Good Morning
Transcript (AI, 546 lines)
You got a new phone yet?
WTF this site is so cool.
It connects your Goosey Center link to OpenVib account under stream.
Cost on AI.
this is some cheap tiny mass shit, good dog D GK.
Guys, you know the rule, right?
We have fun on this channel, we talk about exploits, we talk about hacks, we have a good time.
Problem with this video is that the fridge hacking situation is not something to laugh about, okay?
So if you're not aware, fridge
Hack costing millions and sparking fires stemmed from poor security.
Guys, the way that this went down is so bafflingly bad.
We cannot let this happen again.
I want to go into this video, what actually went down, how all this food went bad, how they got hacked, and how it's probably gonna happen again in the future if we don't stop the trend that we saw here.
What you'll notice in this picture is a woman walks in a grocery store, but unfortunately, there is no food in the fridges.
Why?
Because the food in the fridges went bad, okay?
On the night of October 11th, a hacker hacked into a refrigeration control unit and set the temperatures as high as 50 degrees inside of these fridges, causing them to go into a defrost cycle, some of them getting even hotter than 50 degrees and catching fire in some cases.
Technology like this is referred to as operational technology, right?
Things like power controllers, water controllers, fridge controllers, things that when you hack into them have a physical effect on the world, right?
They turn on a water pump, turn on the lights, turn off the lights.
These are the things that should be protected at the highest value with the most risk behind them.
But ironically and unfortunately, the industry tends to be the opposite.
Some of these devices, a lot of the times, have some of the worst coding practices.
And ultimately, when engineers that design these systems get them working, they don't want to touch them because if you don't let the fridge system work, you don't let the power system work, bad things happen.
And as a result, when they eventually get hacked, things like this are even worse.
And as a result, over
700 supermarkets throughout France got hacked, leading to over a hundred and two million dollars of food waste.
Insane situation.
Million dollars of food waste insane situation.
So, how does one hack into a fridge?
How is a fridge even able to be hacked?
Well, a lot of the times it's not really a single fridge that gets compromised.
And in this case, it's actually what's called a fridge controller, right?
The whole world of this is called SCADA, right?
Supervisory control and data acquisition.
What you're doing is
You have multiple things you need to supervise and control, and you have one central controller to do it, right?
This central controller is obviously very important and also very highly targetable by hackers.
And Clarity over at or in Team82 over at Clarity, actually, August of this year wrote an entire article about like, hey, there is a vulnerability, many vulnerabilities in this controller that could lead to something bad happening.
And they literally named the article Defrost the Food uncovering vulnerabilities in Dan Frost refrigeration controllers.
Again, this happened two months ago before.
The actual controller was had.
The controller in question, by the way, is an AKSM 800A.
It looks like this, you have your little HMI.
And basically, what you do is you plug all your fridges into this thing over some kind of serial connection like RS 232, 485.
And then from here, you're able to operate with your finger.
You poke and you prod and you change the temperature of the fridges.
Someone can remote into this thing and get a view of actually what's going on.
Oh, okay, cool.
All the fridges that have the vegetables are at 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and all the fridges that have the meat are at 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
I'm not a food expert, okay.
I'm largely guessing, but you understand.
My point.
Now remember how I said that the security of systems like this tends to not be very great.
Okay, and we'll be very clear when I'm making this video.
I'm not trying to drag anyone through the mud.
I'm not trying to like make fun of any anybody, right?
I don't want to be that channel that just like shits on people when things happen.
I'm just trying to make a point about trends in the industry.
And typically a trend in one place sometimes can apply to other places, right?
And I don't want this to happen in the future.
So if you look at this system, again, this is research by team82, uncovering the code of the day.
You have the login of the system.
And to log into the system, you submit an XML CGI request with the username and password.
And one of these functions that checks if you're allowed to get in is called check the code of the day.
And what does the code of the day do?
Well, the code of the day does probably what you think it does.
It takes the date and it stamps it together into an eight-digit number.
And then you can use that to get inside of the system.
It is the daily authentication code.
That is the auth.
Yes, correct.
And then from there, once you have auth as admin, you're able to use the access you have to exploit another bug that requires.
Requires off to get a code execution on this device.
Basically, by putting in a new password with a command injection in there, you get code execution as root on the device, you know, trivially compromising this device.
