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• Parsing The Clue Chronicles

  30 décembre 2018, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  A long time ago, I procured a 1999 game called Clue Chronicles : Fatal Illusion, based on the classic board game Clue, a.k.a. Cluedo. At the time, I was big into collecting old, unloved PC games so that I could research obscure multimedia formats.

  
  
  

  Surveying the 3 CD-ROMs contained in the box packaging revealed only Smacker (SMK) videos for full motion video which was nothing new to me or the multimedia hacking community at the time. Studying the mix of data formats present on the discs, I found a selection of straightforward formats such as WAV for audio and BMP for still images. I generally find myself more fascinated by how computer games are constructed rather than by playing them, and this mix of files has always triggered a strong “I could implement a new engine for this !” feeling in me, perhaps as part of the ScummVM project which already provides the core infrastructure for reimplementing engines for 2D adventure games.

  Tying all of the assets together is a custom high-level programming language. I have touched on this before in a blog post over a decade ago. The scripts are in a series of files bearing the extension .ini (usually reserved for configuration scripts, but we’ll let that slide). A representative sample of such a script can be found here :

  clue-chronicles-scarlet-1.txt

  What Is This Language ?
  At the time I first analyzed this language, I was still primarily a C/C++-minded programmer, with a decent amount of Perl experience as a high level language, and had just started to explore Python. I assessed this language to be “mildly object oriented with C++-type comments (‘//’) and reliant upon a number of implicit library functions”. Other people saw other properties. When I look at it nowadays, it reminds me a bit more of JavaScript than C++. I think it’s sort of a Rorschach test for programming languages.

  Strangely, I sort of had this fear that I would put a lot of effort into figuring out how to parse out the language only for someone to come along and point out that it’s a well-known yet academic language that already has a great deal of supporting code and libraries available as open source. Google for “spanish dolphins far side comic” for an illustration of the feeling this would leave me with.

  It doesn’t matter in the end. Even if such libraries exist, how easy would they be to integrate into something like ScummVM ? Time to focus on a workable approach to understanding and processing the format.

  Problem Scope
  So I set about to see if I can write a program to parse the language seen in these INI files. Some questions :

  1. How large is the corpus of data that I need to be sure to support ?
  2. What parsing approach should I take ?
  3. What is the exact language format ?
  4. Other hidden challenges ?

  To figure out how large the data corpus is, I counted all of the INI files on all of the discs. There are 138 unique INI files between the 3 discs. However, there are 146 unique INI files after installation. This leads to a hidden challenge described a bit later.

  What parsing approach should I take ? I worried a bit too much that I might not be doing this the “right” way. I’m trying to ignore doubts like this, like how “SQL Shame” blocked me on a task for a little while a few years ago as I concerned myself that I might not be using the purest, most elegant approach to the problem. I know I covered language parsing a lot time ago in university computer science education and there is a lot of academic literature to the matter. But sometimes, you just have to charge in and experiment and prototype and see what falls out. In doing so, I expect to have a better understanding of the problems that need to solved and the right questions to ask, not unlike that time that I wrote a continuous integration system from scratch because I didn’t actually know that “continuous integration” was the keyword I needed.

  Next, what is the exact language format ? I realized that parsing the language isn’t the first and foremost problem here– I need to know exactly what the language is. I need to know what the grammar are keywords are. In essence, I need to reverse engineer the language before I write a proper parser for it. I guess that fits in nicely with the historical aim of this blog (reverse engineering).

  Now, about the hidden challenges– I mentioned that there are 8 more INI files after the game installs itself. Okay, so what’s the big deal ? For some reason, all of the INI files are in plaintext on the CD-ROM but get compressed (apparently, according to file size ratios) when installed to the hard drive. This includes those 8 extra INI files. I thought to look inside the CAB installation archive file on the CD-ROM and the files were there… but all in compressed form. I suspect that one of the files forms the “root” of the program and is the launching point for the game.

  Parsing Approach
  I took a stab at parsing an INI file. My approach was to first perform lexical analysis on the file and create a list of 4 types : symbols, numbers, strings, and language elements ([]{}()=., :). Apparently, this is the kind of thing that Lex/Flex are good at. This prototyping tool is written in Python, but when I port this to ScummVM, it might be useful to call upon the services of Lex/Flex, or another lexical analyzer, for there are many. I have a feeling it will be easier to use better tools when I understand the full structure of the language based on the data available.
  
