Pretty neat stuff so far mate

Cool so far. It's a good balance between cute and the harder stuff.

>Eugh, you wish you had a gas mask or something.
>Didn't think that she could turn off her nose
It's interesting (and somewhat endearing) that after apparently 150 years in a robot body she still seems to default to thinking as if she weren't. I wonder what that says about her?

>>86956
Relevant point, actually. That came up earlier in the story during the flashback sequence.
>"You're probably still adjusting. Try drinking some water. You don't actually need it but your mind hasn't caught up to that yet."

>>86956
Now that you mention it, I am curious how long the 150 years have been in subjective time (which possibly shorter than total time due to relativity and/or long spaceflight hibernation).

Hey everyone!

I just wanna say thanks for sticking with the quest so far, I'm really happy to see all the wild suggestions. [Yes, even the 800 enhance knockers.] Anyway, I'm going to be out of town 'till Friday for Thanksgiving, so I won't be able to update 'till then. In mean time, I have a simple question I wanted to run by you.

Since the series is rather... splashy it should come as no surprise that Marie & Co's outfits are gonna get increasingly colorful as it goes on. I just wanted to get a feel for the idea of throwing a couple design sheets out and letting you all whip up a new outfit whenever they change (a la Unnatural Selection) or if you'd prefer I just throw my own design on when prompted.

Thanks!

>>87131
Paper dolls are always fun, and if you put some up, we'll play.

Everyone loves a good round of paper doll modes.

>Unfortunately, you are not faster than the spike.
So... why stop the last update right before it hit?

Was there a way to avoid it we didn't think of, or was there a roll we failed? Or was it unavoidable and you just broke things up for tension?

>>87277
One part tension one part 'oops I lost track of time and now it's 2am I got somewhere to be in the morning'

follow-up: Sorry if it felt like I projected an illusion of choice there. Quest will be continuing once the current thread gets archived though.

Nah, nothing to apologize for. Non-choices and tension pauses are legit things to be used. I was just curious.

Apollo 2014/12/04(Thu)13:15 No. 87417 ID: bd6306
File 141772770957.jpg - (508.82KB , 1319x1440 , image.jpg )

It's. A long, slow day at work @.@

Here's a doodle of Haley! She'll be the first other uplifted person we'll be seeing once the next update rolls out assuming I don't die of boredom first.

So just wondering, but any Robert J. Sawyer inspiration here? I mean, the title of the quest is the title of one of his books, and the whole uploading-human-mind-into-robot-body is the concept of one of his books. I suppose I could be just jumping on a coincidence because I happen to like his books but I thought I'd mention it haha.
I'm really liking this quest by the way!

>>87503
Thanks! And it's completely coincidental! But now that I'm looking into his books I need to go read some.

I just want to say that Rollback is one of the most awesome quests I don't really read. That is to say that I skim it whenever I see it updated because the artwork and style are tops and the writing is great as well, but much like Nan quest it's not one I'm really active in.

>>87865
aaahhhh you're too kind, I don't even know what to say. Thanks!

Anonymous 2014/12/18(Thu)09:53 No. 87977 ID: 185cb8
File 141892518575.png - (13.83KB , 911x623 , Rollback Timeline 02.png )

I thought this quest was getting a little date heavy, so I went and threw together a timeline.

Probably going to have to completely redo this later as we're dealing with unreliable memories and/or time travel. But maybe it'll be useful as a reference for the moment.

Reposted to fix obligatory draft 1 stupid typo.

http://i.imgur.com/V1CzBVN.gif
>Enhance Knockers

So I was just wondering what people's opinion of the quest so far is. Is there anything you think I can do better/improve on? Thanks!

I think it's p cool, so far. There's a nice balance of the silly cute funny stuff and the horror story stuff.

I have been enjoying it so far. The art is great and the plot is intriguing.

Anonymous 2015/04/01(Wed)17:25 No. 89987 ID: 5db52c
File 142793432595.png - (14.81KB , 911x623 , Rollback Timeline 03.png )

Updooted.

The way this quest has been going, I kind of feel this thing is terribly incomplete not covered in blood coolant splatter.

Apollo 2015/04/02(Thu)00:37 No. 90001 ID: defceb
File 142796023555.png - (40.76KB , 911x623 , ALittleBloodAdded.png )

>>89987
I love having this available.

>The way this quest has been going, I kind of feel this thing is terribly incomplete not covered in coolant splatter.

Like this?

>I love having this available.
You're welcome!

>Like this?
There we go. That's great.

Hey, what if this entire quest is taking place inside Haley's head? What if Marie is just a mental construct trying to fix something that went wrong with Haley's mind? All the flashbacks either seem to involve Haley, or are rather abstract.

>>90001
I felt this was too perfect to not slip into the quest summary on the wiki.

>>90200
Did you add the the char info too? It looks great!

Oh no, I just put the timeline in.

Well thank you!

And thank you to the mystery contributor!