Now, in this article, they don't go into exactly how you can like control the temperature directly, but the implied thing is that like if you have control over a fridge controller, you are able to control the fridges, right?
It's the implied access that you get.
Now, another follow-on question you should be asking is: wait a minute, how how do they even get access?
To this controller's login interface?
Like, why was this even able to be logged into?
And why didn't they update this?
Because when Clarity disclosed this, which they did responsibly, by the way, to Dan Frost, they literally published a new firmware, firmware R431, that fixed this vulnerability.
So what how did this even happen?
I'm stealing this from Twitter, I will admit that, but this is a an output of a Shodan search that searches for these systems if they're able to be accessed online.
And you will see that yeah, there were about 4,000 online in France, 500 in South Africa, 271 in Belgium.
What this means.
That these are connected to the internet in a way that they are directly internet accessible.
Now, obviously, the password is not public, right?
So I think a lot of assumptions is that, like, oh, I'm putting it on the internet, but I'm doing that because there's an admin screen that has a that requires a login.
In theory, the authentication of the system should leave me safe, right?
Eh, wrong.
Like, all because something is doing authentication does not mean A, it's doing authentication correctly, and B, there aren't vulnerabilities in the way that the thing does authentication.
Now, I've done
A lot of videos on a lot of bugs, and I've had my opinions on the companies that are involved in these vones and these exploits, right?
One of the recent ones that I've done is Citrix.
The problem with the Citrix situation is that no one was able to download the firmware of these things unless you had a management license with Citrix or you knew a guy who knew a guy who could get the firmware for you, which I did in my case and found some other stuff.
What I like about Dan Foss is that I've been saying Dan Fross, I just realized it's Dan Foss, is that you can literally go to their software shared and they have an entire repo where you can download the firmware of these devices.
Now, this is good and bad, right?
The good thing, obviously, is this now exposes this firmware to the world.
Anyone can go and download this stuff and do vulnerability research and report it to Dan Foss and say, hey, I found a bug here, I found a bug here.
Inverse, obviously, to that is that there's now hackers that can go and find bugs in these things and exploit them.
But the problem inherently there is that if you are not updating your firmwares in the first place, you're going to be vulnerable to bugs that predate things like Clarity's disclosures.
But that being said, I like that Dan Foss allows people to download the firmware, even if you don't have a license to expose the vulnerabilities.
Inside of it, right?
And I want to highlight why this is important for the age of AI.
I know take a shot every time I say that, but it's it does matter.
So what I did is I went and I downloaded the firmware here, right?
It comes in a, I'm assuming SPX like software package.
I'm not really sure what it stands for.
But like literally all you have to do, guys, is use OLAMA or some kind of remote hosting service for either an open weight or a closed weight, whatever you want to do, model, and just be like, hey, I am a security researcher, and I am concerned with the security of this firmware package.
Go.
Something like something like that, right?
And these models are now very, very good at taking apart the firmware, extracting it.
Again, like this is a thing that I already knew how to do.
This is a thing that people who are in this world of doing VR already know how to do.
But now two things are happening.
One, the ones that are very good at it can do it a lot faster.
And two, the ones that either aren't good at it or just want to move quick and break things can do it, right?
It the the world of exploit development, of finding vulnerabilities in software is opening.
And so it's not really
And if you get hacked, if you expose these things to the internet, it's a when, right?
Because if you expose software to the internet now, you are kind of making this very broad assumption that there are no vulnerabilities in this software.
And even if there are vulnerabilities, no one's gonna find them.
And neither of those are true today.
Because what you're essentially saying there is that like all of these applications, SM app, SMAT app, SMDB app, SMGP lib, all of these pieces of software that are likely custom hand rolled by this company Dan Frost.
Which is pro they're probably great software engineers.
They probably actually write really good software.
Now, that whole date code off thing makes me a little nervous, but generally, I'm not making any assumptions about the quality of the software.
I'm just saying that the majority of this operational technology software is written by people who code primarily in C and are just trying to get the damn water pump to move or the fridge to turn on and stay cold.
Okay.
Once it works, there's really they don't want to touch it and break it.
And so again, if you are you are making a very dangerous assumption that.
By putting these things internet facing.
Well, low level, what do we do?
