MechPilot524

NavyField: Resurrection of the Steel Fleet. It's now known as NavyField: Fleet Mission after it was acquired by a Hong Kong company, KupaiSky, circa 2017. The game's website is here. It's a very quiet game now, but used to be somewhat popular during its heyday. Some fans in Europe saved a version of the game previously and run a fan server, but it's extremely small. But are there any clues as to where the password in the main executable might be?

So I've got 50,300 normal characters in one line consisting with the occasional null character. It seems pretty scrambled; from the seemingly random brackets and parentheses, it probably isn't code? I'm scrolling through the file and I've found a few spots where it lists the entire alphabet. Should I expect a password to be an exact number of bytes or characters, or for it to be defined in a certain way? I've got maybe 2,200 lines here to sift through, and I'm not sure what the environment around such a password might look like. In the main executable, I did a little sifting and it may use zlib (it has that inflate 1.1.3 Copyright 1995-98 Mark Adler, as well as unzip 0.15 Copyright 1998 Gilles Vollant). Both of which seem to be for open-source decompression, though zlib also seems to deal in decryption. A couple hundred lines later, I also see the mark "Microsoft Base Cryptographic Provider v1.0".

Oh yeah. I've been a fan of this game for years. What I do know is that this is a proprietary in-house game engine coded by one author who left the small developer a decade ago, and with him left their ability to do much with the code. It's been years and years of band-aids since the author parted ways. It's also been so long that any trails into the game's actual source code are cold. I was in a modding community and we have a tool to open the game's graphical Sprite files and audio assets, but we never had anything to look at gameplay mechanics, partly because we couldn't mess with them. Maybe it's because they've been encrypted all these years. On many files N++ and HxD can make some sense of them, but these .data files make no sense. I don't really understand what you mean by N++ encoding - you mean DOS vs Windows ANSI? Marius' assessment makes sense, I'll see if I can break the encryption. It can't be anything too crazy, right?

My HD 7950 and R9 290 worked pretty well. I was happy with them. Used to have a 980 Ti Matrix, but I got a really great offer for it and resold it. Was a pretty solid card So last December, I bought a Sapphire-reference Vega 64. The card seemed pretty phenomenal, and out of the box was a decisive improvement over a 290. At the beginning I was able to undervolt and tune it nicely. But then Adrenalin ruined the experience... after a certain driver version, games would randomly crash to desktop, or rarely even brick my PC requiring me to force it off. I probably would have had a better experience with a more common card that AMD would have invested better drivers into, like the RX 4/580. But after my experience with my Vega 64's Adrenalin drivers, even after reverting all my tuning, I caved in and bought an RTX 2070. Nvidia's definitely got more going on the software/driver side, even if AMD is perfectly capable of making some good silicon.

It is believed this file contains attributes for the game's various naval guns. For example, cannon X has range of Y, with an accuracy rating of 22. It probably also specifies requirements to equip, such as the cannon requires a slot of 100 space, weighs 44 tons, and requires a level 45 gunner to operate. I do not expect it to encapsulate other files such as images or sounds, as those game assets are already cataloged and known. It's probably not compressed, as the game's sprites and audio are not compressed. I wouldn't know if it's encrypted.

I'm looking to read the contents of a .data file which is part of a game which came out a long time ago, going into beta circa 2004. It's called NavyField: Fleet Mission. It would be too easy if the file was in plaintext or if it was properly Romanized, but of course... it isn't. Maybe NP++ isn't using the right shiftkey, or maybe it has a rudimentary level of data encryption; I don't know. Copying and pasting the Asian characters hasn't yielded anything that makes sense; in Chinese or Japanese it looks like random characters giving me random words, like "Moth" or "Feeling" in a file that based on its name should be talking about the naval guns in the game. I've had a little exposure to bitstream analysis and I have fledgling knowledge of programming and coding, but I don't know the approach for something like this. I also don't know of any tools I can use to derive things like frame width, or how to see which bits/bytes are checksums, if any bytes are going to be markers. Lastly, I'm clueless as to how programming languages change if they're made by a foreign country - one whose primary language is very different from English. I've uploaded the "Hong Kong" and "China" versions of the "same file" along with the North America file. Interestingly, they do not contain the Chinese/Japanese characters, but I've had just as much success reading them. How could I go about analyzing, processing, or reverse engineering the files? Gunset_EN-US.Data Gunset_ZH-CN.Data Gunset_ZH-HK.Data

I personally picked a 500GB NVMe SSD over a 1TB SATA SSD. My situation though I already have a 1TB HDD for my games and stuff, the NVMe is my boot drive now. And I plan on replacing the 1TB HDD at some point since SSDs aren't too expensive, compared to what they were when I made my first build. Honestly, I think you can get by with the 500GB SSD until you save enough to buy another storage drive. And that storage drive can be a 1TB HDD if you want. Or even a 1TB SATA SSD if you save long enough. Those are my two bits.