  The purpose of this tool is to explore all the possibilities of the existing corpus of INI files. To that end, I ran all 138 of the plaintext files through it, collected all of the symbols, and massaged the results, assuming that the symbols that occurred most frequently are probably core language features. These are all the symbols which occur more than 1000 times among all the scripts :

     6248 false
     5734 looping
     4390 scripts
     3877 layer
     3423 sequentialscript
     3408 setactive
     3360 file
     3257 thescreen
     3239 true
     3008 autoplay
     2914 offset
     2599 transparent
     2441 text
     2361 caption
     2276 add
     2205 ge
     2197 smackanimation
     2196 graphicscript
     2196 graphic
     1977 setstate
     1642 state
     1611 skippable
     1576 desc
     1413 delayscript
     1298 script
     1267 seconds
     1019 rect
  

  About That Compression
  I have sorted out at least these few details of the compression :

  bytes 0-3    "COMP" (a pretty strong sign that this is, in fact, compressed data)
  bytes 4-11   unknown
  bytes 12-15  size of uncompressed data
  bytes 16-19  size of compressed data (filesize - 20)
  bytes 20-    compressed payload
  

  The compression ratios are on the same order of gzip. I was hoping that it was stock zlib data. However, I have been unable to prove this. I wrote a Python script that scrubbed through the first 100 bytes of payload data and tried to get Python’s zlib.decompress to initialize– no luck. It’s frustrating to know that I’ll have to reverse engineer a compression algorithm that deals with just 8 total text files if I want to see this effort through to fruition.

  Update, January 15, 2019
  Some folks expressed interest in trying to sort out the details of the compression format. So I have posted a followup in which I post some samples and go into deeper details about things I have tried :

  Reverse Engineering Clue Chronicles Compression

  The post Parsing The Clue Chronicles first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.

• Revision 32737 : habillage par defaut de Zpip utilise les conventions documentees

  8 novembre 2009, par cedric@… — Log

  habillage par defaut de Zpip utilise les conventions documentees

• Community survey revealed – Discover the profile of a Piwik user

  7 novembre 2017, par Piwik Core Team — Community

  In January 2017 we launched a Piwik community survey which gathered more than a thousand responses. It is now time for us to release the results of this study. We release today the results of this survey painting a picture of the growing Piwik Analytics community !

  What types of businesses are using Piwik ?

  Just a reminder : Piwik is currently used on over 1 million websites and mobile apps.

  

  According to the community survey, 75% of businesses using Piwik are small companies and 25% are medium to large enterprises. Out of those 25%, more than 7% are large enterprises with more than a 1,000 of employees.

  Why choosing Piwik ?

  With a large majority, Open Source came first with almost 50% of the answers, then come the data security aspect (27%) in third comes the raw data access (10,5%) and for a minor part customizability with 1,9%.

  How often is Piwik used ?

  92% of respondents said that they are using Piwik regularly (at least once per month) :

  • on a daily basis 28%
  • on a weekly basis 41%
  • on a monthly basis 23%

  Is Piwik mostly installed on Intranet or External websites ?

  

  Piwik is mainly installed on external websites, 80% of the cases. However, 12% of respondents answer that they are using it on intranet too. The remaining 8% have chosen not to answer.

  Which CRM for Piwik users ?

  As CRM is a high valuable asset within the company, we wanted to check if there were any needs for Piwik to develop something specifically for CRM.
  The answers showed us that in almost 60% of the cases no CRM was used at all, for the rest there is no clear leading CRM which is used more than others.

  Do Piwik users wish more integrations to third party applications such as CRM, support systems ?

  60% of responders said no, which can clearly be understood from previous question. But the 40% remaining are clearly showing that they wish more integrations. We heard you, we are constantly updating our integration page. If there are any integrations you wish to have, do not hesitate to contact the solution provider and suggest them to integrate their product with Piwik.

  How do Piwik users get notified when a KPI reach a specific value ?

  Great question, great answers. Almost 50% of responders are not notified when something happens in Piwik and prefer to have a look at the UI instead. 15% did not know that it was possible using Custom Alerts but may have a look it. Some of you are also designing their own system. It made us realize here that we need to change our UI and integrate custom alerts to the main UI directly. Custom alerts is a great feature that you can access within the administration panel to get notified when something happened in your Piwik data.

  

  Which improvements could be made to Piwik ?

  Only 20% of you answered to this question, which is a good thing for us