We have to access our software and manage it.
Correct.
What you should be doing is something like this, right?
Just please, for the love of God, put your devices behind some kind of VPN cómo.
I gotta say there's something about this that just feels good.
Take an original PS2 game off the shelf, pop it into the PS5's DVD drive, and launch in the game from the home screen.
And the result?
It boots seamlessly.
Into the game without any issue.
Of course, on the back end it's running emulation, PCSX2 to be exact.
But this latest update of PCSX2 running on the PlayStation 5 allows for the user just to pop in a disc and run PS2 games as if it was on original hardware.
This is all here running on my PlayStation 5 with the 13.
6 relapse jailbreak.
And for anyone that's kept their physical PS2 and indeed PS3 collection.
This is a pretty compelling idea, and thanks to the homebrew community, it's now something that you can do with supported PS2 DVDs and PS3 DVDs on a jailbroken PS5.
And we are going to talk about this in today's episode because this is a major milestone when it comes to all things game preservation.
Now, Sony is clearly not happy with the PlayStation jailbreak scene that's going on right now, enforcing a mandatory update if you're running firmware 14.
0.
But for those of us that
Still running jailbreak 13.
60 and have no intention of updating to the latest firmware, then simply put, you get your pick of running PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 3 games as well as PS4 and PS5 games all on one system.
Full backward compatibility is what the community has asked for since the PlayStation 5 was announced.
The best Sony could provide is a drip feed of PlayStation Classics, and once again it's up to the homebrew community to step in.
Now, the emulator that powers booting PlayStation 2 discs is PCS X2.
The PlayStation port is known as PS5 SX2 and it's been developed by Sword PDF, and we did cover PCS X2 in our previous jailbreak episode.
But PCS X2 to the PS5 is a native homebrew application.
It has all the bells and whistles of PCS X2 on the PC.
I only want to see people with tantrophidal pay.
I only wanted them.
This is an IxieTube, and you have probably seen one of these before.
They are quite popular nowadays, and for a good reason.
Reason.
I mean, you just need to appreciate how insanely good this looks.
I also find this really cool, but not just because of this.
My favorite thing about this is that there are no active electronics inside, no semiconductors, nothing, just a tube filled with nanomas at low pressures and some number-shaped electrodes.
Basically, you have a metal mesh that is your Node, and each number is a separate cathode where the discharge happens.
The light is emitted due to the ionization of the gas atoms, so physics does the heavy lifting here.
So I always wondered how hard can it possibly be to make one of these?
Unfortunately, I broke one of them, and while I tried to glue the pieces together to stop them from falling apart, I kept thinking, does this still work?
I mean, of course it's completely missing its low-pressure atmosphere, but I can help with that.
So I kind of threw the whole thing in my vacuum chamber and connected it to my wire free through.
There is just one problem: I do not have neon gas, but I do have Argon for welding, which
Still should work, although it will not make the familiar orange red glow.
Instead it will do this.
Okay.
So definitely needs much more water.
A deep bluish-violet glow and I think it looks amazing.
It was kind of hard to get a good contrast on the characters because I couldn't
Don't increase the pressure enough.
My vacuum pamp is actually too powerful, and my organ valve is maxed out.
So I installed this valve between my pump and the chamber so I could restrict the airflow.
And this helped a lot.
Now the characters can be seen clearly, and this success really hyped me up about trying to make my own display.
So I started to think: how can I make characters and what material should I choose for them?
Completely by accident.
And in the meantime, I was experimenting with sputtering platinum.
If you don't know what spattering is, you can check out my older video that I made in the topic.
And I thought that this could be a perfect solution.
With sputtering, I can easily mask out different shapes and use glass as my base material.
And platinum should help to prevent the degradation of the cathodes and provide a long life for the display.
Of course, it's completely overkill and it's really hurting my wallet, but that's not the point.
I'm just trying to make something cool.
To keep things even more interesting, we can use a special kind of glass for the anode.
This is a layer of indium dinoxide on its surface, what makes it conductive but also keeps it transparent.
So, with the help of some copper and captain tape, I made this test setup.
I separated the two electrodes with a piece of 3D printer filament.
And this is the result.
I think it looks really interesting and it's really stunning actually.
As I change the voltage, I can manipulate the
Size of the discharge.