>>/quest/634726
What I want to know is, if it's friendly now, why did it spike Marie when she ran away with Morgan? Or... is the issue that it can be taken over by whatever's happening to the Grid, just like Marie almost was back then? We are off the Grid right now, after all.

>>90330
I'm pretty sure we're still on the grid. We entered when we left the stairs to help Rudy, and I didn't see us cross a clear boundary out since.

>why might he be benevolent before but not now?
Part of the problem is the perception hacking. We don't actually know who attacked us, who helped us, and who might have been hacked to look like someone else at the time. We literally can't trust what we've seen.

One theory- he might have attacked us to render us disabled long enough to install the new eye. Which might be supposed to 'help' us.

>>90341
The eye? That's an interesting theory... Wait, did we ask Morgan if the eye was installed before the spike?

Another theory: There are multiple of Spooky, some of which are hostile and some of which aren't, similarly to how there are multiple of us (or perhaps exactly the same, with some of the alternates of us being Spookies).

>>90349
Actually, yeah, we did.
>>/questarch/614187

Kills that theory if we had the red-eye before the spook spiked us.

Although Morgan was sorta high at the time. Not 100% sure we can trust his memory to be accurate.

I want to comment on all these theories but to do so would be to unleash spoilers on all of you.

But I really like reading them!

say, apollo, why are you not in the irc? come hang out with the cool kids

>>90400
Promise not to laugh?

I don't know the first thing about IRC and couldn't figure out how to keep a non-guest username so I decided to figure it out later and then kept pushing later back.

>>90401
Well, mibbit is fairly straightforward since you just have to choose Rizon from the dropdown and type in #tgchan for the channel.

Mibbit is kindof bad, though. I personally use Chatzilla Standalone. Doesn't require firefox, and it's quite functional. Only problem is links don't turn purple after you click them.

I just realize that bear claw thing and dialogue is Morgan remembering a previous job. The war crimes thing makes me wonder... was Marie landing on him an accident? Or was her mission to assassinate him?

Wait, is THAT why red-eye dude attacked her? Because she was saving a bad guy? Holy shit.

>>90404
Hey now

It wasn't technically a war crime anymore

>>90404
That would be a lot of effort to kill some guy who had already done whatever it was and did not even seem to be in charge of it. It would be kind of like sending a time traveler to kill one guy who was previously a German soldier at a concentration camp in WWII.

>>90401
i use hexchat. its strong point is that it's not nearly as terrible as kvirc.
also to register a name you write /nickserv help and follow instructions (the instructions are to write /nickserv register [nickname] [password] [email])
then to log in you /nick [nickname] to change your name and /nickserv identify [password]. pretty much all dedicated irc clients just do that automatically every time you enter ircscapeland though.
it's really all retroactively futuristic.

shit
shit I think I have a theory
shiiiiit.

"Marie" is a composite of two(maybe more) previous 'inhabitants' of that shell.
All these out-of-sequence memories and discordant events? Corruptions brought on by ghost data.
To explain, when a program is deleted it doesn't actually GO anywhere, it's just switched from read-only to writeable memory and the bits get overwritten when you next save a thing.
But when you start involving things like brains, that can probably get a bit screwy.

The result is that the marie that wound up as a mars robot and the marie that was hospitalized because of her everything are two distinct people that have been fumbled together into a sort of half-stable amalgam, with several conflicting memories and some messed up internal processes.
Hell, the mars marie might have a messed-up timeclock because of mars' shorter years.

There's probably a lot of holes in this but it's 3:30 AM and I'm typing this thing before I pass out and forget it.

>>90425
She's not remembering anything from her time before the uplift, though.

>>90433
I'm not sure that means we won't though, despite Haley's comments.

I mean, sure, we haven't seen any memories from the 20 years before her uplift. But we also haven't seen any from the 40 years between her uplift and mars. Or the the hundred years between Mars and the crash. (And we've gotta see Roderick in one of these, eventually). There's a lot of holes.

I mean, the question here seems to be if we're really uplifting people from one body to another, or if the process just creates a new robot-person with a non-identical personality, and a copied set of memories that fade away. It's a question of identity, and if the process actually saves anyone. (Although it's real messy where you draw the line between transmission error in a consciousness changing bodies and creating loss-y cloned forks).

...at least that's what I think Haley is worried about, since she focused right in on questions about pre-uplift memory retention, and personality shifts.

>>90405
If your boss feels obligated to use that many qualifiers when explaining whether or not your next assignment constitutes a war crime, the smart move is to have yourself reclassified as a conscientious objector ASAP.

>>/quest/635514
Well, it's a horror quest. Everything is a trap. I don't think anyone was really expecting to be completely helpless though. In previous instances, we had room to try and react or limit the damage or do something.

This time we either completely missed whatever we were supposed to be doing as soon as the vision started, or we were doomed to be bashed into unconsciousness as soon as we clicked that button.

...that or we just crashed ourself with that infinitely reproducing anti-hack program when it hit an integer overflow, or ate up all our processing power. It's possible we turned an encounter we could have walked away from into a strait up loss.

