So far, I’ve only received one submission for the second and final phase of the Ruckingenur Challenge. With only two weeks left, we’re getting down to the grind, especially if you need artwork created for your puzzle. If anyone is working on a puzzle but has not yet submitted it, you should say something in the comments. Feel free to advertise for the Challenge if you know people who would be interested! Remember – PIC programmer!

I’m going to be working on some new games in the next few weeks, and will post details here as I make progress. In the meantime, though, we need filler content! What would you like to see here?

• After completing a level, your progress is saved so long as your Flash "cookies" aren't deleted. However, your designs are never saved when leaving the workshop to return to the mission select screen.
• It's easy to find yourself in a situation where your steam design isn't working as you'd like. It's good practice to use gauges to ensure that pressures are building as you expect; things that potentially vent to the outside, such as weapons and control mechanisms. If you're really stuck, you can always post to the comments with your question.
• All the music is from jamendo.com, a really great creative commons music site. The song at the title screen is "En retard!" by Evan, while the rest of the music is by Celestial Aeon Project.
• For the curious: the pressure algorithm works by iterating over all paired connectors, each with a volume estimate and a pressure, and exchanging a "steam amount" (representing n in the equation PV = nRT) to neutralize the pressure between the two components. This is repeated until the pressures between each pair of connectors are neutralized to an acceptable degree (I believe I used a value of around 0.15 PSI). After neutralizing the entire pressure circuit, we advance the simulation by the time delta to flush "steam" from things that "leak", trigger pressure dependent valves, and advance other time-dependent components.

Additionally, I’m upping the ante for the Ruckingenur Challenge! If I receive thirty (30) or more complete submissions, I will be awarding a special Microchip PIC prize kit to the creator of the best level, containing the following:

• 1× PICkit 2 PIC Programmer
• 3x PIC18F887 microcontrollers

• 3x PIC18F886 microcontrollers

While you’re free to create submissions as groups, only one prize package will be awarded. Pictures of the prize package coming soon, in addition to formal updating of the Ruckingenur Challenge Phase Two page to include this information.

Get to it!

If you somehow missed, it the Ruckingenur Challenge is a contest where YOU create a level for the not-yet-but-perhaps-one-day-award-winning Ruckingenur II. Here are the conditions for Phase Two:

• Create a level using the Ruckingenur Editor.
• You don’t have to create any artwork, but you can if you want to.
  • If you’re not making artwork, create your level fully using stand-in graphics. Then submit your level before the deadline and tell me what you want. Provided you’re not being ridiculous in your request, you will get your artwork!
• If you are making your own artwork, be sure to model it after the graphics in Ruckingenur II. All of my artwork was created with minimalist color palettes and doubled in size to enhance the pixel-ness.
• After collecting all the finished levels, I will sort them by difficulty and release a special Community Edition of Ruckingenur. Everyone who created a level will be gratuitously credited.

• The author of the best puzzle (as decided by me? or maybe by a poll?) will win some sort of small prize, most likely a shirt. If I receive thirty or more complete submissions, however, I will award a PIC Microcontroller Prize Package to the winner, containing a PICkit 2 PIC Programmer, three PIC18F887 microcontrollers, and three PIC18F886 microcontrollers.

The deadline for entries is December 1st, 2008. If you need artwork, it’d be wise to submit your otherwise fully completed level to me at least two weeks before that date.

As always, I’ll be happy to field any questions you have – just post them to the comments!

Everything that applied to Ruckingenur II applies to the Ruckingenur Editor; you’ll need .NET 2.0 (maybe 3.5?), it’ll probably crash if you’re running a 64-bit version of windows or don’t have a sound card installed, and should be easy to get running under Mono or Parallels.

The Ruckingenur Editor conforms to fairly standard editor mechanics, so it should be pretty easy to use your first time. Here are some tips:

• The only “hidden” feature is that you can hold down shift while dragging a circuit board, project box, or chip to drag everything that is on top of it along with it.
• While widgets are placed with default DisplayLevel values, you may sometimes have to tweak them to get things to stack the way you want – widgets with higher DisplayLevel values are placed above those with lower DisplayLevel values.
• When two widgets with the same DisplayLevel overlap, they will flicker.
• When running a .ruck level, the Ruckingenur Player searches for a file called “script.lua” in the same directory and uses that as the script. The file “ruckapi.htm” in the zip file provides documentation for scripting Ruckingenur levels.
• Sounds and images that you add should be added to the same directory as the .ruck file.
• Check out the level1-remake folder for a full remake of level 1 from Ruckingenur II built in the Ruckingenur Editor.

