Afterlife

[RageAgainstVoid]

What do you make of Afterlife?

[RageAgainstVoid]

I should probably just do youtube videos (which would then be spammed by demands for the program ), but there's some experimental stuff going and I need to know about any problems on various configurations.

[Zeuter]

minecraft timelapse tiltshift shader autism server youtube video

[RageAgainstVoid]

minecraft timelapse tiltshift shader autism server youtube video

Brilliant title.

Just for the record though, I kinda cringe everytime I hear Minecraft as a genre title, the same way we cringe about Dota as a genre title. Minecraft was not the first to do this, it wasn't even the best, in many ways several steps backward from previous efforts, it just happened to popularize it. But in this case, I'm not mad or jelly at Markus Persson though, I think he's a cool guy, and he did a couple of things well that others have not given proper attention, and all came together in the right mix of things in the right time, I like that he's having that success. I'm just confused why the market has been surrendered so entirely to so few, when it seems so obvious to me how things need to be improved. What I am aiming for will not really look like Minecraft, at most resemble the process of creating content, like not every FPS looks and plays the same. Also, other than technology, the gameplay too has been so unevolved so far. The makers have been way too focused on shoddy (random) generation of 101 content, it's all just the uninspired shell/treadmill of a game/rpg, like MMOs. I don't understand why no one picked that up and went all out on world/story/rpg of the epic classics, but I guess that takes too much actual talent, the same reason why almost all real retro indie games suck so much, even though they are so simple to "do". I'm not saying I have that talent all on my own. Fortunately, I don't need to, knowing people 'round here. =D

Things are going sooo slow though, so much to do, so little time and energy, stupid real life shit to take care of, underpayed and bad day jobs to pay for even worse off-days, annoyances with gov office, and assholes trying to bring me down.

[RageAgainstVoid]

I don't know. I have such wild mood swings. One moment I am all enthusiastic and brimming, the next I am all hopeless doubt. I guess it's not really important if this shit ever gets somewhere, odds are it doesn't, but you know, when you got nothing, you gotta belief in something, even if it's silly, I guess thinking and talking about that stuff is just my way to keep going, defend my soul.

[Kaz]

RAV why are you not naked and in my bed

[RageAgainstVoid]

Believe me when I say, it is one of my greatest regrets in life that I have not been naked in your bed.

[RageAgainstVoid]

Ok, so this is the situation:

Since I haven't got enough feedback here if or what the problem is, I whored this out to someplace else to see what happens. Well, turns out some people actually do get scanner warnings. But here is the thing, when I check it at http://www.virustotal.com/ all it gets is a few warnings but dozens of OK. Those few alerts are only "potential problems", from heuristic and placeholder matches, indicated with "Gen", "Generic", "Possible", "Behav" in the names, and these are coming from rather fringe scanners known for being picky / generalizing, while the bigger commercial scanners such as Kaspersky, etc are totally cool on this, like they should since this totally is ok. But now the fucked up part: Actual people with actual scanners installed on their machines too tell me that when they scan it no problems, but when they want to actually run it, their scanners are suddenly making a fuss, somewhere between a caution right up to outright deleting it on the spot.

Well, I have an idea what's up about that. The way my code loads and manages its memory is something special, but I can't tell you how fucking disappointed I am shitty scanners make this a problem. And right now I totally am not into making major rollbacks and fucking around low level all over again. Goddamnit!

So since only about 3-5 people here had the courage to take a look at the program, I finally took the time to make some videos for youtube, and that's how I roll from now on. The videos are totally horrible quality, mostly because I have hardly any space left on my disk, and it really is ridiculous to record and encode 50 gigbytes of video for a 50 kilobyte of code, and half my face is laughing at that, the other is crying tears, but that's life, and now you get to know Afterlife:


Since I was at it, I also made a video of last years Cuboom for those who haven't tried that either.


I'm thinking about merging both, grey Cuboom being an intro to fancy Afterlife. Kinda useless exercise, I should be doing other stuff, but maybe I end up doing it one day or another.

[Cassiel]

Demoscene!

AV heuristics are generally pretty bad. What are you doing for memory management? Allocating the chunk upfront and creating objects contiguously for fast access? Going straight to __asm__ and forcing everything to sit in cache? Calling low-level or undocumented WinAPI funcs? I'm trying to imagine what could cause an AV to flag, short of the standard stuff like hooking or injecting code pages.

[RageAgainstVoid]

Terminology overload!

It is kinda self-hooking/self-injecting, the way the program is structured and unfolding. My micro kernel has the ability to dynamically load and unload sections of code as is opportune for an efficient footprint, on and off, along with overseeing all other allocations. It's like its own little OS bootstrapping itself out.

You mentioned demoscene, and the scanner problems are a very common problem there for similar reasons one way or the other, apparently creativity is bad. I shouldn't be surprised, I know I'm a dirtbag, but I thought it's ok, as far as online scanners told me they are. Bitches.

The "map" you edit in Afterlife, really is just supposed to be a smaller sprite/tile on the screen, from which to construct the world and creatures, like in the bitmap engines of classic rpg, but with the ability to have everything uniquily manipulable and destructible on the run. To have this fine granularity of the world run like that on mid range PC, I need all the efficiency I can possibly get. Well, at least that was the plan anyway.

[Zeuter]

Speaking of makeup, I went to see a Ryoji Ikeda performance last weekend. Super rad.

[RageAgainstVoid]

So here is the conclusion, and hopefully this kind of shit stays resolved for any future releases.

There are several stages of warnings that built up as I progressed development.