>>90400
>>90403
>>90412

Yay I'm in now. I think. Maybe. I hope? Does this mean I'm a cool kid now?

>>90460
Yes.

>>90460
so wait, obviously the name apollo is taken. which moniker did you register?

>>90476
_Apollo_

>>/quest/635976
Pixie-butt! Sydney clothes sure are popular.

I didn't realize the cutaway was an actual tattoo. I thought it was just stylization in the thigh day pic.

Apollo 2015/04/23(Thu)23:01 No. 90536 ID: defceb
File 142985528715.png - (92.59KB , 840x600 , HaleyTats.png )

>>90514
110% canon! Why does she have them? I'll never tell! (But she might.)

Also the Red Giant themed undies are too fun to draw. I can't stop. Save me.

>>90536
sigh, ok. not that it's hard to figure out but, >>90545

Holy crap, this quest is like sci-fi Twin Peaks with time travel.

A lot of the story is rather confusing but I really dig what you're doing with the visual/memory mindfucks, Apollo.

>>/quest/646353
I really like it that Marie went with an appeal to history argument. She's lived long enough to have seen the trends she's talking about firsthand, probably in more than one iteration.

>>/quest/647785
"No! We must stop the hackers" they shouted
The radio said "No, /quest/. You are the hackers"
And then Marie was run by Unix.

>>91860
I just had a good laugh from this one.
Thank you.

Yeah the quest is turning out to be a competition between hackers- us, and whoever's corrupting the facility. The facility hackers have the advantage because they know what they're doing, but Marie seems resistant to anything but our suggestions so there's that.

So, I was thinking that Marie needs coolant because pushing her systems- especially using super strength and speed, generates heat. But without a radiator or something to exchange heat, that only helps to a certain extent. Circulating blood-coolant will only serve to slow down a failure, make her heat up more uniformly instead of at at points.

At which point I realized Marie's ears have an actual, functional purpose! They're cooling fins! She's a rabbit!

Which would actually give her a small performance advantage over an otherwise comparable android-body model. Downside is if she's circulating coolant through the ears they're an easy target to damage and cause a leak.

Now hold on a doggone minute!
>"Uplift Machine" doesn't sound much like a device to transfer a brain to a cybernetic body, but more akin to straight mind-uploading
>'We' (the voices in Marie's head) appear to to be the former residents of this facility
>Marie's brain is chock-full of a massive amount of data
Maria is acting as a data-lifeboat for the facility's former residents.

Man, we went into this encounter fully functional for like the first time since thread 1, and we still got our ass kicked.

Poor Marie. I can't help but feel like we completely failed to leverage her strengths correctly.

>>/quest/657143
Honestly, I'm far from sold on that theory. Of course, it could all be inside a simulation (that's one of those things there's no way to disprove), but there's nowhere near enough evidence that can't be explained any other ways to convince me, yet.

Yes, the room thing was weird as all fuck, but that could have just as easily been accomplished by collapsing / destroying that side of the room, perception hacking it weird, and perception hacking Liz's response to confirm what we saw (and/or Liz being untrustworthy or in on it). Or simply Liz interpreting "is half the room gone" as "is half the room collapsed" and answering "yes". We checked to see if she saw the same thing, but the wording wasn't unambiguous, and Marie was too panicked to compare notes in detail.

Granted, at some point something messing with your senses and being in a simulation become the same thing. The question is if there's a 'real' layer being interacted with. I kind of prefer to assume there is, until proven otherwise. It's dangerous to assume there aren't consequences when there might be. (As we've proven several times).

And really, I don't buy it because so much more could have been done to us if this were entirely a simulation. Things have largely been too constrained, too internally consistent. The spooky stuff has really been holding back if we're in a malleable virtual reality.

>>92268
You sneaky bug.

>>93313
>perception hacking Liz
She's organic.

”Is half the room missing?” seems pretty unambiguous to me.

>>92268
*looks at timestamp*
Uh. Should I take this to mean the giant staticbeast put it here, or are you just showing off the poster?

>>93326
>perception hacking Liz
>She's organic.
That what I meant. Perception hacking that which Marie heard Liz say, and/or what Marie saw in the room. (The flashbacks prove vision isn't the only sense that can be spoofed- there's audio). That doesn't require compromising organic-Liz at all.

(Although if you're right, and this is a simulation, there's no way to tell if she's real or just an npc in the environment, in which case she'd be as hackable as the rest of it).

>”Is half the room missing?” seems pretty unambiguous to me.
Not without context. If you walk into a room, see half of it collapsed or fallen though the floor, and someone asks you if half the room is missing, the reasonable answer is yes. You don't say no unless you're being a rigorous pedant (no, it's not missing, it fell bellow somewhere!) or unless you have the context to understand "missing" means "erased from existence like part of the paper of reality torn off". Neither of which necessarily fit Liz.

My point is, the missing room is not, by itself, only explicable by simulation. It's a candidate explanation, but perception hacking in an existing facility still works. (And then there's the not unreasonable conclusion that Marie isn't being hacked so much as she's slowly falling apart or going insane, which is practically the same as perception hacking, except there isn't an easy agency behind the hallucinations we could theoretically confront).