The filament was a bad idea though.
Okay, that's hmm.
So after this, I really wanted to characterize this kind of flat electrode argon discharge, since there is not a lot of information about what pressure and what voltage should I run this.
So I made this test where a photodiode is measuring the light output of the cell while I'll monitor the pressure, the voltage and the current.
While I was doing the test, I immediately noticed what was also evident with the Nixie tube test.
At low pressures, the outline of the discharge is more fluffy, and at higher pressures it becomes much more well defined.
And these are the test results.
So this is the breakdown voltage of the setup at different pressures.
That just means when the cell starts to conduct electricity.
You can see that at 0.
6 mbars and at 2.
5 mbars, we have a crazy high 270V breakdown.
This dips down to around 210V.
And these are the efficiency measurements.
We can multiply the current and voltage to get power.
In millibatts to get a better idea of what's happening.
The measured light isn't in any real units, but it can be compared between measurements that is useful.
It is kind of a lot, but it actually gives us a clearer picture.
As we increase the pressure, the efficiency of the discharge gets better.
For five nights in a row, Charles came back to the very same doorstep.
It wasn't until later that we realized he might not have been looking for food at all.
I first noticed Charles in May this year after reviewing my outdoor camera footage.
He stood out from the other feral cats that I had been feeding because he had these ginormous jowls, and he didn't look too healthy either.
He looked like he was stressed and sick.
And he definitely wasn't very young like the other ones that I usually feed.
I noticed that he would stay nearby, and he even would sometimes take
A nap right on my doorstep.
I realized that on the first night he had stayed there for a full hour until a raccoon showed up.
The next night I noticed the same thing.
He slept right on the doorstep again.
And that's so unusual for a feral cat.
There are many other feral cats that show up, even raccoons, that isn't necessarily safe.
But apparently,
Was safe to him.
But another interesting thing.
Brain rot my boy and brain.
One thing about me, I fucking love worms.
So I get up.
When I get up, the rooster is crowing and the crow is practically roostering.
That's how early I am.
You know?
So one day I'm sitting on sitting on the block with my mates, right?
And we're yapping about, you know, just about how many, you know, they're letting in all these bla peek.
Into the country from different places.
Government, they gotta have all these birds, all these, all these strange ends from all these foreign places.
And that's another talk for another day.
But it's too much.
It's too much.
Whatever happened to seagulls, whatever happened to chickens, they gotta do all these fucking birds, these peacocks, these these fucking ones.
I'm just yapping about with my mates.
Lad goes walking down the street, you know, with a slingshot.
Shot, a slingshot, and we're just thinking, what a geezer, what a fucking geezer.
And you know, we're having a laugh when all of a sudden, bang, stone comes in, both of me mates, dead, dead, both immediately dead, and if you took a bite, you would get salmonella just like that.
That's how fast it happened.
Sometimes I wish I were a mourning dove.
I'm just a seagull.
Cause I'm still in mourning.
I just don't know how.
I don't know how.
Fuck.
Hey Gordon.
The Citadel's on full alert.
I've never seen it lit up like that.
Get out of City 17 as fast as you can, Gordon.
Take the old canals, right?
They'll get you to Eli's lab.
It's it's a dangerous route, but there's a whole network of refugees, and they'll help you if they can.
Black Mesa.
Good luck out there, buddy.
You're gonna need it.
Oh, no.
Guys, look, someone built a road using Apple Maps.
Well, do you think we should build it again?
Or I know, just make a flying car.
Okay, now you're back where you started.
I would have just done a horizontal U-turn, but sure, do a vertical one.
Why not?
Oh, hey there, I'm Sam Tucker.
From the company that remade the silver car from Back to the Future, and today we made the car from Back to the Future.
2.
The one that flies.
Well, I guess that only makes sense since the company is run by Biff.
Introducing the all-new Tesla Roadstar that can drive on roads even when they're walls.
So the car's able to do this through a series of fans that spin up and suck off the road.
It could suck a tennis ball through a hose pipe.
And when it runs out of road, its air boosters furiously fart their way.
To a safe landing, letting it rip in 360 degrees.
And best of all, because it's not silent, it's not deadly.
So we'll turn the fans on for that.
Sorry, it's a little loud here.
