN IN"
@foone not sure if it supports comments (will go check) but I'd recommend switching to dnSpy. it's basically dotPeek but newer and better maintained, and has a lot of the old Telerik folks working on it after JustDecompile stopped being maintained. it decompiles all the fancy new language features and .NET 7 stuff, too. and has built in assembly editing features so no more relying on old Reflexil plugins.
edit: original dnSpy is archived; look for the dnSpyEx community fork repo.
@gsuberland@foone In 2017 I had to reverse-engineer a dot net tool in the Cypress Semiconductor EZ-PD toolchain. The chip was a PSoC with a Cortex-M core and the USBC PD interface. For some crazy reason they required a second, undocumented checksum in the gramming file, and their programmer tool checked for that. Maybe they wanted to prevent interoperable third-party tools? I had to binary patch the output of their toolchain for other reasons, so I needed to recompute the checksum.
@foone no comment support, unfortunately. will raise a github issue. (might need a bunch of work though, 'cos the comments need to be stored somewhere but the tool doesn't have the concept of projects or anything like that)
okay so I looked more into what this numbersToChooseFrom array does: It's a list of different events that can happen in the game.
Every time the game needs a random event, it picks a number from this list, then deletes out that entry in the list. So it might pick 7 the first time, but then it deletes 7 from the list so 7 can't happen again
so there's still code here to trigger an Event-27, even though the current state of the numbersToChooseFrom array means that Event-27 cannot be trigger naturally.
ah-ha! they're not permanently left out. Just temporarily: there's a function LisaaPahatMonsut (add bad... something?) that puts them back in.
It's triggered at 2:00, which I think means in-game time?
So you can't get the bad-something-events until after 2:00 am (the game runs from midnight to 6am)
@slothdude@foone it did also suggest "evil" as the middle word, but with the context of "monsoons" it didn't seem right. I've flagged it as incorrect on the site.
kumahdusAanet on kellonKumahduksetSours is one that google is having trouble translating.
It's clearly sound related, being used to play the clock ding-dong noises at the top of each hour, but google is translating it as the "bulging Sound" array on the "Clock's Gloom Sours" object
there's a different class for each language the game is translated into. it has all the logic copy-pasted, but the start-game menu option loads a different scene.
so like, in english it loads 2p0, in spanish it loads 2p0esp, in korean it loads 2p0korea, and... I can't find where the russian level is loaded.
Oh, the russian files are named completely differently. it's 2p0rus
I think the function that's called when you do a report and the intruder starts wiggling in front of the camera is named "TaysAutismiLol" which... yeah that's not a great name
so I thought it might be good to catalog the anomalies in a google sheets, because I could use the built in google translate support to try and help me translate it.
but "keittioTuolinAnim" turns into "tubing".
regular google translate says "kitchenChairAnim".
it's the stage-3 of reverse engineering:
static analysis is over
dynamic analysis is over
now it's onto fucking up the program and seeing what exactly breaks
so it turns out MrspookKontrlScript (Mr Spooky Control Script) and PikkuMonsuScripti (Little Monster Script) do exactly the same thing, just with different names.
PROGRAMMERS STOP USING COPY-PASTE CHALLENGE: ALWAYS FAILED
@foone kumahdus = bong / thump (probably bell bong re context), Aanet (äänet) = sounds. kellonKumahduksetSours ~= bell's bongs source (sours is how one would write in rally-english, not a word in Finnish). the choice of expressions (between slang and leet-speak) makes me thing that the person who wrote this wasn't very mature or was writing a joke on purpose.
@foone monsut=monsterit=monsters. Kumahdus i the gong of a bell. Sours is probably finglish for source. Not sure if you wanted this, I don't know when I am allowed to post help on mastodon or not.
@foone for a moment I was wondering if they were trying to avoid excess memory usage via const reference folding (same trick Redis uses for integer values - if you add a hundred million keys pointing to small numbers, the keys just point to const values rather than a new int64 for every key, saving 800MB of RAM) but then realised that in order to do that in .NET you'd need boxed references to the constant integers which sorta defeats the point (unless you're using object collections already)
@tedmielczarek pretty sure not, no. There's a lot of manual stuff here that suggests the developer was not exactly the most experienced C# developer, so I doubt this got transpiled from something else
@foone i try to cut game developers slack since they often don't have the opportunity to refactor, but this part of localization seems basically solved? 😬
@foone There was a thread once in which somebody asked if there’s a tool that would automatically translate all the class names in their app to English, as they were expanding internationally and wanted to hire programmers from other countries. Somebody jokingly replied that the tool they were after was called an intern, but the OP was confused (thinking intern had something to do with internationalization perhaps) and said that Googling for “intern Java” and such didn’t actually bring any useful results and requested a link to the actual tool itself.
@foone Hahah! This reminds me pf one of my game porting work, of a very famous PlayStation 1 racing game to Android...
We got sources, which were already ported from PS1 to PSP to iOS, and those original sources were in weird japano-english , with Japanese comments that after all those ports became gibberish because original non-UTF text encoding were lost 😅😅
@kkolakowski ahh, yikes. I've had to deal with some source that was shift-jis so funky that it crashes compilers, but eventually I was able to convert it to unicode, nothing was actually lost.
@foone There's a classic cryptographic tale that says that the only secret code to never have been deciphered was the language Native Americans spies from the Union used during the American Civil War.
@foone A different kind of “code talker” … to make reverse engineering annoying, employ programmers who speak uncommon languages and encourage them to use that in their class/function names.
@foone I once administered SQL Server databases for an app that was originally written in Swedish. So it had gems like Slutdatum, Slutid, and Programkanal.
@foone remind me of a problem someone I knew in grad school had, he was a nuclear physicist needed code to do something, and his professor was like, don't worry I wrote some code for that in grad school.
Send him a Fortran program where all the comments are in Polish.
@foone If you need I can help with the translation. Acronyms are hard to translate unless you actually know the language (I do).
The third one is not in Finnish, though, but looks fairly clear to me anyway.
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