I have no idea how to help you but from the rumors I've heard it's just Aura-Sync's fault.

I already have an Asus ROG-Strix X470-F motherboard on my Ryzen 5 2600 rebuild, plus 16GB Trident Z RGB RAM. There's a bit of a predicament. It's a super first world problem, but I am concerned about RGB software and how bloated I've heard it can be. Here's the dilemma: - Asus Aura-Sync will not work with non-Asus peripherals. - I prefer Corsair peripherals, had a K70 that I loved, but I hear iCue is pretty bloated and hogs system resources. - I'm not really willing to pay a ROG tax - why pay $150 for a ROG keyboard when I can get a K70 that I like for $110, since Corsair RGB won't match with Aura-Sync anyway? Similar story with mice. I don't care too much about functionality or extra features, it's just for the PC and peripherals gracing my dorm room. I just don't want bloated software that takes up significantly more system resources than they should. If I can get RGB to work properly that's fine, otherwise I'd have to get maybe just plain LED stuff. The horror, I know.

Yes, the system boots from the SSD with the HDD disconnected. That is not the problem. The problem is, now I have 147GB unallocated data that refuses to be added to the existing partition on the hard drive. MiniTool does not want to do anything with the partition now that it is dynamic, will not recognize the 4 misc partitions on the HDD, and will not convert the partition to basic without me paying $60 for the professional version. Windows Disk Management is acting similarly, except it's not trying to sell me more software and it won't even try to convert the partition back to basic. Per an article on Microsoft's website, doing so via Disk Management will be like reformatting the drive and will erase the 400GB data I already have there. Another problem: The "Non-System Storage" partition actually used to be drive D. It is not letting me reassign that partition back to drive D. It's starting to look like I need to wait until I buy a 1TB SSD and try and transfer everything over to a clean piece of hardware, unless anybody has any other bright ideas...

So I recently refreshed my system with a Ryzen 5, X470, and a Samsung 970 Evo 500GB SSD ("Disk 1"). Prior to this, I was operating my installation of Windows 10 Home 64-Bit on an i5-2500k and a chipset from that time period. I had only a Seagate Barracuda 1TB hard drive ("Disk 0"), which I will continue using until replacing that drive in the future. I gave the drive two partitions. I had a (C:) partition for the OS, and an (D:) partition for mass storage (games, large files/programs, etc). (C:) was sized about 147.55GB because it itself was migrated from a weird 160GB HDD, then (D:) took up the rest. I guess Windows made its own partitions or something, they are pretty small and had no label. Fast forward to today: I installed the new platform and used Samsung software to clone partition C onto the 970. I went into the UEFI and disabled every boot source aside from Windows Boot Manager on the 970 Evo, to ensure the system wouldn't boot off the HDD. I opened up Disk Management after loading the OS, to find the HDD was offline. Okay, I said, it's just because the other disk also has a C. I figured I could fix it, right clicked the disk and set it online. It proceeded to reassign my drive letters. I wiped the original C partition off the HDD, then it asked me some question about making the disk dynamic, with the caveat that I wouldn't be able to boot off anything except the boot disk. I said yes, now the mass storage partition turned green, it had become partition F after I activated the HDD. I manually reassigned it to E, but could not reassign it to D. The real issue, though, is that it won't let me extend E partition to occupy the unallocated space that the original OS copy took up. It keeps saying there isn't enough space. Screenshot of current state is attached - the only thing different is that "Non-System Storage" has been reassigned to letter (E:) since taking that screenshot. What do I do next?

If it's causing an absence this long, then it can't exactly be the common cold.

Yeah, I honestly don't think they're sacking him. The only conspiracy to me that makes any sense is that if they fire him now AMD stock prices will be hurt, they may want to wait for a suitable candidate before officially sacking him. But like we mentioned earlier he's overall done good enough with the initial launch of RTG/Crimson and the 480/580.

The original Titan, yes. The original Titan was definitely aging when Hawaii came out. Par the 290X/390X beating the 780 Ti, at a later point you might be right. IIRC some time after they rebranded the 200 series and were about to drop Fiji they released Crimson software for the first time, replacing the older Catalyst control center, and also a massive optimization. That optimization may have propelled the Hawaii chips, which had more VRAM and better bandwidth to surpass the 780 Ti. Before the 300-series rebrand they released the R9 285, which only used 2GB VRAM and a 256-bit bus but incorporated technologies like color compression and the like, and beat out the 280X with a 3GB(?) VRAM and 384-bit bus. All the reviewers were like "this isn't that important it's probably a tech demo", but I guess they used those software improvements to finally get the full use out of the existing silicon. TLDR what I know is this, the R9 290X trailed the 780 ti when I was building a PC in the summer of 2014, and the next year when the 300 series came out they made a noticeable optimization driver-wise for all GCN cards.

