ARGH I opened a new can of worms for myself lol. One of the utilities I wrote allows me to inspect my save game file the RAW JSON, similar to how GoatFungus JAVA version but without all the simple editors. Mainly nossy. Its how I noticed that the Rocket Launcher has storage in the SAVE FILES…or did… something broke in my reader…not sure what. So I decided to inspect Goats to see if maybe I was missing something added.
FYI - I think having a GIT Hosted project, without the source code kinda a douche move. Not that it would stop most people anyway so I’m not sure the point lol
So I had to start reversing it to try find the section I wanted… 5 hours later I had forgotten what I was doing it for but I had got into a grove lol. Once I realized I had gone off on a wild goose chase as nothing I looked at seemed to be the reason for my issue…
Probably would have been faster to pull apart NOM NOM it looks to be based on .net…wait why didn’t I do that???.,…no more drinking. Look at this tomorrow when I have clearer head lol
UPDATED
… I hate a mystery. Turns out after all that nonsense it was the LZ4 Decompressor I was using. Not my code at all. Just changed decompressors lol…now bed lol.
Doing some EXE work…ready to pull hair out. my .RDATA pointer on disk is reading correctly. but I have 5936 bytes at the start of my .RDATA that IDA says is not at the start of .rdata…but further down. Doing a hard byte search for what IDA shows are the first bytes in RDATA gives me a physical location that accounting for RVA matches the VA address IDA Shows. So basically IDA shows RDATA starting 5936 bytes (relative to physical storage) after it really does.
I mean I still got the data I wanted I just had to adjust the start position…it must be a memory mapping thing…hate assembly lol
I always liked assembly… but I haven’t gone back in years so I must not like it that much. My first decade or so was spent designing electronics and we never had anything more high level than an assembler. Often not even that. These days I never write it and only look into it to see what nightmare some compiler writer thought was a good idea to generate.
For me, it’s only a necessary evil. Or a case of curiosity killing the cat lol. I stumbled upon something…that could be…very cool, but without a closer look at the exe and internal code I couldn’t be sure if it was a case of something sounds way more interesting, than it really is.
Since apparently the python tools shared with MBIN are virtually useless, and none of the IDA related data is shared…well unless it is being shared on Discord or some back alley lol…I can’t be bothered with all that nonsense. I had to kinda start from scratch…that got boring fast.
I did manage to automate pulling 1855 structures related subroutines manually extracted from the exe, with name, guid and address pointers to what I believe is the individual class structures. But no point treading down the same rivers as others…
Ultimately I examined what code I could find related to my search and frankly it didn’t make anything any clearer. Hope to have some spare time next weekend to continue my hunt. I am hoping its not a code “Snipe Hunt”
I know we shouldn’t share much personal info on the internet, and this isnt exactly the place to ask it… but I must ask, how did you guys get into programming/coding? And do you do it now for work? And if so, how did you get your first job in programming?
Ive been doing android app development for the last year on my own as a hobby and as a way to learn java. Im enjoying it so much that I wish I could spend more than 4 hours a week on it by doing it for work but I dont feel skilled enough to do it professionally yet or confident enough to even apply for jobs in it.
Started as a kid, had a nack for it, but not the grades for any kind of computer-related education (that stuff was gated off pretty hard in the 90ies…). So I continued coding stuff, mostly for the orbiter spaceflight simulator, because it was fun.
Then at some point in the 2010s I lost my job, and by that point software developers were in crazy high demand in Switzerland (that’s what you get for gating it off like that, hurr hurr), so I signed up for a “school” (more like a 2-year crash-course) because I figured I had no clue of how this stuff actually works, and went looking for an internship. Took a couple months to get my head around backend/frontend development while looking for an internship to pat out my “resume”.
Found an internship, got bored of the school because the level to which they taught was mostly way below what I already knew, got promoted to full employee after 6 months of internship (that was supposed to last for the entire 2 years of the school…). Still working for the same employer.
Still feel like I have no clue how any of this works, by the way. The major realisation since I started working is that people who actually do know what they’re doing in this industry are as rare as 4-leafed clovers… Most of us just keep making up stuff as we go…
Similar for me, started programming at age 12 in gwbasic, making short programs to help me with studying my latin words
Did electronics as a study field and tried a higher education in computer sciences on what we would now call bachelor level. Failed and did the same studies in evening classes.