But just to be safe, the demonstration was unmanned.
Or was it?
Yes, it was.
That's just a real man.
Nickin.
Anyway, while loop-de-loop roads haven't really been in use since DOS, it turns out that the down force.
The thrusters are good for gripping the road for awesome cornering and acceleration.
I mean, just have a look at how fast its ass blasts out of the frame here as it goes from 0 to 60 in under a second.
Plus, the boosters on the bottom are good for getting over traffic jams.
Just hope no one's got a flying car going the other way, or else you'll have a space jam.
This is not necessarily a safety-optimized car.
Of course, the car.
The car itself runs on electricity and it uses plain old air to refill its fart tanks that are 600 litres big for a total of 250 kilograms of air.
That sounds like me after a spicy bowl of beans.
Oh, and keep in mind, this will be an actual car that you can drive.
And Elon hopes, fly in the sky.
Like this will be an actual car that's on the roads.
Yeah, but you know, the powers that be.
Wouldn't even let the Cybertruck come out without first forcing Tesla to put side mirrors on the thing.
But I'm sure the government will let him keep the rocket boosters in this one.
You know, I'm not sure it's necessary legal in all jurisdictions, but.
The all-new Tesla flying car looks totally safe.
And I'm sure there won't be any bugs with their software.
Even though their last version of Windows literally crashed.
Oh my fing guy.
Hey everyone, thanks for watching the video.
And you know, I'm pretty cynical and jaded about tech, but even I have to admit that this was pretty frickin' cool.
Flying cars.
Video game worlds have greatly increased in both size and detail over the last decades.
This means storing massive amounts of data.
But developers are smart, they can condense huge games into very little space.
No, I'm actually serious.
AAA games tend to receive flag for many reasons, storage requirements being one of them.
But considering their scale and detail, their file sizes are honestly impressive.
Or so I thought, until I learned about a game called Krieger, which takes up a mind-boggling 97KB.
That is smaller than my channel logo, or this screenshot I took of the game.
How on earth is that file size achievable?
And could modern games work like this?
The fundamental limitation is that like any digital media, video games use bits, zeros and ones.
Every single thing will ultimately be a sequence of these two numbers, regardless of how they work in the real world.
For example, to make an analog signal like sound storable, we need to take values at consistent intervals.
This is called sampling.
To make sure we don't end up with infinitely precise numbers, we need to quantize them as well.
These two operations are the backbones of digital storage.
But an hour of mono audio encoded this way in standard CD quality is about 310 MB.
A game like The Witcher 3 contains 48 hours of dialogue for one language.
With its 7 languages, that's already 104GB, and this doesn't include music and sound effects.
Just compress the files, I hear you say.
Well, yes, except compression is not a magical one-click of a button solution.
For example, the MP3 format has a small amount of silence at the beginning.
Beginning of each clip.
This makes it difficult to use for looping soundtracks.
A lot of sound effects also need to be sudden, but having to decode heavily compressed files would make them play with a delay.
These unique challenges mean that compression becomes a balancing act where different cases require different approaches, and storage space isn't always top priority.
For this reason, games also utilize all sorts of tricks, like only using one channel or lowering the sample rate for low frequency audio.
The same sound effect can also be reused by randomly altering it a little bit instead of storing each variation.
Unfortunately, even with compression and plenty of tricks, audio assets can take up dozens of gigabytes.
So, what did the developers of Trigger do?
Well, they took all these files and threw them straight in the trash.
You might be familiar with MIDI files, these are what most video games used for music in the 80s and 90s.
MIDI's contain notes and instructions which were read by synthesizers within the dedicated hardware that shift with consoles and motherboards at the time.
Oscillators start by first generating some basic waveform.
This is modulated, filtered, and ran through a number of effects until you end up with something resembling a real instrument, or just a cool sound.
Because all the audio is fabricated real time, there is no need to store any of it.
To avoid the problem where different hardware generated different music, Krieger has a custom
Seems built into the game.
Wait, doesn't that take up more space though?
Unintuitively, it doesn't.
The code that would be required to communicate with third party MIDI, like the one that comes with Windows, would take up similar space.
The sound effects are also generated by this synth from a list of notes and saved into memory at Game Start.
This not only means that there is no latency, but we also have zero decoding costs during gameplay.
