Code obfuscation/encryption

**giffen** · Jan 10, 2022, 10:26

Good afternoon!
I apologize in advance for my English, it is not my native language.

My question concerns the code of some characters (Perhaps stages) of the game. As far as I know, each character is a set of arbitrary scripts written in Smalltalk (.st), please correct me if I am wrong, as well as animation and sound data, and .cns files, and the main configuration file .def.
For some characters I observed clean and readable code, and for some it was obfuscated and reduced to a format like "Ž|ѓŽS'oђ1..." or "癡牳整ഊ...".
I tried to find software solutions that could pull this off with the files, but found only lefty programs on Chinese sites that didn't do this kind of thing.

1) Is this software open source, or is it "private" development?
2) If there are similar programs on the internet, is it possible to find and download them?
3) Or... if it's not about software at all, how is such a result achieved?

Thank you very much!

**ichiruto** · Jan 13, 2022, 15:58

Did you find these characters in the code/config part of the file or maybe in the comments? Sounds strange to me unless those characters are part of the config value.
It's very likely to be just encoding issues (example: the author is Japanese and was using Shift-JIS encoding in creating/editing those files while you are using UTF-8 to view those files)

**giffen** · Jan 14, 2022, 17:21

I did have some assumptions about the encodings, I put it on encodings definition, nothing that could be read in any way. Also tried the encoding you suggested, it did not work. As far as I could see from the example of the Code.Crashed killer character, this code only exists in the .cns files.

**shinzombie** · Jan 15, 2022, 02:08

What version of Code.Crashed killer are you looking? I dowload him out of curiosity and the Helper.cns it show clear, but no R2.cns file comes on the package.

**giffen** · Jan 15, 2022, 13:04

I found this character in one of the youtube videos, I'll attach the link here. Unfortunately I can't insert the URL here yet, so I'll leave it as solid text with a separator between website and .com

ttps://mediafire .com/file/k968me6o4qnrhxb/Code.Crashed.Killer-1.0_New.rar/file

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Looked at some more of the characters' code and it turns out that there are characters with the same content as above, but the code itself wasn't just in the .cns files. One of the characters had a solid wall of text in Chinese characters in the .def file. For example: Wicked_Law's_Witch v0.9

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Oh, sorry, the image didn't stick, I hope now it works.

**shinzombie** · Jan 16, 2022, 12:17

The text with the Chinese characters can be readed by changing the encode to UTF-8, once you do the conversion the Mugen code shows.

The other type of symbol text (like the one on the R2.cns) I cant find a way to read them in a clear way. ANyway there something curious: if you delete the R2.cns file and play the char, it run normal, don't seems to need the R2.cns file at all, while erasing the any of the other files like the Helper.cns will make the char to not work at all.

**giffen** · Jan 16, 2022, 13:07

Oh, really... Tried to convert the encoding to UTF-8 using a couple of methods, the same notepad++ and re-saving via standard notepad, tried to set the encoding via cmd, but it wasn't working.. After your words I decided to try online services, maybe the problem is with the computer. One of them really showed quite readable code. It appears I have, through my own illiteracy, raised an unnecessary topic.

About R2.cns really, I didn't specify before that no errors appeared when deleting the file, the very presence of the file for no reason, and this encoding problem made me pay attention to this file as well, but mostly it turns out that I made up my own mind.

Thank you so much for your answers and help!

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In fact, I still have a couple of highly controversial questions that I would like to clarify. Maybe it's not good that I chose R2.cns for the example, because there is also R.cns, which is directly listed in .def, and which has the same content. When deleted or renamed it causes an error. That is the question, what is it then?

There's another character: plzdontkillmeeeeeh, it uses a .st file already, which is also specified in .def, and without which the character doesn't work. It has the same unreadable code as R.cns
In the case of Code.Crashed I'm not sure. But "plzdontkillmeeeeeh", has a .dll in the folder, could it be related? At least the "Load...", "Libr..." in the second window hint at really some code from outside.