its a road ahread blog so i dont think he will be out next week... id say a month or 2 at least
I know. And I've been farming all these old republic toons I don't care about because i knew something like this was coming. But the massive focus on non canon toons this year has really dampened my excitement for this game.
its a road ahread blog so i dont think he will be out next week... id say a month or 2 at least
I know. And I've been farming all these old republic toons I don't care about because i knew something like this was coming. But the massive focus on non canon toons this year has really dampened my excitement for this game.
Well, fortunately for most of us, he is coming and we are very excited!
Well, fortunately for most of us, he is coming and we are very excited!
That's fine. I am happy for all the Revan fanboys. I know he's been a highly requested toon. I just hate that it's right on the heels of the Traya meta. It's just a lot of non canon with very little alternative if you want to stay competitive in the end game.
its a road ahread blog so i dont think he will be out next week... id say a month or 2 at least
I know. And I've been farming all these old republic toons I don't care about because i knew something like this was coming. But the massive focus on non canon toons this year has really dampened my excitement for this game.
Decided it might be worth doing a quick code post-mortem for anybody curious how we all figured that out.
For me, I started by looking at the gold characters, thinking they might be useful. I grabbed an Aurebesh translator image like the one @RogueJedi posted and converted the second image into a block of letters. Then I looked at the first image, and started translating the gold characters only. I noticed that there were a number of letters, but they were all in the A to F range---no letters after F. I also noticed that there were a lot of 4's and 5's in the image. The character sets posted by @Mstrefe1 and @MistaLeahy also helped a lot for seeing these patterns. @Iy4oy4s also noticed some of this patterning and commented on it.
Those were both consistent with the idea that the image might be a big block of hexadecimal code. The A to F bit is straightforward there, but the 4's and 5's less so. It's a safe bet, though, that all the letters in ASCII are going to come in a contiguous sequence, and since there are 26 letters in the alphabet, they should all fall in a range with just 2-3 distinct (also contiguous) leading digits. I didn't know that 4 and 5 would be the two digits in question, but the format was suspicious enough to make me think a hexadecimal to ASCII conversion was probably the right way to go. @gordonjones also picked up on the apparent hex patterning---I think it was just sort of dumb luck that there weren't any C's in the list. Looking at Reddit, it looks like a few other people also independently came up with the hex step over there.
The next bit owes heavily to insights from @JediKnight_MarkRyan and @APX_919 . When I first translated the characters in the second image from Aurebesh, I didn't notice that each letter was appearing only once. Or that 'J' was missing, which @chionophile caught and which wound up being very important. Knowing that, my first inclination was to try to treat the problem like a substitution cypher---kind of like the cryptoquips that show up in newspapers. That went nowhere fast, though. The obvious substitution schemes I tried resulted in character strings that were obviously not plaintext, so I was able to rule them out pretty quickly. But @APX_919 's comment about the Polybius checkerboard is what got me pointed in the right direction. I checked out the Wikipedia page for it, and found it didn't really help me much, but there was a comment in the Wiki page about the Playfair cypher being paired with the Polybius setup. When I looked that one over, it started to look very promising.
I still screwed it up pretty badly at first, though. I was trying to rush through the decoding, and I wound up running the cypher backwards---double-encoding the bits that fell into the same row/column and decoding the bits that formed rectangles. But I was generating letters that looked more like natural text, so I was pretty sure that I was onto something; I just needed to get my act together on the decoding. Eventually, I got the first bit to come out plain: "The road ahead..." This is where @KausDebonair got to as well---but then I ran into the problem of the 7's and D's. I completely missed this when I did the initial ASCII encoding, using one of the character lists provided in the thread. Without @dsteve , @Kingpin01 , and @JediKnight_MarkRyan pointing that out, I would have been stuck for a while (and might not have posted the bit about the Playfair cypher). Unfortunately, I didn't see @dsteve 's revision of the hex code and ASCII, so I went off and did it by hand from the image again---and then did the deciphering by hand as well. By the time I finished, @newershadow already had the text up for everyone to see. He got exactly what I'd gotten by hand, though; it was nice to be sure this was working exactly as intended. And he got the bit.ly link, which would have flown completely over my head.
The last bit with the 'J' was awesome, I thought. The I/J issue was still floating around in the back of my head from (a) @chionophile 's earlier comment about the missing J and (b) the Wikipedia description of the Playfair cypher where they put the two together in the 5x5 grid. As soon as I watched the clip from @CG_Carrie , I knew exactly what needed to happen---thanks in large part to @Sev74907 , who picked up on the fact that the bit.ly link had Revan backwards in it.