In 1998 (when I started evening classes) I landed a job as software tester which was in high demand due to the Y2K bug. And started testing bank gateways. Did that until 2005 at which point I moved to development.
In Belgium alone they are looking for 16000 (not only development of course) IT personnel. So with some education you should be able to get in.
Did the Y2K bug actually affect anything? I remember getting a good laugh thinking we would wake up to life in 1900 instead of 2000. My son was born that year so we jokingly say he was almost 100 years old at birth.
It affected the nerves and schedules of a lot of people in IT at the time…
Y2K is one of those things that is hugely misunderstood by most people. For one, shit would have gone down if they didn’t do a good job fixing it in advance, so it was not just much ado about nothing. But for the other, it wouldn’t have been the end of computing or anything. It would have cost a whole lot of money, though.
I stared when I was 16, took a course on QuickBasic. When finished school I took IT course that was absolute shit. Here’s books study do examines, occasionally ask teacher for help…which I am sure most of the time he had to look it up first. Most of what I studied was way below me. Keep in mind this was Windows 95 era / NT days. Had offers for internship… tossed them due to a massive personal situation that arose. When came out of it opened a PC repair shop, mostly coded some web stuff on side. Now in a completely unrelated career and code mostly for personal / with some business related stuff tossed in.
Mostly I had people help guide me. I started with computers in the late '60s when I was in middle school. My math teacher gave me a book “We Built our own Computers” and taught me logic on the side. Something she must have liked because she had a lot of personal toys to teach that with. I did hardware with software on the side until a friend introduced me to a contract to build a sorting system for a major shipping company. They hired me out of the contract and gave me projects that became more software than hardware. I liked both and stayed there for 35 years. I did a lot of 3d visualization coding and when NMS was announced a few colleagues brought it to me and I’ve been hooked since. My friends brought me opportunities, I just had to step into them.
Many of the groups that I was responsible for had old (really old) mainframe code that was riddled with 2 digit dates. Some of the old operating systems locked the code into a 4K page size and expanding the date would put the program over the limit so we did a lot of reorganization and rewriting. Code on our newer systems had to work with the mainframe so we had a lot of work there as well. We did this work over a couple of years well before 2000 so when when the time came we had a large watch party which became mostly a party.
The thing that nobody saw coming wasn’t that this was going to happen at some point, usually… The thing nobody saw coming was that their original code would still be running after 20+ years…
I have several friends that got into software development and web development around 6-7 years ago. Most of them learned on their own or were taught by other software developer friends and eventually landed jobs. I was learning web development and 3d modeling at the same time they were and we would all teach show each other what we learned and help debug each other’s code. After about a year, I put it to the side as I had proposed to my then girlfriend and so months of planning and saving up money afterwards to get married didnt allow me time to continue. After some time, I decided to learn c++ during the pandemic for fun.(I was still working full-time as the pandemic didnt effect my line of work much) I enjoyed c++ and started learning java for fun afterwards so I can make apps for android devices and then it hit me… I should have never stopped coding as I CLEARLY like this much more than what im doing now. Even if it might pay less than what I make now too.
Now every day at work I keep thinking how “I wish I could be programming right now”.
I weirdly find joy in solving problems and learning.
Also, thank you all for your comments on the subject.
The UK government became a little concerned around 1998, and cast about for someone to reassure them. Eventually, they decided that their own industrial safety agency should take on the task. That safety agency then looked for members of staff who knew about industry, engineering, and computers - and they found me.
I spent the best part of a year travelling round the country, confirming that businesses and service industries had checked their equipment. I eventually reported to government that there was no major problem.
In the event, as far as I remember, one sewage treatment works had a set of pumps that failed, but were brought back up within 8 hours, and a sweet (candy) manufacturer found that their internal telephone exchange wouldn’t work any more. That was pretty much the extent of it…
My first decade or so was spent designing electronics and we never had anything more high level than an assembler. Often not even that. These days I never write it and only look into it to see what nightmare some compiler writer thought was a good idea to generate.
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