I just don't like locking into explanations when there's insufficient evidence to rule others out.

>>93327
It's certainly a weird showing off, since he saged it not to be immediately noticed.

>>93329
tl;dr version:

The missing room is weak evidence for a simulation. I'm still going to consider multiple models until I get strong evidence for one of them.

>>/quest/656915
>>/quest/656916
>You turn around and inspect the mural directly, finding it to be exactly like what you saw in the mirror.
Am I missing something? These look nothing like each other and nobody's commented on that...

>>93357
Is that the first time you've noticed that Marie can't see certain things properly?

Heck, it's happening more frequently now.

>>93357
>no one commented on it looking different
>>/quest/656963 did.

But yeah, it's not the first time we've seen something she hasn't.

>>93365
No, which is why I asked.
>>93368
Oops, I somehow missed that suggestion. Maybe I'm being perception-hacked.

Also I'd like to point out that I love Marie's outstretched ears on the radio logo.

Some of the suggestions right now remind me of this: >>93382

>>93745
I'd say we're more running into the opposite problem: defaulting to terminal violence as soon as we're challenged or betrayed. (Also a pattern /quest/ falls prey to pretty frequently. We don't like being crossed).

The complicating factors here are that pretty much every time Marie's defaulted to violence it's gone badly, usually resulting in literally losing parts of ourself (we keep thinking Marie is a big strong robot with all the advantages that entails, only to find out the other guy is a big strong robot too, or we get tricked into smacking the wrong people (well, except 'Rudy' was the right person, it turns out)).

We're either looking at a situation where he has some means to kick our ass we haven't seen yet (a weapon, or hidden cyborg stuff), or where we're being bated into killing someone who's half-dead already (and which will probably be recorded on invisible cameras and shown to others out of context). The problem is we don't know which.

>>93747
Well okay, but talking without even trying to restrain him doesn't resolve any of those potential problems.

Well, good job guys. There's a nice hole in Marie's chest now.

maybe I've been not following this as closely as I should but I almost wonder if it's more...
Less 'right answer' and more 'we're the protagonist, whatever we do.'...That said, it's certainly seems like there's danger all over and the 'crazy' that comes of all the hacking-based hallocinations doesn't help!

>>93750
We were talking while actively reaching for something to throw as a ranged weapon, and then he shot us practically faster than we could blink. "Trying to restrain him" would require charging him head on, which would give him even more chance to shoot us.

Really neither talking nor fighting seem to be working out for us very well. In this particular instance the only option I can think of that would not get us shot would be to hide and either incapacitate him before he saw us or avoid him entirely. When even people without fancy mechanical limbs are still faster than us and able to kick our ass we should maybe try for stealth as default.

The correct option was to ambush him instead of talking to him at all. I mean seriously, we knew he was a murderer, he had bloody sleeves, and his hands were off-panel, implying he was armed. Connect the fucking dots.

>>/quest/660490
Oh, so we should just not do anything while the murderer comes in and shoots us? We didn't even start fighting, dumbass. Oh, also, we did win that fight against the robot we found after meeting Liz. Marie took superficial damage.

The first fight sortof worked. Marie got a spike stuck in her, but we were doing fine until then. The other times Marie got injured were: running away from the redeye in the elevator, and walking straight into a trap by pushing that fucking button. Hey it looks like fighting isn't the fucking problem!

Oh right and running away only works if there's somewhere to run TO. He was blocking our escape! Or did you want to talk him down, and mimic the image YOU fucking posted in the quest advice thread?

>Oh, so we should just not do anything while the murderer comes in and shoots us? We didn't even start fighting, dumbass.
We did start fighting. We tried to draw a weapon on him when we could tell he was armed and confident, and got shot for it In that moment, the choice was (largely) between stalling non-action looking for an opportunity before he acted, or attempting action and hoping it beat him to the punch.

(The majority here was for trying something, even if what, and the lethality, was all over the place).

>The correct option was to ambush him
Prior to stepping out of cover, I think you'll find even those who wanted to talk wanted that. People suggested getting behind him, and by the door, not to step out in front. Talking or fighting from a position of strength is more preferable than not. Diiiidn't happen, though. (Either Marie didn't wait for him to move from the door, or we were asking to do something that just wasn't gonna happen).

>Or did you want to talk him down
I... don't think anyone implied we were going to be able to talk him down? Trying to prompt him into saying something that might provide answers/clues or help understand the insanity maybe, and/or stalling after that.

That, and there was a certain reluctance to strait up murder someone on some player's parts before we were sure he was a real threat. (Not an idle concern considering we've been tricked by hallucinations before, and that Marie's psychological condition and mental state is a reoccurring issue, that well might end up being more important than her physical condition. Especially if this is a sim, or if falling prey to the same madness that took the drones is a possibility). We underestimated him- there was the expectation that he was either unaugmented, or that he would bring the static to bear, or that he would have secret cyborg stuff after all. All things we've faced before. I don't think anyone was expecting him to be packing a handgun that could put a five inch diameter through and through hole in metal in a single shot. Or for him to be able to draw and fire from within, what, 3 meters max, when we supposedly had cyborg speed to close with?