• From what I can tell, it’s fairly stable, but if any more bug reports come in I’ll be rolling out new versions and uploading them here.

If you have questions or find bugs, please email me at zachbarth@gmail.com! Good luck!

It was tough picking a winner; while I only received 9 submissions, they were all very diverse and generally well thought out. While some seemed to be a little obscure for obscurity’s sake, it seems like most everyone who submitted has a pretty good grasp on what goes into making an interesting and complete level.

In other news, Phase Two of the Ruckingenur Challenge begins tomorrow! I will be posting rules and information then, so stay tuned!

And now, the Wee-CD!

Follow the fold for the rest of this submission!

The Wee-CD Hack

This puzzle is based on the first hacks for the Nintendo Wii console (in this puzzle, called the Wee).

Now to the challenge:

• You want to be able to run backed-up games on your Wii.
• The protection for this in the Wii is in the DVD-drive.
• If the Wii DVD-firmware says it’s a DVD-RW disc instead of an original-disc, the game won’t run.
• So the solution is to update/modify the firmware. The only problem is that the serial port for firmware update is password protected! So some clever guy used a timing-attack to figure out the password.

• A timing-attack measures the time between a sent password and the answer. The theory is that a strcmp-function inside the DVD-drive would take longer time to return the more correct letters in the password.

Example: If each letter takes 1ms (in the strcmp-function) to compare and the password is ‘FOO’, then the password ‘BAR’ will take 1ms to complete. But the password ‘FOI’ takes 3ms to complete, now we know the password starts with ‘FO’. And so on.

So that was my base for the puzzle.

The Setup

You have two DVDs, one original game and backup of the same game (identical).
You have one wee DVD-drive.
You have one programmer.

The Chips

• Tray Controller – controls the DVD-tray, moves the DVD in and out.
• Media Check – this chip reads the DVD and determines if its a DVD-RW or an original
• Copy Protection – this chip receives signals form the Media Check about the DVD-type. When a DVD-RW is detected it will eject the DVD.
• Programmer – Sends a copy of the EEPROM chip into the Copy Protection chip.

• Reader – When it receives a signal from the Copy Protection it starts to read the DVD, and output the contents to the serial-port.

Wee-CD Operation

When a DVD is inserted the Media Check will check what type of flag it has, original or DVD-RW. This information is sent to the copy protection chip. The Copy Protection chip compares the flag with its allowed types. If it’s OK a signal will be sent to the Reader, else a eject signal will be sent to the Tray Controller.

Chip Details

Tray Controller

Controls the DVD-tray, moves the DVD in and out.

• EJECT-signal moves the DVD out, active +5V

• STATUS-signal signals +5V when the DVD is in, else 0V

Media Check

This chip reads the DVD and determines if its a DVD-RW or an original.

• TRIGG-signal activates the chip
• SERIAL-signal sends ‘1’ When original DVD is detected, ‘0’ if DVD-RW

• DEBUG: read only, DVDFLAG = 0×000000x displays the type of flag sent

Copy Protection

This chip receives signals form the Media Check about the DVD-type. It will compare the received flag from Media Check with it’s own Allowed flag register. The chip will send a EJECT-signal on all ‘errors’.

• DEBUG REGISTER: (read only) ALOWFLAG = default : 0×00000001
• SERIAL FROM MEDIA CHECK , Trigger chip when it receives a serial and compare it FLAGS register, if fails report ‘error’.

• SERIAL FROM PROGRAMMER ,

• DONE signal, +5V when a DVD check is GOOD.

Reader

• DONE signal from Copy Protection, trigger the chip if its +5V.

• SERIAL-PORT , data output, or ‘data-read-error-message’. The data output is just some random code/instructions.