Anyway, for anyone reading this thread who was trying to figure out how on earth we all figured this out, I thought it might be nice to write up a run-through. It was really fun working with all you guys on this and cracking the code (and to go check out CubsFanHan's livestream right after we finished, and get to see him pull up the video right after us). Big props to @CG_SBCrumb for making this Friday night so much fun, too! It was a blast. And here's hoping I didn't miss too many of the people contributing to the decoding when I was writing this up... If I did miss you, I'm very sorry! But everybody participating in the real-time brainstorming over here was invaluable, and if you were in on it, thank you very much!
its a road ahread blog so i dont think he will be out next week... id say a month or 2 at least
I know. And I've been farming all these old republic toons I don't care about because i knew something like this was coming. But the massive focus on non canon toons this year has really dampened my excitement for this game.
They will be Canon very soon. The game of thrones creators will be doing old republic I'm certain of it
When will we get the non-trash version of Revan? Or are you guys going to implement a way to decide if he's light or dark? You could have his unique be based on the number of light or Darkside characters in the squad. 4 Jedi Characters > Jedi Revan, 4 Sith Characters > Darth Revan, and if it's mix ratio, block all his abilities and call him Just Woke Up Revan.
If memory serves me right, none of the KoTOR characters knew Jedi Revan until he returned as Darth Revan. They only met him after his mind was wiped. At that point he was a nobody. Soooo...how are they going to be required for him? Plus, where's the rest of the KoTOR squad?
When will we get the non-trash version of Revan? Or are you guys going to implement a way to decide if he's light or dark? You could have his unique be based on the number of light or Darkside characters in the squad. 4 Jedi Characters > Jedi Revan, 4 Sith Characters > Darth Revan, and if it's mix ratio, block all his abilities and call him Just Woke Up Revan.
If memory serves me right, none of the KoTOR characters knew Jedi Revan until he returned as Darth Revan. They only met him after his mind was wiped. At that point he was a nobody. Soooo...how are they going to be required for him? Plus, where's the rest of the KoTOR squad?
There's no way they will do this when they have the opportunity to release two versions of him which will mean more money opportunities for them
Yes it looks like a December event if this is announced in the road ahead ... or new raid ... whatever I personally don’t care about Revan. I do care about Jedi Luke though.
Decided it might be worth doing a quick code post-mortem for anybody curious how we all figured that out.
Thanks so much for the writeup! About 20 people from the team were watching in real-time and commenting on how you guys were doing. Crumb was hoping to stump you for 45 minutes, so 2 hours is a rousing success in our opinion. I'll be sharing your write-up with people on the team who weren't able to watch in real-time.
I kept putting the wrong URL in myself, and the one thing you mentioned but specifically didn't call out is since the Playfair cyper is a 5x5 grid and the English language has 26 letters, the J is omitted. It just worked out that Crumb could use that to screw with the URL and if you had known it was omitted in the cypher itself, then you'd know that only the first "i" needed to be translated because it was replacing the J (as opposed to all "i"s should be "j"s). For me, reaching for an Indiana Jones quote is like breathing, so that was just a happy accident.
Anyway I'm certain we had as much fun watching you as you guys had figuring it out. Thanks for being great sports (and so gosh darn smart).
OK, that was super fun. Great job here @CG_SBCrumb and everyone involved at CG. Those little hints prior to reveals really work well with me. I enjoyed this one, thank you!
Ok so the video is cool but there is two thing that we might focus on now. First is the hero fading last in the video(see screenshot). The second is the monster at the end. What kind of monster it is ? It look like a monster similar to a raid like the rancor. What you guys thinking about that ?
Replies
At least Chewie was fun for a couple days.
its a road ahread blog so i dont think he will be out next week or something... id say a month or 2 at least
I know. And I've been farming all these old republic toons I don't care about because i knew something like this was coming. But the massive focus on non canon toons this year has really dampened my excitement for this game.
Well, fortunately for most of us, he is coming and we are very excited!
That's fine. I am happy for all the Revan fanboys. I know he's been a highly requested toon. I just hate that it's right on the heels of the Traya meta. It's just a lot of non canon with very little alternative if you want to stay competitive in the end game.
100% agree
For me, I started by looking at the gold characters, thinking they might be useful. I grabbed an Aurebesh translator image like the one @RogueJedi posted and converted the second image into a block of letters. Then I looked at the first image, and started translating the gold characters only. I noticed that there were a number of letters, but they were all in the A to F range---no letters after F. I also noticed that there were a lot of 4's and 5's in the image. The character sets posted by @Mstrefe1 and @MistaLeahy also helped a lot for seeing these patterns. @Iy4oy4s also noticed some of this patterning and commented on it.