>Oh, also, we did win that fight against the robot we found after meeting Liz. Marie took superficial damage.
In my book, a two-person surprise ambush on a single target that ends with you pinned and getting half your face burnt off is a big screwup. We started with a tactical advantage and ended with a strait up slug fest we won by being more durable. Not impressive or well executed.

>Hey it looks like fighting isn't the fucking problem!
More generally, I would say it's largely overconfidence. We repeatedly overestimate Marie's capabilities (which yes, does include combat prowess), and underestimate our foes. We continually expect to be stronger, faster, or tougher than things, and keep getting hurt for it.

>>93786
>tried to draw a weapon on him
I think if you reread what happened you'll see the problem was that Marie took her eyes off of him for a second. The problem wasn't trying to fight, the problem was trying to throw a goddamn ashtray instead of getting in his face and then being able to restrain him. He was like three feet away. Anyone can cover that distance in less than a second.

But hey, if most people were in favor of ambushing him a little, then I guess the real problem is railroading!

>>93788
I more meant that the action Marie took (attempting to grab a weapon) was starting fighting.

But yes, I would agree that of the several proposed plans of attack, throwing the ashtray was inferior to just closing, especially considering how close we were.

The action was not merely "attempt to grab a weapon", but "attempt to grab a weapon while hiding this fact".

That is to say, attempt to delay the hostilities starting until we were armed too.

Good news is, some of *today's* computers can function without a cooling system if they keep their cpu usage low enough. Case in point: smartphones.

Oh hey I just realized, Marie has a spare heart. We picked it up in that trap room.

Marie needs to get a pair of those elbow blades like in Deus Ex

>>93804
Too bad that unlike a smart phone, Marie has a lot of moving parts. When we were low on coolant before it factored into physical exertion- her mechanical systems produce heat, not just her processor.

soooo wtf happened to thread 5?

>>93849
I think it's some meta bullshit. Like Marie was out of commission for so long this time she missed a whole thread.


I'm not having much luck with that last sequence of binary. Two things of note:
It's formatted to be on four lines.
Most of them are 9 digits, not 8.

I can kindof convert it to letters by taking every 9 digit number and removing a 0 at the start, then taking every 8 digit number and switching the fourth 0 to 1. This results in
14 3 20 3 7 14 13 14 7
12 7 15 18 14
13 13 17 13 14 13
23
which is
NCTCGNMG
LGORN
MMQMNM
W

Still seems like nonsense data. I'm not even sure if this is the right direction. It's possible Apollo took some valid binary sequence and changed all the digits in the first half of each number to 0, accidentally adding an extra 0 to most of them. The formatting might even be accidental too.

Apollo, can I get a confirmation that the formatting and digit count is on purpose? It's terrible to try to decode something only to find out the author wrote it down wrong.

It'd also be nice to know that this isn't just random data.

>>93850

The formatting is on purpose and it's not junk data.

Alright I noticed that the binary that translates directly to text always starts with either 0110 or 0111, and most of the time it's 0110 so I used that instead of fiddling with only the fourth digit. I got exactly the same sequence.

Really I just don't know where to go from here. It's not a simple substitution cypher, that's for sure- no word has the same structure as the third sequence of letters, even backwards (which is probably the case since I can't think of any valid sentence that starts with a one-letter word)

Bit counts:
9 9 8 9 9 9 9 9 9 (9 long) 9 9 9 8 9 (5 long) 9 9 8 9 9 9 (6 long) 8 (1 long)

There's only 1 8-bit character(?) per line. I want to guess that means they're significant / distinct from the rest- maybe the key needed to covert the rest into something readable? But I don't have any good ideas as to how, yet.

>>93850
Oops I missed a letter. It's

NCTCGNMNG
LGORN
MMQMNM
W

Okay, looking up the 4 characters that are actually 8-bit, they map to control characters.

00000100 is EOT, End of Transmission.
00000010 is STX, start of text
00000001 is SOH, start of header
00000111 is BEL, which is supposed to ring an electromechanical bell to alert an operator to an incoming message.

This would fit with the message being reversed- rings a bell, gives the header, gives the message, terminates. (Although I don't know why there's data between BEL and the header, or after EOT).

I'm still not sure what to do with the 9-bit stuff.

>>93874
yeah i've got nothing. i was thinking maybe we're supposed to line up the 8bit ones, and tried to go from there but didn't really get anywhere.

The corvid sings no harsher note
A song of woe and wasteful rote
Three for the lies you sold and bought
Three for the holes to stop your heart
Three last gasps of failing breath

010010 010|1| 0110|0 010|0| 010|0| 00101| 10|00 011010 011000 010|01 00101| 010|00 011000 101|1 01110| 0110|1 00101| 010|11 0110|0 010||0 11011 011011 010|0| 010|01 00101| 0101|| 011111 0101|0 010|01 010|0| 0101|1 0110|| 010|1|

>>93938
wtf are you on about, friend?

