Fixes and changes since the 11 October build. If you reported one of these, thank you.
Changed
- The playtest now ends after the third Act 1 mission, with an end notice. Choose Keep playing to carry on in the same world: side jobs, the store, deliveries and the economy keep running. The notice shows once.
- The prologue is tighter. There are two help-desk tickets instead of three, and the follow-ups from Danny and Maria come at better moments. A resumed prologue no longer replays or cuts IRC lines.
- Faster start. A new save's first connect went from about 10 seconds to about 1, and the backend is ready roughly twice as fast. On slow Windows machines the startup screen now waits for the game instead of dropping you on a desktop that isn't ready, and offers Retry if it really fails.
- Recon works the 1997 way. nmap 1.25 has no -O and no version detection: it shows ports, states and services. You learn what a box runs from what its daemons say when you connect: the FTP greeting, the mail server's 220 line, the ssh banner. The mentors teach this where it matters.
- Man pages for wuftpd_exploit, snmp_rw, bruteforce, halfcrack and log_cleaner. Every command's usage line now matches its man page.
- Servers answer like their real software. FTP replies use wu-ftpd's wording, ssh uses ssh 1.2.x's host key messages, and ps -ef prints the System V layout with your login name.
- Every server runs only software that had shipped by the day you meet it. This applies across the whole network, from daemons and kernels to mail servers. Versions move forward as operators upgrade, and the exploits follow what is installed.
- Dozens of in-world websites now show their early 1997 state at game start, including ZDNet, InfoWorld, BYTE, Cisco, Intel, MCI and CompuServe. Later news arrives on its real date. "Last updated" stamps and old holiday sales now make sense for the day you visit.
- New music: "Hacking a Phone" by Tim Kulig joins the gameplay rotation.
- Doors: Paint, batch files and shortcuts have proper icons, and in-world pages draw their fonts the same way on every OS.
Fixed
- Starting a new game after deleting a save, or after Start Over, could carry the old game into the new one: the bank balance, hardware, NPC trust, pending mail, IRC history and the world clock. It could even freeze the calendar. A new game now starts clean.
- Returning to the menu could save an empty game over your real save in rare timing. Fixed.
- Typing while a command was printing could erase its output. Your half-typed line now moves out of the way and comes back. Resizing the terminal mid-line no longer leaves stray characters.
- Story pay matches what you are told. A mission paid a hundredth of the amount its mail promised.
- Side jobs accept steps you did early. If you fingered or probed a host before the job asked for it, the job used to stall. It now counts what you already did.
- Mentors now teach a step before you need it, not after you've already worked it out, and they speak in the channels you are actually in.
- #black_ice scrollback is in time order after a restart.
- Your saved notebook (~/diary.txt) matches what you actually did in the prologue. Before, it always told the same story.
- The browser no longer fills your handle into every login and email field.
- The Network Map shows a box as rooted while you hold it, and repaints when a session ends, including after a trace hangs you up.
- Mail and IRC dates in quotes are written like a 1997 mail client would.
- "Not enough RAM: needs 2 MB, has 2 MB" now shows the real numbers in KB, and a second click on Mail no longer tries to open a second copy.
- The FTP progress meter no longer floods a narrow split terminal.
- The front-panel calendar follows the clock straight away after a time jump.
- Emacs: Find File starts in your home directory, and the keyboard goes to the file you opened.
- The Doors MS-DOS prompt and mIRC got smaller fixes, and mIRC's About box shows the version that existed on that day.
Known issues
- Telnet to a port other than 23 or 25 is refused even when nmap says it is open. Use ftp, telnet <host> 25 or ssh to read a daemon's greeting.