Nah, I'm gonna keep using it in various builds. It's powering a frankensteined former IT PC with a 2500k right now, but it'll go in my next build which is gonna be Ryzen 5.

Club3D RoyalAce. It doesn't have the memory clock of the Sapphire Vapor-X, but it has a faster chip clock. The Hawaii chips were flagship, high-end cards of their time after all. Not quite on par with the 780 and 780 ti but competitively a good alternative price-wise. I don't remember prices being inflated by miners back then like they were again recently, even though Hawaii was also all the rage for that sort of thing, but that was my first real graphics card and I hadn't been watching the market that long. *Edit: I also liked it because it had a metal shroud, not a plastic one, and it had a really nice backplate with an engraving as well as a painted design.

Well between DX12 and Freesync and how good a lot of these cards are, many cards won't be going obsolete soon. My R9 290 I mentioned before can still game pretty well and still likely has a future.

Well the FX series in general was really hot, but the 9000's were the worst and 220W is still a very hefty TDP. Point being that the FX-9590 was AMD's flagship processor at the time.

Hmm, Vega 20? On the high end that could make or break it for RTG. This TweakTown article says it's gonna be 7nm, 1TB/s on a 4096-bit bus with up to 32GB HBM2. (source) But that just makes Koduri's absence more strange/disconcerting. Vega 20, after the current Vega launch, will be even more important. Vega 11 has already been ordered, which I guess is a relief, but it seems they haven't finalized the Vega 20 fab process.

Maybe. As pointed above though if they were gonna dismiss him wouldn't they just hire an interim director and dismiss him? And I guess the whole HBM2 situation wasn't pretty - Linus did point out in his Vega review that there were and still are supply issues on HBM2, like there's only one supplier. Maybe that doesn't explain some of Vega's other downsides. But he did good on the 480 and 580, the miners ruined it (no offense to miners).

Hmm. Nvidia is very deeply entrenched in mobile products. AMD APUs have always been good because Intel integrated graphics have always been trash (I think someone ran a 1080p benchmark and a 4790k on IGPU was about the same as an A10 APU)*. You had the 940M and now the 940MX, to which there was never really an alternative. And the 10X0 series desktop cards have been in laptops these days - no way Vega will be a good mobile card and Polaris can't touch a 1080 in a laptop. AMD has a better chance on desktops, where you have things like FreeSync. AMD's had some good entries there - RX 4/580 were fundamentally good, it's just data mining got 'em. And my first true GPU was a Hawaii, an R9 290 I keep around to this day. *Edit: Trivial but found it. Gamers Nexus tested a new Athlon chip and in their benchmarks included a 4790k running IGPU and an A10-7870k. The 7870k handily beat the 4790k in general, titles I noticed were GTA 5 Normal at 1080p and GRiD Medium at 1080. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxukB3GZyMg

Raja Koduri was an important guy but back in 2013 RTG was technically still just AMD, it wasn't as autonomous as it is now. He was made the chief of RTG when the Fury X cards with HBM dropped, in the summer of 2015. At one of the conferences where they hyped Fury and revealed the Crimson software suite, RTG became sorta independant and he was the official chief. So he may not have had the level of influence he could have on Vega, depending on when they were R&Ding the chip and idk when they started that process.

Maybe so, but RTG is in a better position now vs Nvidia (they can actually sorta compete across the market) than what AMD had when Intel dropped Devil's Canyon (Haswell refresh with improved TIM and binning). AMD had the FX-9590, only capable of competing in heavily multithreaded applications, and overclocked in gaming (difficult to do because Vishera was a space heater!) couldn't even match an i5. And AMD was trying to sell them to compete with the i7 K-SKUs on price, though they eventually shifted it to match an i5. So yeah, compared to that market where you really were only gonna pick AMD processors on a budget and snag an 8350 instead of a pricier i5, Ryzen is a miracle and RTG can at least compete.

I think for Vega it's largely too late for anything really noticeable. Drivers, sure, but that's it aside from maybe improving HBM2 availability and fab deals. My hope is that Lisa Su might influence the next generation of cards (or the generation after), finding the right people and laying the right groundwork as she did for Zen.

Probably. I guess it kinda depends on the game though - how well it scales at various resolutions and whatnot. Some games like World of Tanks are only really optimized for 1080p and don't scale so well to 1440p or 4k. Older games may be that way as well. Big, demanding titles probably won't run close to the limit of the monitor refresh. But the frames should be pretty good and very playable. (inb4 someone links some actual benchmarks)