>>93940
It's a hint to solve the weird binary puzzle.

>>93938
Alright that's strongly implied to be base 3, which is:

84 104 114 101 101 32 99 111 108 100 32 99 108 97 119 115 32 103 114 105 112 112 101 100 32 98 121 96 100 101 97 116 104

Which is: "Three cold claws gripped by`death"
Looks like that ` is a 0101|0 that should be a 00101|.

...I don't see how this helps since the mystery code isn't in base 3? Unless it IS, but just looks like it's in base 2 because the message is weird? I guess I'll try translating it from base 3...

Well just straight up parsing it as base 3 doesn't help.
That gives the first line as
39 4 9 4 13 39 37 39 13
where 9 is the 8-bit number. At this point I can already tell this doesn't match up with anything so I'm not going to bother continuing.

>>93945
Shift -1, reverse it?

>>93946
It doesn't translate to meaningful letters (at least not yet) so you can't do that. I can get some letters out of it by adding 64 to each number and tossing that in a simple converter but the letters don't spell anything. Also they're in mixed case, which is a red flag.

>>93953
perhaps some interaction with the 8 bit ones instead of translating them? adding them before/after the base 3 conversion or after a base 2 conversion maybe? xor? I'm grasping at straws here

>>93850
Wait, sorry how is it formatted to be on 4 lines?

>>94014
If you copy / paste the original message, it comes out in four lines. There's only that many carriage returns.

The board does this auto-formatting thing where it decides how wide the box around a given post needs to be. And since it decided on a width that's not long enough for the first line, it gets text wrapped into two.

Can't figure this out at all.
Thought the base 3-ness would relate to 9 in some way but chopping it up just gives bad numbers and remainders in whatever base you do it in.
Even tried ignoring the 9-ness and just converted the numbers into ternary, just comes out as jibberish.

Whats up with the hint, btw?
A crow (alien?) singing about:
Three for the lies you sold and bought
Three for the holes to stop your heart
Three last gasps of failing breath
Three cold claws gripped by death

>>94023
Aside from hinting to 3s I mean

This structure is so crude and grating
Tune strange and unaccommodating
Everything all switched around
Scarcely enough to make a sound
A cruel mistake to walk that path

00|00011 000|||00 0||0110 00||0110 0|011011 00||0011 00|0110| 0|011011 0||0110 0000|||0 000||000 |011110 00|011|0 0|011011 000|0|11 0||01111 000||0|0 000|0|11 000||0|| 000||000 00|0|11| 0|01100 00|0|11| 0||01111 0|011011 000|0|11 00|||011 00||0110 00|0|11| 0||01111 0|011|11

>>94045
Are those all supposed to be 8 characters long? Some of them are 7. I know last hint there were some padding mistakes, is that the case here?

>>94045
...anyway the poem implies that the digits are mixed up in some way, which means this is legitimately encrypted and I'm NOT going to try to decode it.

The/cor/vid/sings/no/harsh/er/note (8)
A/song/of/woe/and/waste/ful/rote (8)
Three/for/the/lies/you/sold/and/bought (8)
Three/for/the/holes/to/stop/your/heart (8)
Three/last/gasps/of/fail/ing/(bre/ath) (8*)

This/struc/ture/is/so/crude/and/gra/ting (9)
Tune/strange/and/un/a/ccom/mo/dat/ing (9)
Ev/(er/y)/thing/all/switch/ed/a/round (9*)
(Scar/ce)/ly/e/nough/to/make/a/sound (9*)
A/(cru/el)/mis/take/to/walk/that/path (9*)

Each poem appears to have 8 or 9 beats per line, though you have to adopt a sort of breathy exaggerated pronunciation to do it. ("bre-eth" instead of "breth", "ev-er-i" instead of "ev-ree", "scare-seh-lee" instead of "skairs-lee", "ka-rule" instead of "krool").

(If you don't take that liberty, they go 8/8/8/8/7 and 9/9/8/8/8).

I want to guess that means one hint is intended to be relevant to the 8-bit words and one to the 9-bit words, but I'm not sure how to proceed from there.

Okay, so. This has gotten a little out of hand and tbh Chebec even I'm getting confused signals from those poems.

So let's skip the first step.

120-2-100-2-12-210-201-120-12
200-12-112-10-210
201-201-1-201-120-201
111.

I this will be slightly less head-grindy.

>>94062
...
The only pattern I see to reproduce those results does not hold up in every case. I disapprove.

Anyway, now they translate cleanly into 1-26, but it's still not at a stage where it's a simple substitution cipher, even reversed, because of that third line. Unless it's in a foreign language? In that case we'd need some sort of hint as to which foreign language it is. It's certainly not a caesarian shift this time, that's for sure.

For convenience, here's the alphabetical translation of that:
OBIBLUSOE
RENCU
SSASOS
M

>>94062
So... for those of us who were banging our head against it, what was the first step?

