Augh... in Off Topic

ID:189079
 
Oct 23 2003, 3:04 pm
Yet another evil introduced to the icon trading game genre...
http://games.byond.com/hub/Krairo/OriginalIconCrasher
I don't know WHAT they did to that file.... but it's absurdly effective at instantly crashing entire worlds. My question is, what the heck is it and is there any way to prevent it?
#1 Oct 23 2003, 3:07 pm
It's probably some file full of binary garbage. You could probably get the same effect by trying to use any old exe.
#2 Oct 23 2003, 4:12 pm (Edited on Oct 23 2003, 4:25 pm)
In response to Jon88 (#1)
Jon88 wrote:
It's probably some file full of binary garbage. You could probably get the same effect by trying to use any old exe.

Yeah, that's what I thought, until I found an actually copy to look at (thanks Enigmaster2002). It does contain some ASCII:

// BEGIN_INTERNALS
// END_INTERNALS
// BEGIN_FILE_DIR
#define FILE_DIR .
// END_FILE_DIR
// BEGIN_PREFERENCES
// END_PREFERENCES
// BEGIN_INCLUDE
// END_INCLUDE

So I figure, maybe it's some junk binary being manually added to an "empty" dme after being compiled by DM, than being renamed to have a dmi extension. I try adding some new binary junk over what's already written, making sure to keep the byte size the same. Save the dmi, run and no go... not a crash but Error, unable to read. Tried half a dozen more times with slight/different changes just to be sure. Can't seem to make an Unoriginal Icon Chrasher this way.

Maybe someone whose better with low level programming and using memory finders could reverse this well enough to see what's happening.

(Edit: scratch that bit about not being able to change the binary in a hexeditor... got it to work on the first try by using another hexeditor.)
#3 Oct 23 2003, 4:41 pm
In response to Grei (#2)
So I figure, maybe it's some junk binary being manually added to an "empty" dme after being compiled by DM, than being renamed to have a dmi extension. I try adding some new binary junk over what's already written, making sure to keep the byte size the same. Save the dmi, run and no go... not a crash but Error, unable to read. Tried half a dozen more times with slight/different changes just to be sure. Can't seem to make an Unoriginal Icon Chrasher this way.

heh Well the first problem I ran into while scanning through the file in a hex editor was that it has the number of states for the file listed as 1305 :). So maybe BYOND doesn't verify this and blows up trying to load that many states.
#4 Oct 23 2003, 6:31 pm
Has anyone contacted Dantom about it? Someone probably should.
#5 Oct 23 2003, 7:13 pm
Even though it is bad, I have to say, that is quite a clever method... Simply corrupting the .dmi file so the program cannot read it without crashing. I have to applaud that he is doing this without the use of a viral program or hacking... Though don't get me wrong, it is still a bad thing to do, though I couldn't care less with those games.