Those were both consistent with the idea that the image might be a big block of hexadecimal code. The A to F bit is straightforward there, but the 4's and 5's less so. It's a safe bet, though, that all the letters in ASCII are going to come in a contiguous sequence, and since there are 26 letters in the alphabet, they should all fall in a range with just 2-3 distinct (also contiguous) leading digits. I didn't know that 4 and 5 would be the two digits in question, but the format was suspicious enough to make me think a hexadecimal to ASCII conversion was probably the right way to go. @gordonjones also picked up on the apparent hex patterning---I think it was just sort of dumb luck that there weren't any C's in the list. Looking at Reddit, it looks like a few other people also independently came up with the hex step over there.
The next bit owes heavily to insights from @JediKnight_MarkRyan and @APX_919 . When I first translated the characters in the second image from Aurebesh, I didn't notice that each letter was appearing only once. Or that 'J' was missing, which @chionophile caught and which wound up being very important. Knowing that, my first inclination was to try to treat the problem like a substitution cypher---kind of like the cryptoquips that show up in newspapers. That went nowhere fast, though. The obvious substitution schemes I tried resulted in character strings that were obviously not plaintext, so I was able to rule them out pretty quickly. But @APX_919 's comment about the Polybius checkerboard is what got me pointed in the right direction. I checked out the Wikipedia page for it, and found it didn't really help me much, but there was a comment in the Wiki page about the Playfair cypher being paired with the Polybius setup. When I looked that one over, it started to look very promising.
I still screwed it up pretty badly at first, though. I was trying to rush through the decoding, and I wound up running the cypher backwards---double-encoding the bits that fell into the same row/column and decoding the bits that formed rectangles. But I was generating letters that looked more like natural text, so I was pretty sure that I was onto something; I just needed to get my act together on the decoding. Eventually, I got the first bit to come out plain: "The road ahead..." This is where @KausDebonair got to as well---but then I ran into the problem of the 7's and D's. I completely missed this when I did the initial ASCII encoding, using one of the character lists provided in the thread. Without @dsteve , @Kingpin01 , and @JediKnight_MarkRyan pointing that out, I would have been stuck for a while (and might not have posted the bit about the Playfair cypher). Unfortunately, I didn't see @dsteve 's revision of the hex code and ASCII, so I went off and did it by hand from the image again---and then did the deciphering by hand as well. By the time I finished, @newershadow already had the text up for everyone to see. He got exactly what I'd gotten by hand, though; it was nice to be sure this was working exactly as intended. And he got the bit.ly link, which would have flown completely over my head.
The last bit with the 'J' was awesome, I thought. The I/J issue was still floating around in the back of my head from (a) @chionophile 's earlier comment about the missing J and (b) the Wikipedia description of the Playfair cypher where they put the two together in the 5x5 grid. As soon as I watched the clip from @CG_Carrie , I knew exactly what needed to happen---thanks in large part to @Sev74907 , who picked up on the fact that the bit.ly link had Revan backwards in it.
Anyway, for anyone reading this thread who was trying to figure out how on earth we all figured this out, I thought it might be nice to write up a run-through. It was really fun working with all you guys on this and cracking the code (and to go check out CubsFanHan's livestream right after we finished, and get to see him pull up the video right after us). Big props to @CG_SBCrumb for making this Friday night so much fun, too! It was a blast. And here's hoping I didn't miss too many of the people contributing to the decoding when I was writing this up... If I did miss you, I'm very sorry! But everybody participating in the real-time brainstorming over here was invaluable, and if you were in on it, thank you very much!
They will be Canon very soon. The game of thrones creators will be doing old republic I'm certain of it
If memory serves me right, none of the KoTOR characters knew Jedi Revan until he returned as Darth Revan. They only met him after his mind was wiped. At that point he was a nobody. Soooo...how are they going to be required for him? Plus, where's the rest of the KoTOR squad?
There's no way they will do this when they have the opportunity to release two versions of him which will mean more money opportunities for them
They will. It'll be released on a Monday, but to get Carth you need it to be 7* by that Friday.
I kept putting the wrong URL in myself, and the one thing you mentioned but specifically didn't call out is since the Playfair cyper is a 5x5 grid and the English language has 26 letters, the J is omitted. It just worked out that Crumb could use that to screw with the URL and if you had known it was omitted in the cypher itself, then you'd know that only the first "i" needed to be translated because it was replacing the J (as opposed to all "i"s should be "j"s). For me, reaching for an Indiana Jones quote is like breathing, so that was just a happy accident.
Anyway I'm certain we had as much fun watching you as you guys had figuring it out. Thanks for being great sports (and so gosh darn smart).
Confirmed by CG Carrie...
Hero for heroes journey ?