>>94065
It looks like you're supposed to merge the adjacent 1s in the 9-length strings, while leaving the 8-length strings as they are. The problem I'm having is that 000001110 corresponds to both 120 and 210, for no apparent reason. It's like it's an arbitrary decision which way to merge it.

I took what Apollo gave us and converted it from base 3 to base 10, and matched that to the alphabet. However, it's almost exactly the same as treating each string as its own symbol.

>merge the adjacent 1s in the 9-length strings
...yeah, I'm not sure what informs you if 000001110 should go to 120 or 210. Also not sure why we don't have similar variability with 000000111 (always 12, never 21). Or what makes 000001111 go 112 and not 211. (Nor 22- I guess we only get one merge max per word?).

If a single sequence has multiple translations, then it must depend on something like adjacent words / bits, or the word's position in the line (relative to start, or to the 8-bit word?) that tells you which to use?

Hmm. Actually, it alternates. The first time 000001110 appears, it translates to 120, the next as 210, the next as 120, etc. (Although who knows how a translator would know which to start with, even if they knew to alternate).

Geeze, given the solution (to a step at least), and still no idea how it works.

>>94064
I think you might be off by a letter. Translating from base 3 to decimal I got
15 2 9 2 5 21 19 15 5
18 5 14 3 21
19 19 1 19 15 19
13

Which then substituting for letters is:
OBIBEUSOE
RENCU
SSASOS
M

Played with that a bit, haven't got anything useful yet, though.

>>94073
Oops, yeah, I didn't convert the 12 at all for some reason.

>>94073
I GOT IT

I WAS BASICALLY TRYING DECODERS AT RANDOM BUT I GOT IT

METHOD:
OBIBEUSOE
RENCU
SSASOS
M

Turn newlines into spaces: OBIBEUSOE RENCU SSASOS M

Start with the first letter, skip 4, next letter, skip 4, including spaces, rotate back to start when you hit the end.

Or be lazy and just use this: http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/skip.php

ANSWER: OUR OBSESSIONS BECAME US

>>94077
Congrats. Well, like I was saying... that's basically a real encryption method. It's used in the Kryptos statue for chrissakes.

>>94077
well that was anti-climatic

>>94077
I am laughing my ass off cause I was inserting text into decoders at random on that exact site myself for a while there.

Good on you for finding the solution.

Anonymous 2015/08/22(Sat)13:24 No. 94325 ID: 6b52eb
File 144027507224.gif - (307.43KB , 267x200 , zDcF7.gif )

>> 94077
>we just solved a legitimate cryptography problem

srsly tho well done, do we know how the first bit works now?

Also message has implications for final result of the setting.
This is blatantly taking place inside the crazed immortal mind of the main character in the far future.

>>94325

What would a past be if you couldn't remember it? Would it be interrupted by static as new memories came to light? Would the present-past then be changed by this new evidence? Would all the various bits and pieces of your psyche chide you for forgetting everything so long? Would your paranoia take a physical form to torment you? Would all of the lost regrets and people you couldn't save appear before you, almost like a taunting second chance?

I'd say so.

Apollo 2015/08/23(Sun)17:41 No. 94368 ID: defceb
File 144037689312.png - (342.90KB , 1000x760 , birbalienm.png )

doodle doodle doodle

*re-upping with minor edit

>>94368

Wings? Fuck those. You know what we need? SPACESHIPS.

These guys are hardcore.

>>94368
Y'know, Red Giant had Luminoth Alexandrius Falt, now you're throwing some Chozo Peeps into Rollback? Are you just trying to be Metroidy now, or was that just coincidence?

>>94414
The space peeps were introduced a while back.

I thiiiiiiink we might be the AI psychologist, this is Marie's inner world, and we're trying to sort out the various issues she has that were caused by digital cannibalism that the cyborgs seem to resort to. Perhaps it's due to the memory leak- they eat the neural nets of other cyborgs in order to claim more memories? The consumed neural nets might be the redeye cyborgs we've encountered. Some are more lucid than others, which means that some of them were consumed with less loss.

Apollo 2015/08/25(Tue)01:33 No. 94438 ID: defceb
File 144049159975.png - (270.02KB , 400x800 , metroid.png )

>>94414
110% canon reply

Anonymous 2015/10/09(Fri)21:33 No. 95411 ID: 59ae77
File 144445162214.png - (14.92KB , 840x600 , descrambled.png )

Fixed this >>/quest/675727

Anonymous 2015/10/09(Fri)22:35 No. 95413 ID: 59ae77
File 144445530374.png - (20.08KB , 840x600 , sunset or sunrise.png )

And here's >>/quest/675723

Slightly messier, cause the column pixel width wasn't completely constant (sometimes they seemed to bleed to the left onto the next column, not sure if that was deliberate, or just an artifact of the chopping up). I could go through with the pencil tool and fix the scanlines that produced when unscrambling, but nope, don't feel like it.

theres so much that must've been forgotten

this thread is freaking me out a little, i can't tell when the plot's gonna end.

is that a black hole at >>/quest/675562 ?
is it a worm hole? how did we get a worm hole when we're nowhere near there technologically?
how far ahead is this being viewed from?

we fell in love and forgot about it? >>/quest/675723

when we're yelling to not be fixed, theres dust objects, how long have we lived?