Programmer

Sends a copy of the EEPROM chip into the Copy Protection chip via the serial interface.

• Button – pressing this button activates the chip and sends EEPROM contents on the serial-port.

• DEBUG register : a copy of the register in Copy Protection chip. This register is however possible to edit.

The Solution

1) Find the correct password. This is done by placing a Volt-probe at the eject signal. Then its time to ‘smart brute-force’ the password. The Copy Protection chip sends eject-signal every time something wrong has happened, like typing a wrong letter in the password. Try all letters starting from A,B,C… When we don’t get a eject signal we found our first letter in the password! So just keep trying. The serial port will answer with ‘PASSWORD OK’.

2) Send the correct password to the Copy Protection chip.

3) In the programmer chip change the allowed flags to DVD-RW.

4) Activate the programmer.

5) Insert the backup DVD! Watch the serial-ouput-data!

You can download the editor here.

Everything that applied to Ruckingenur II applies to the Ruckingenur Editor; you’ll need .NET 2.0, it’ll probably crash if you’re running a 64-bit version of windows or don’t have a sound card installed, and should be easy to get running under Mono or Parallels.

The editor is fairly straight forward to use, with the only “hidden” feature being that you can hold down shift while dragging a circuit board, project box, or chip to drag everything that is on top of it along with it. While widgets are placed with default DisplayLevel values, you may sometimes have to tweak them to get things to stack the way you want – widgets with higher DisplayLevel values are placed above those with lower DisplayLevel values. When running a .ruck level, the Ruckingenur Player searches for a file called “script.lua” in the same directory and uses that as the script. Sounds and images that you add should be added to the same directory as the .ruck file. Check out the level1-remake folder for a full remake of level 1 from Ruckingenur II built in the Ruckingenur Editor.

You can learn about scripting Ruckingenur levels by exploring the level1-remake and the Ruckingenur Editor API.

If you have any questions or find any bugs, please email me at zachbarth@gmail.com! Good luck!

If you’re working on a level and are stuck, you can email me personally for help at zachbarth@gmail.com. If you have a submission finished, email it to me right away!

Thursday, after Phase One is officially over, I will begin judging the submissions; I’ll be contacting the winner(s) soon after that. If you submitted a level or are on my mailing list, you’ll probably be receiving a link to a beta version of the Ruckingenur Editor within a week or two from now. All in all, it’s a good time to be a Ruckingenur.

I’d love to know how you feel about the Ruckingenur Challenge, so go ahead and post some comments!

Yeah, how about that – an entirely hybrid circuit. The exochip on the left is the brain of the drone controller and dispatches commands to the entire drone network. The exochip on the right is responsible for interfacing to the controls and prevents the drone controller from sending any unauthorized commands. After being brought online through the chip on the right, the chip on the left may be instructed to send a self-destruct message to all active drones. Unfortunately, the right chip will not authenticate this command, requiring the player to kill the chip and fake its signal. Upon authentication, the self-destruct command is sent; across the region, drones shut off and come crashing to the ground.

So that’s it – those are the three levels that never made it in to Ruckingenur II. I’m excited to see what you can do!

Does anyone like these sort of posts? Although I don’t have any more Ruckingenur levels to post, I do have more mockups of old games and games that I never made which might be interesting. What would you like to see here between game releases?

After hacking the drone transmitter, the insurgents are able to successfully radio and then ambush a drone, as depicted in a movie that may one day be used in a future Ruckingenur product.

In order for the insurgents to locate and destroy the drone controller facilities, the player must trick the crashed drone into thinking that it is flying along its stored waypoints until it believes it has returned to the facility, at which point it may be made to give up the proper IFF codes needed to get within range of the base. Players are assisted by the exochip’s stream of consciousness signal, which provides cryptic hints as to what it requires to advance the hacking process.

Did I mention that exochips look like brains on the inside?

If you’re lacking inspiration, here’s a special feature to help your creativity along: the fifth level of Ruckingenur II.