1.
When checking earlier works of mine with online scanners, there is one generic warning from one irrelevant scanner out of more than fourty scanners. This one warning probably has to do with the weird compiler setup of mine. No actual people with actual scanners installed ever mentioned a problem.

2.
When I worked on that kernel for all my future works, an online scan revealed that AntiVir also now gives a generic warning. Even though this is one of the major scanners, it didn't seem to be of actual relevance in practice other than that it maybe gave a recommendation to run in sandbox mode. I'd see this as acceptable, given how many advantages it has to my development. I haven't heard much of a problem so far, but I haven't had many people testing on that stage isolated either.

3.
When I employed code compression, an additional 2 to 4 generic warnings were given by fringe scanners. Nothing major. Or so I thought. I have tested it live on various computers over the weeks, never had a problem, have it integrated into my auto-compile pipeline for months now, haven't even given it a second thought. It's cool keeping the download as small as possible, and can have this or that other benefit as well. I even used a well known open-source tool for it, UPX, to prevent any problems, I mean really, why would major scanners have a problem with something so standard, because it actually is, at least in fields like embedded systems / robotics engineering, so what gives? Well, while normally scanning the code has the scanners relatively calm, I couldn't have known by myself how all the fuck haywire many even major ones get when actually executing it. So this made a lot of testers in the last couple days worrying. I had to upload here several different builds to see what exactly gives what warning, and tried to have new testers go in without preconception, as few as possible to not sully our reputation unnecessarily.

I reuploaded to the first post the latest version of Afterlife that seems to make the littlest problems, to prevent we get flagged here for "distributing malware". It would be nice if some people that had problems before would bother telling me if they have less to none now, so I can grow more confident in the current state of development and put my mind to other things. I'm just glad to hope not to have do any actual rollbacks.

[Cassiel]

Ah, UPX packing will actually cause a lot of AV to flag simply because it was (maybe still is, I don't know) so common in malware. Now you're probably just as likely to see people hand-roll LZO or ZLIB in, after a resource extraction and XOR decryption pass.

Any hooking or injection will do it, too. Usually I wouldn't expect that unless you had something like a combination of CreateRemoteThread and WriteProcessMemory, which you probably aren't doing if it's self-injecting, but who knows. The heuristics are pretty simplistic.

[RageAgainstVoid]

Ah, UPX packing will actually cause a lot of AV to flag simply because it was (maybe still is, I don't know) so common in malware.

I was expecting that for this reason some might specifically target innocent UPX. But I figured it's ok since the important scanners didn't flag it at file scan all the while; but turns out all the same suddenly made a fuss at execution. That makes me guess it's a detail of the actual two-stage load/run that UPX just happens to share with common malware, maybe something so basic that any such process pretty much must employ, so that's why only the runtime guardian shields of the cooler scanners trigger.

Now you're probably just as likely to see people hand-roll LZO or ZLIB in, after a resource extraction and XOR decryption pass.

Yeah, I had something like that in mind at first too, but then I was like "Naah, that shit will get flagged for sure, save yourself the time, be a good boy, go the official route"... well DUH. But even if something specific is not flagged now, it probably eventually will, eventually some asshole will use something similar to wreck havok, and the scanners will be made to ident-mark it at code that by itself has nothing to do with that havok, just because it's maybe the easy quick fix for an overworked AV crew.

It would have been nice to have, but turns out in terms of lasting relationship with a greater userbase it's just destined for trouble.

Any hooking or injection will do it, too. Usually I wouldn't expect that unless you had something like a combination of CreateRemoteThread and WriteProcessMemory, which you probably aren't doing if it's self-injecting, but who knows. The heuristics are pretty simplistic.

I just don't get why out of 46 scanners only AntiVir is the last one that still flags the latest Afterlife, and it's annoying the hell out of me. Boom5 isn't flagged at all, and the difference of any significance to that matter is the custom kernel. But honestly, it doesn't do anything that fancy in terms of interfacing and asm. Maybe I'll have to make test builds line by line and have it scanned to figure out where's it at exactly. Blargh... I'll keep you informed what's up with that if/when I find it.

[Fledermaus]

I got a "Afterlife.zip is not commonly downloaded and could be dangerous." warning when DLing it bit since I like to live dangerously I downloaded it anyway. No other anti-virus warnings though. Played for a minute and won.
Running AVG.

I should probably just do youtube videos (which would then be spammed by demands for the program :roll:), but there's some experimental stuff going and I need to know about any problems on various configurations.

Can you also do youtube videos of you reading your long posts so I don't have to?

[RageAgainstVoid]

Well, actually I did want to do that, to make the video more interesting, but unfortunately couldn't get my mic to work that day. But do not despair, you will hear of me in the future! That is in addition to my long posts that you "have" to read. I am very generous when it comes to sharing my opinion.

[RageAgainstVoid]

Afterlife so far was decidedly impractical for this release. When I put in features such as colour picking, saving to file, and variable cube size to make it semi-productive, should I then:

Release it immediately and repurpose my forum section so that people can post and comment voxel art there. People get some fun, I get to see what can be done, and figure what should be done, and can take my time to work at my own pace on whatever comes up.

Or keep it under wraps for a select few I would work with on something specific, and feel all elitist about it, and pressured for results in a huge workload and little time, when I'd rather relax.

Hrrrrrm.

[Turkey_Slayer]

I don't really see the point in putting the stuff in your forum section at this juncture. Just make a general thread for it here.

[RageAgainstVoid]

You're right... so far. I've been having a lot of crazy pipedreams of what might happen here if we play our cards right on this.. if that is what we want at this point.