>when we're yelling to not be fixed, theres dust objects, how long have we lived?
Well, in this flashback, we see Alex >>/quest/672807

That puts Marie's lifespan on the order of 5 billion years, at least, since the sun's already a red giant (title drop) in his time.

Riotmode 2015/10/12(Mon)23:06 No. 95465 ID: f56624
File 144471640296.gif - (76.39KB , 1000x1000 , 144471288892.gif )

>>/quest/676216
VWOOP VWOOP VWOOP VWOOP VWOOP

Apollo 2015/10/31(Sat)18:08 No. 95863 ID: defceb
File 144634012152.png - (574.68KB , 635x846 , sketch1png.png )

Recently I found an old sketchbook of mine that has all the doodled of Rollback before I started it. I asked peeps on IRC if they wanted to see my shameful scribbles and they said yes so HERE WE GO.

This is the first drawing of Marie and what would later become Red Eye side by side. My early idea for the character was drastically different from what made it into the quest. They had a different general helmet design, were 10 feet tall, and weren't an antagonist at first. I ended up splitting their character into two different people, but I can't go into detail about that without getting into spoiler territory.

I also realized it was a weird idea when I asked myself; how do they get through normal people sized doors?

Apollo 2015/10/31(Sat)18:11 No. 95864 ID: defceb
File 144634029512.png - (227.45KB , 407x542 , sketch2png.png )

First draft of what would later become Red Eye's helmet, with a scribble I added in now for comparison. I wanted the helmet to be a really complicated smorgasbord of machinery, but ended up simplifying it to the spooky silhouette we now know in-quest. I realized as cool as it might look, I'd rather be able to update at a nice pace instead.

Apollo 2015/10/31(Sat)18:15 No. 95866 ID: defceb
File 144634051737.png - (563.44KB , 840x1123 , sketch3png.png )

Hi Haley! Some redacted text here too. Her glasses were so much smaller back then.

Fun facts, in the first draft Haley:
-was a cannibal
-would end up going insane and chase Marie with a chainsaw
-took a LOT of drugs
-like a LOT
-ALL THE TIME

I ended up downplaying the drugs part and cut out the chainsaw segment.

Apollo 2015/10/31(Sat)18:17 No. 95868 ID: defceb
File 144634067598.png - (379.33KB , 730x560 , sketch4png.png )

Here's where I started to home in on where I wanted Red Eye to look in-quest. Also first draft of Morgan and Blue. Morgan probably went through the most character changes during this time, going from a punk kid to a corporate spy to a number of other things until he hit where he is now.

Also there's Haley with the chainsaw I was talking about earlier.

Apollo 2015/10/31(Sat)18:18 No. 95869 ID: defceb
File 144634073445.png - (141.21KB , 332x443 , sketch5png.png )

Another early Marie drawing. Still hadn't figured out quite what I wanted to do with her hair or silhouette yet, but I had a decent idea of her starting outfit.

Apollo 2015/10/31(Sat)18:20 No. 95870 ID: defceb
File 144634080462.png - (267.35KB , 664x403 , sketch6png.png )

More of Morgan, Haley, and Marie. I really struggled with trying to nail some kind anatomy down to this really cartoony level. I'm still awful at it too, I think.

Apollo 2015/10/31(Sat)18:21 No. 95872 ID: defceb
File 144634089151.png - (428.52KB , 618x561 , sketch7png.png )

First draft of Roderick and Jeannine. I ended up reusing some clothing elements for Jeannine in one pic, but besides that pretty much none of these sketches went on.

That's all for now! I hope you've enjoying seeing my shameful display of old art.

>>95866
>implying she's still a cannibal

>>95873
That, ah, might possibly help explain the spontaneous bleeding. Lots of weird, horrible diseases a person can catch that way.

Anonymous 2015/11/03(Tue)21:54 No. 95906 ID: 5ad4a7
File 144661644174.png - (18.94KB , 840x600 , NotRedEye.png )

I evened out the levels a bit on the most recent spook image.

For the people who don't hang out on IRC:

I've made an important addition to the wiki page. Now we all know what everyone's Dungeoneer VN otps are. It's all canon.

Okay, asking the important question. Which syllable in "Marie" is stressed? Because I've been reading it French-like ("ma-RIE") since the beginning and it'd be really embarassing to realize I've been misspelling it all along.

>>99671
Marie'd pronounce her own name in more of a Brazilian Portuguese fashion. It'd sound more like 'Mah-re', with a as in father and the e as in yes.

Riotmode 2016/05/11(Wed)16:31 No. 99719 ID: 35151f
File 146300949902.png - (62.85KB , 200x295 , bill mahreh.png )

>>99716