The trade off is the high memory usage.
So far, nothing about
Trigger seems groundbreaking, but that shouldn't come as a surprise.
People in the past have already gone through the trouble of inventing solutions to most problems, you just have to apply the right ones in the right place.
And for that, of course, it helps to understand how those inventions actually work.
Now let's talk graphics.
Just like the sound effects, all the meshes in the game are generated at launch.
But there is an important distinction we need to make here.
The game is not procedurally generated, there are no random numbers involved.
Instead, everything is built using a list of predetermined instructions.
This gives the developers full artistic control.
The only meshes the game explicitly stores are basic 3D objects.
These are modified in all sorts of ways to make unique shapes.
For example, this enemy is just a collection of low-poly cubes, spheres, and cylinders.
It's stored in the game as a list of primitives and the operations required to assemble it.
This is significantly cheaper than describing.
The object in the traditional manner.
Extracting from the code that is publicly available, a mesh of this complexity is most likely under 1000 bytes, while normally it takes up about 100 kilobytes.
I think you are starting to see the general idea behind the game.
Instead of storing pre-rendered content like games generally do, Krieger stores simple data plus instructions and algorithms.
The next step is one of the few exceptions where the devs also opted to borrow some already existing.
Data.
Normally, if you want your game to include text, you need to either store the font for runtime generation or a pre-rendered sprite sheet.
For Krieger, they chose neither and let Windows do the work.
The code simply asks for a font which falls back to Arial if not defined, and then asks Windows GDI to render the characters.
It does this not only for text, but even used it as the basis of some of the textures.
You see, textures take up by far the most storage spacing.
Video games, so you can bet that Krieger stores absolutely none.
Like pretty much everything else, they are generated from scratch when you launch the game.
To make these wooden tiles, for example, we can start by generating two rectangles with smooth edges.
We can tile these in a way that each row is offset by halfway tile's width.
We can also grab a rectangle in the same proportions and tile it in the same way while removing each second one.
We can then use this as a mask to create two separate orientations.
In the pattern, which we can combine into one.
To get the wood fill, we can generate two noises and distort one using the other.
We can add color to this by mapping a gradient to the grayscale values.
The final color is simply a blend of this result and the pattern.
For a bumper normal map, we can use a combination of the grayscale versions, and voila, we have a tiling wooden floor.
Based on the textures that I could extract from the game, you can see that they were all generated with such techniques.
You can imagine that this takes quite some processing time, and unsurprisingly, Krieger takes about 10 seconds to boot up on my PC.
Even on BFIR setups at the time of the game's release, it probably took over a minute.
During launch, the game also expands to about 300 MB in memory, a good indicator for how much storage it would have traditionally taken off.
Regardless, with all the code in place, it was time to compile it into one executable.
At this point,
It shouldn't come as a surprise that code can be compressed.
They used a fairly standard algorithm with a hand optimized decompressor that took up about 300 bytes.
But this wasn't enough.
Krieger at this point was about 120 kilobytes, and since the devs wanted to submit the game to a competition, specifically a category called 96k game, they still had some ways to go.
They were able to reduce it a lot by throwing away every bit of unused code.
If they found anything
That barely got used, they replaced it with something that already existed.
The rest of the code was shuffled around and rewritten through trial and error.
Every change that resulted in a smaller file, and hopefully didn't introduce bugs, was kept.
But the secret ingredient was a piece of software they wrote that pre processed the compiled code to make it work better with compression.
To get the game back, you need to shift the code that reverses this, which takes up 900 bytes.
Since this happens after decompression, the reverser can be compressed together with the game and only ends up being about 300 bytes.
A week before the deadline, they got the game down to 100 kilobytes.
Still not enough.
In a less ditch effort, the devs came up with an idea so insane it might just work.
Video games tend to contain a lot of conditional statements.
These branched the execution of the code towards different outcomes.
The idea was that some of these branches
Might never actually happen.
To make it easier to find these cases, the devs made yet another tool, keeping on team with the double case, of course.
Without going into too much detail, this allowed them to remove just enough bits to satisfy the requirement.
Wait, since when is 97 less than 96?
The confusion comes from the limit being defined in binary, which is technically called kibibytes, but no one uses this term.
96 kibytes is actually 98.