As it’s unlikely that I’ll ever implement these levels as designed, I will proceed with full disclosure: the final three (for a total of seven) levels revolved around the exochip as a critical component of the circuits. What is an exochip? As it turns out, the Tangential Forces weren’t acting alone in their campaign of oppression against the Northern Continent; although no one knows the origins of the Visitors, their hybrid biotronics were far superior to any other technologies available, giving the Tangential Forces the military edge they needed to take control. Exochips are the centerpiece of the Visitors’ hybrid biotronic technologies, and consist of a genetically engineered organism capable of interfacing directly to a wide range of electronic signals. While exochips are more complicated than normal integrated circuits and require a constant flow of nutrient-rich exobrine, they are able to trivially learn and reproduce almost any task and can instantaneously communicate with any other exochip via psychic network. They are used extensively in the network of autonomous drones that constantly patrols the Northern Continent, locating hidden insurgent bases and eliminating opportunistic targets.

Level five would introduce the player to exochips, which could be controlled by pulsing various pins mapping to goals, concepts, and positive and negative reinforcement in the exochips’ neural paths. When this drone transmitter was lost, it was disabled; thus, the player’s objective would be to re-enable the device and signal for a drone to return to it, offering the insurgents a chance to ambush the drone when it arrived in an exposed position.

It should be noted that I was unable to create an exochip mechanic that I was happy with and felt properly achieved the same level of reverse engineering verisimilitude as the rest of the game; this is why the last three levels were eliminated from the game.

(That’s the last flashing LED GIF – I promise!)

So here’s the deal:

Phase One

• You design a puzzle for Ruckingenur.
• All puzzle designs must be in on or before October 15th, 2008. (That’s two weeks from today, for those of you who don’t know what day it is.)
• You do not code anything, nor do you create any game art. This is purely design of the puzzle.
• You may submit as many entries as you want.
• If I receive fifteen (15) or more complete submissions, I will make a special version of Ruckingenur capable of playing levels created with the included level editor.
• The author of the best submission will win a Ruckingenur prize pack, most likely filled with electronics related prizes!

• Submissions may be emailed to me at zachbarth@gmail.com

Design Requirements

• Your submissions should include the following:
  • A short description of the puzzle, including an objective.
  • A semi-detailed description of the internal state, i.e. how the device works. It’s a good idea to think of your device as a state machine.
  • A short description of a possible solution. More solutions make for a better puzzle.
  • A list of all test points, describing:
    • How their voltages are determined.
    • How pulsing them high and low effects the state of the device.
    • How they respond to serial data, and when they emit serial data.
  • What registers are available if the test point corresponds to a debug pin on a chip, and how their values are generated and affect the device state.
  • Some sort of quick drawing (mspaint is fine) detailing the layout of all components and interface items.
• A list of any special art or rendering your puzzle would need. Assume that the level editor will include common components like chips, LEDs, switches, and displays and tools to draw common things like circuit boards and tracks between components.
• I suggest you play through Ruckingenur II again, paying attention to these details in the puzzles.
• A good puzzle shouldn’t let a player get stuck in a loop of unsolvability, where they’ve done something preventing them from solving the puzzle, yet are unaware that they are stuck because of it.

• A good puzzle shouldn’t require a player to use trial and error to solve the puzzle.

Phase Two

• After I finish the level editor, I will release it to the public. There’s a good chance that people who submitted an entry in Phase One will receive it earlier than those who didn’t.
• You create a level. While you won’t have to create any artwork, you will have to program the implementation (most likely in Python Lua, something you should look into if you’re interested in this).
• If you intend to create a level, you should really submit the design in Phase One. This will help me judge what functionality is needed in the level editor and ensure that it can create puzzles with sufficient richness and depth.
• You send me your level. I will work with everyone who submits a level to make sure that all the levels fit together coherently and with a uniform implementation of the mechanics. While I worry that this may seem authoritarian to some people, that’s really not my intention – I just want to make sure that, because of the uniqueness of Ruckingenur puzzles, everyone’s puzzles fit together.
• After collecting all the finished levels, I will sort them by difficulty and release a special Community Edition of Ruckingenur. Everyone who created a level will be gratuitously credited.
• Everyone wins!

• The author of the best puzzle might win something extra!

Constructive commentators are encouraged to leave constructive comments. If you have a question, ask it in the comments so everyone can see – I’ll answer it there. Otherwise, start working on those levels!