[0rph3u5]

Originally, I was not going to do a Discussion Topic on "The Proteus-Project" while it is on-going, because I thought it would distract from the experimental aspect of it to have this side bar.

But after a brief conversation with Mito[PL] on the Discord, I knew I had to clear up a few things.

Firstly: Dem bloody Rules.

1. The game is very free form. While I will hold to some restrictions with the "valid commands", I will also try not to railroad you into certain outcomes. (It may seem a bit restrictive right now, but you are only scratching at the surface ATM.)

2. The game proceeds in turns. A turn passes each time I make an update, and will move the ingame clock 6 hours forward.

3. I will make updates on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

4. Calling certain commands or having a certain number of turn pass will lead to me injecting new elements, such as the system messages left by the previous "human back-ups" of Stations S498-B.

5. If you are disruptive, I will cordon you off. If that doesn't help, I may get ... less creative. (Euphemism-level >9000)


Secondly: A peak behind the curtain

"The 'Proteus'-Project" story came to be when I was trying to decide what to do in terms of a new "showcase"-release for TBP, ultimately I settled on Project Erlkönig which is coming along very well. But there are number of other ideas in contention - Project Scarlet (picking back up the Psi Corps-stories I had sketched 10+ years ago, but with a crime thriller twist) and Project Crusader (basically reworking Crusade into a duology of campaigns, which would be very abridged versions of the Drakh Plague and Shadow Hybrid storylines). Erlkönig won out because it was technically challenging but also deliverable in a relative shot amount of time - except for the Voice Acting, but one problem at a time.

While trying to decide I did go through a lot of reference material and I just didn't want to let it go to waste.

Now the "Proteus"-story has only tangential connections to any of those projects - mostly because it is now also a delivery vehicle for Erlkönig's promotional stuff (as it has a bit of a problem with deliverables in terms of visual media).

[Colonol Dekker]

I'm genuinely enjoying it and am just looking to see how much immersion I can invest myself in 👍

[Mito [PL]]

It's fun to explore it right now. My question would be, how are you going to "slice" the turns up? I think there is the slight issue of treating multi-command posts. For example, if I decide to just blurt out like a dozen commands that I can think of in a single post, this should be treated as a single turn, right?

[0rph3u5]

I am not going to show you my cards, but I do have at least one trapdoor in case I get overwhelmed and need to slow walk stuff.

[0rph3u5]

There has been a small mishap, I skipped over turn 4 when doing fixing up the forum output ... so you get 6 hours back and the crash of the INBOX still happened even though it was not supposed to happen yet

Hangovers...

[0rph3u5]

I am suspending the game for a week due to health issues.

I caught something last week while shopping for supplies, and need some full.on bedrest. (No, its not a current pandemic bug; different symptoms)

[perihelion]

Take your time.  Hope you feel better soon!

[Colonol Dekker]

Take your time.  Hope you feel better soon!

👆👆👆

[theperfectdrugsk]

as above; feel better! the forum game has been fun!

[0rph3u5]

I am back at full health - and we are resumed at turn 9.

[Colonol Dekker]

I'm not going to blow the AIRLOCKS until we get that resupply.... If we're still here 

Anyone got any clue as to the encryption on that last message?

Too many options
https://www.tools4noobs.com/online_tools/decrypt/

[Mito [PL]]

I reflexively yeeted it into a base64 decoder (but a different one) and I got:

Code: [Select]

Nzb wwksl xvpfl rkh hxyff onun ivi qvhc fki.

Uonn huu sgmffcnf me:
Zkfsyrqza
Seems like this hits the spot, as the strings were decoded to something that seems to follow the basic rules (capital letters and interpunction).

From this point, I presume this is some sort of letter combination cypher. Throwing myself at Caesar code didn't work.

[theperfectdrugsk]

`wwksl` is throwing me. There aren't many english words that start with double-letters. Of the ones I can think of, none are 5 letters AND do not repeat letters. Possible that the double-letters in the code are subs for a completely different character?

[Colonol Dekker]

Basic substitution would lead me to look at the first word, common three letter words starting sentences are few.  E being the most common letter (allegedly) should help.

[Mito [PL]]

@theperfectdrugsk:

If this would be a cypher with some constant value of the character shift all over the text, this would have been pretty trivial, I think. Throw in some characteristic words that you'd use in the beginning of the sentences, use such repeating characters to narrow down word possibilities and then figure out the couple possible cypher methods and apply them to the text. But, not so easy.

My opinion: I don't think it's any syllable manipulation cypher, nor a constant value shift of any sort... So it's either a variable shift, or an actual keyword based cypher. I wonder if this isn't a rather late-game objective, as first riddles in such games are pretty often not too complex and not leading to very important discoveries right away.

[0rph3u5]

The database might offer some clues if you are really stuck.

[Mito [PL]]

Looks like 0rph3u5 is giving us a crutch if we don't break the code in some time window... Not sure what to feel about that since there aren't many people here.

That said, now it's confirmed that the encryption actually uses some code. Possibly a lengthy one. Also possibly in German. I hope there's no umlauts in there!


This seems like a job for someone who is at least mildly knowledgeable on Babylon 5 lore, maybe some enryption type or a passcode was used in some episode of the show?

[0rph3u5]

Not a crutch, its a tutorial. You need turn over a few rocks.

And there is no time limit related to that code. While there is at least one doomsday clock in the game, it has not been triggered yet - and you will know when you do.

[Colonol Dekker]

Can we have updates once a day as it's soooooooo intense waiting for updates.

[0rph3u5]

Sarcasm doesn't get you closer to a solution....

This might:

tachyon signals containing sensitive information receive at least two layers of encryption, not including encoding for transmission.