Thousand bytes, which allowed Krieger to enter and, unsurprisingly, win the game.
Thanks to this desperate last minute reduction though, they did end up introducing a bug or two.
For instance, the condition where the player takes damage from enemy projectiles did not end up making it in.
Oops.
But now, I think it's time we answered the big question why don't games today work like this?
I have alluded it to at times, but low storage space comes with compromise.
And not just the
same.
Few either.
No one would be willing to sit at a loading screen for hours while everything gets generated.
You would also run out of RAM way before everything could be loaded, and in
In the age of AI data centers, that is the last thing you want games to use more of.
Why not generate on the go and store things for only as long as they are needed?
Well, that only shifts the problem from the RAM onto the CPU.
Even pre-rendered content can cause stutters when loaded at runtime, and those are relatively cheap.
Krieger itself ran pretty badly on 2000's hardware, and then we haven't touched upon the worst part yet.
Developing a game in this manner is a massive pain in the butt.
Just lay out things the way you normally would.
For Krieger, the devs had to make a proprietary tool called Werkzeug.
You can see exactly how the enemy we looked at earlier is constructed step by step.
It's a really cool node-based system that combines everything.
When you launch the game, these are the exact steps the code retraces to generate the content.
But working in such software can be very time-consuming.
Games take tremendous man hours to develop as is, but it's not like this procedural technique.
Just disappeared, the industry adopted a bunch of them and made them quicker to iterate with.
For instance, the software I remade the wooden tiles with was specifically made for texture creation, even if the result is meant to be saved to disc.
Such procedural generation has made its way into pretty much every facet of game development covering textures, models, sounds, visual effects, and of course, word generation, just to name a few.
Is that these were introduced to make development faster and game worlds more varied, not to make file sizes smaller.
A few years after Krieger's release, one of the devs experimented with pack style compression and got the game down to an even more insane 87KB.
I wonder how much further it could be pushed today with all the knowledge gained since.
Regardless, Krieger was an experiment, an idea taken to the extreme.
It was never about practicality, but it goes to show that human ingenuity should
Crew tractor.
Oh, crew tractor.
Yeah.
Who told you could fish here?
I thought it was state property.
State?
Yeah.
This?
Yeah.
State?
It's the road, dude.
This ain't no state property.
This is private property.
What is your name in it?
I want you to know.
Yeah, it who who told you fish here?
Computer
Computer Idea.
Computer too
masterpiece.
Computer,
Computer Idea.
Computer too
masterpiece
I'm a genius.
Good morning Mr.
Freeman.
Looks like you're running late.
Hey Mr.
Freeman.
I had a bunch of messages for you, but we had a system crash about twenty minutes ago and I'm still trying to find my files.
Just one of those days, I guess.
They're waiting for you, Gordon.
Sorry, sir.
I've gotta stay at my boat.
You got the wrong airlock, Mr.
Freeman.
You know I can't let you through here.
Come on, Gordon!
You trying to get me into trouble.
Testing everything seems to be in order.
All right, Gordon.
Your suit should keep you comfortable through all this.
The specimen will be delivered to you in a few moments.
We'll take it from here.
Power to stage one emitters in three, two.
One
stage two emitters activating now.
I've just been informed that the sample is ready, Gordon.
It should be coming up to you any moment now.
Get away.
Shutting down the bees.
Attempting shutdown
Their idea of containment is to kill everyone with the project.
Now look, if anyone can end this catastrophe,
opposite end of the base, the rocket test plan, you might be able to worm your way through the tunnel and crack down whatever's left of the Lambda team.
Nice hit.
All right, we got him.
Wait a minute, then I'll let you in.
This is the supply depot for our first circuit team.
Quite a few handsome specimens were collected from the border world and brought back this way.
We suspect there is an immense portal over there, created by the intense concentration of
A single powerful being.
I hate to say this, Gordon, but you must kill it if you can.
If you're willing, my colleague is waiting for you at the main portal controls.
He will open the gates for you, Mr.
Freeman.
Do hurry.
All right, I can open the portal now.
Don't enter the beam until I give the okay.
Understood?
I will begin.
It's ready.
You want to
do it.
Type one if you have no idea what this is.
Hello.
Hello?
Hey.
Hello.
Hello?
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