The Hacker Project - a free online game

I guess the bigger question is - what are newbies to do with all those AP  I can tell you I'd be happy to sell some of them at times.

 

Now that would help us advance faster hrm...

I choose Black. (I like black) 

Bingo ;-)

The first in fact is made to show the level of weirdness you introduce when you try to make patterns based on the spelling of numbers. I'll give Moen a hint - it does have to do with the spelling of numbers... but the language used as a reference is not English.

That is correct. Can you explain why it's not 25, 26, 27 though?



Nothing wrong with Wiki ;-) That one was easy huh... we await your pattern.

  Aha... well this promises to be challenging to say the least. Probably will leave this for now and if it turns out to be a problem I'll try looking into this with a bit more detail.

Thanks for the reply Ivan Drago!   

Ok I stumbled across something interesting today -

It's a server which pretends to be a secret Omnicron server, but in fact it's a player server (there is no bulletin board and the server shows up as "private" not "secret"). Basically someone edited their server details (name and description) to make it look like a secret Omnicron server.

My question is this - is there a way to know who is behind the server? If I hack into it will it tell me or will I just have to try to infer what is going on from the logs I find?

Thanks.

Ok then...

This sequence is to show the dangers of the sequence which you posted previously: 

3,6,7,9,13,15,16,17,19,23,x,y,z

This one is a more "normal" sequence which you should be able to deduce 

4,2,5,2,6,0,3,7,6,4,6,9,0,8,x,y,z

Have a good one

I very much like the idea of Ebolla to have differential research - adjusting the characteristics of the program without changing the version number because it implies a few things:

1) You first need to research the file
2) Then you can optimize it how you feel good

The one thing which is the basic limiting factor of virii is the bandwidth usage - I would say that should not be alterable because you could really run into virii which are hyperefficient, even with just a little tweak to research. So I would leave bandwidth used by virii strictly linked to version number - just play around with the resources used.

I do have a question though - once you have modified a virii file, can you continue then to research it normally or can you only continue optimizing it till it gets to the cap (wherever the cap may eventually be)

This really would make things very interesting and open up a lot of options.

One thing I don't like about the option from ZacQuicksilver is the option of researching virii without increasing bandwidth use. I find that would be ... yes you know the phrase... brutally unbalancing. Sure, it may be more expensive and take long but it would be the road to riches and fame. (consider a v5.0 adware virus which could run and use only 3 bandwidth!)

There is an alternative way to implement this incidentally -

By the introduction of "coder skills". Consider the following:

Coder skill: Compression (smaller file sizes, bigger CPU usage/memory usage)
Coder skill: Memory manager (smaller memory use, bigger CPU usage/HD storage)
Coder skill: Process efficiency (smaller CPU usage, bigger memory use/HD storage)

The trick? Each coder could have only ONE of those skills, (chosen, randomly assigned, whatever take your pick on how to assign them and whether or not they could be changed)

The advantage of this is that it encourages cooperation between players and the formation of player groups, as the different skills would have different effects depending on the programs being coded. You could have the skill either be boolean (either you have it or you don't) or something which you need to develop and pay for (either in HPD or time or by other means)

I don't provide figures for the skills as I find Ebolla's figures for the adaptation of programs to be more than adequate.

Gopher. I liked gopher. If anyone even knows gopher... you can't use gopher any more... Now I am restricted to using other animals instead. 

Hi, My name is...

Real Name: I'll give you my initial - J.
Age: 34
Gender: Male
Date Joined: July 30th I think
Country: Belgium
Friends in game: Well, I'm looking  (I'm not sure if I should ask Hatejacket to be my friend!)
Rank Range (ie, top 20, top 50, top 100, etc) or Exact Rank: Top 100
Do you vote every day?: Except when I forget, yes.
Rate Hacker Project out of 10: 9 so far excellent game though, bit rough around the edges.

Goal: I am here for the same reason as always - to have fun ;-) Tried a whole bucketful of games, got involved in a few too. I find HP to be an interesting game at a VERY interesting stage.

*groan* Even numbers which do not contain the letter "e" Now that leaves me... 

Very tedious... that's how I did it too took me... at least 8 hours but ended up with a bucketful of secret IPs, basically if you find one secret IP you have potentially found them all.

 

There I feel better now.

This already exists ... it's what I do every day.

I am pretty sure I don't follow you...

If the initial reward of a virus disinfect mission is low I would think people would be more likely to actually install virii rather than steal them as they could reap some of the rewards of having the virus installed before it got killed due to a virus disinfect mission. As it is now virus disinfect missions are accepted as soon as they appear and your only chance is to hope that you don't generate a virus disinfect.

I am pretty sure players are already using PvP tactics to keep up their virii as long as possible - again I am not at all sure how this would change things. Unless you mean people trying to keep up virii going for a longer time in order to perform the disinfect mission themselves... (personally I am not sure you should even be allowed to disinfect your own virii... you aren't allowed to perform anti-hacker missions against yourself either  )

I find that virus disinfect missions are just weird...

A few things I have found:

1) Virus disinfect missions give good cash - so good in fact people spend time installing viruses... and then killing their own virii!!!
2) Trying to install a virus as a newbie on a public server is a very very frustrating waste of time. I know that there is a small chance there will be no mission generated, but it takes a lot of your meager resources to get a virus up and running... and often it's killed within hours. (Ok not if it's a file share virus, but those take even longer to do anything)
3) Virii installed by the stronger players are kept in place by the threat of retaliation from the stronger players.

Ok so here is my suggestion:

Have the rewards for virii disinfect missions scale up with time.

Literally they should be small to start with, but the longer a virus runs on a given machine, the higher the reward would go up.

Possible scenarios - run checks every 6 hours a virus is running (maybe have different times for different virii) say give it a 50% chance for the reward to go up. Start with a base reward which is maybe 20% of the current reward. As time passes the reward becomes more and more important... to the point when someone will attempt the disinfect mission even against the big virii out there (though for the sake of balance a cap should be placed on the reward offered maybe)

This could work in one of two ways: 1) A new mission is generated. Thus there are several missions available for each virus (cumulative returns) or 2) The value of existing missions is increased. The question with the second option is how much does someone get paid - the value of the mission when they accepted the mission or the value of the mission when they completed the mission? (The second case is somewhat open to abuse when someone completes a mission but does "not" press "complete" while waiting for the value of the mission to increase)...

Ok just some ideas from a younger player