On 'Life is Strange' – part II

Wowzers. What a journey.

This post ended up taking a lot longer to write and in the process turned up a lot longer than I first anticipated. And I still feel this is not everything that could be said (and nor was the previous part).

Most of this was written in the immediate days after the release of the final episode and most of the editing was done by the end of that week. Afterwards it still took few extra weeks to recover enough to even be able to get everything together and add some missing observations.

But to get on with this: first some initial thoughts about the final episode. I’ll try to be vague; there shouldn’t be any spoilers. These thoughts are complemented with some self-reflection.

Episode 5

While the final episode was enjoyable, it lacked some of the magic all the previous episodes had. I don’t know if it was because of the fact that I wasn’t still done processing the previous episodes, or the fact that I had so much other stuff distracting me in real life. In any case I felt slightly disconnected.

Or maybe it was the fact that the episode was more action-oriented where the previous episodes were more dialog-oriented. Also, with so many different locations and quick transitions between them the episode felt a bit rushed. But then again, it’s also about how you view the thing. Squeezing together tons of different fan theories(intentional or not) and sensibly finishing a time travel story is definitely not easy.

There exists a variety of arguments to be made for and against the final episode and especially the endings. The disparity of polish between the endings was quite disappointing and a lot was left to be desired. And the overall feeling of sadness about the end of this all is completely another matter...

After watching the credits I still had to spend maybe five minutes just staring at the main menu listening to the music, not really comprehending what had happened nor that the game really was over.

Craving for closure

As above - and like I so subtly hinted in the previous part - Life is Strange touched me with an unexpected intensity. Partly because of the game itself(the story, the characters and the atmosphere) and partly because of how it led to some pretty major self-reflection. First about the game itself.

There is so much I want to say.
So much emotion.
So many thoughts.
So much everything.
And while that everything was.. everything, it also was almost too much.

And now the end is here and I feel empty. The closure wasn’t what I was expecting, nor was it was I was hoping. Instead, it was what I needed.

While the endings left A LOT open, they also had an adequate amount of closure to keep me from totally collapsing. This allowed me to limp to the game’s reddit community, where the feelings could be shared. Thank you all. In addition, after I had played the episodes 3&4 that I discussed in the previous post, I listened to PSNStores podcasts about those episodes. This helped me a great deal in processing what happened with those episodes.

The more time I spent reading reddit and watching interviews, the better I finally felt. Now that I’m writing this particular paragraph weeks later, I’m almost completely at ease with everything. I’ve had time to research how the final episodes, and in particular the ending, is supposed to be understood.

* * *

As the game’s developers have told in many occasions, the game was about the personal growth of Max. A nostalgic coming-of-age story. This is a crucial cornerstone to understand. The relations between characters were crafted to be so perfect and special. For example Chloe was crafted to be THE perfect friend with a deep emotional connection with Max / the player, evoking a longing for such a person in real life. But real life does not work this way. It just doesn’t.

* * *

To adequately process coming-of-age stories, there needs to be some reflection on one’s own life. This is the part that most definitely changed me. Some details below, but the gist of it is that while affecting (at least in the short term) on how I see the world, this experience also made me realize certain rather grander / fundamental things about life. Life is so weird.

The most immediate realization from this whole experience: everything will come to an end and there is nothing you can do. Ends have to be endured. It’s hard to endure everything alone, and for that you need someone, or someones. (In this case primarily /r/LifeIsStrange and the podcasts. I also had some friends, but their role was just to be an audience while I announced how this game had had such an impact on me. But that helped, too.)

In the end you’ll feel weird and dull, but also oddly at ease: there is nothing you can do now. I’ll never forget the journey, or how it helped me grow.

Transforming life

As the game and the setting were so greatly crafted, it was really easy to actually become Max, not just be someone who control’s her avatar. Not many games can accomplish this. Almost without noticing it I had slipped to be in the wonderful nostalgia-colored teenage-life of Maxine Caulfield.

This glimpse to another life. Life of an adorable, slightly geeky girl who likes photography and innocently loves to observe the world. But you can’t change your life just like that; I am not Max, nor is her life mine. No matter how much I hoped to be Max, it was not going to happen. But you can try to slowly change yourself.

My immediate reaction to this was of course to try and be more like Max, try to observe the world with that same kind of non-judging, all-seeing way. But it’s not that easy. While being bit of a stretch, I do have moments when I feel emotions somewhat comparable to hers. Not everything is perfect, but I’m pretty good in what I do and how I have my future planned. I do have the occasional moments of feeling great in life. While not happening too often, I’ve also had some good moments with friends. I should just embrace who I am, no matter what.

And you don’t actually need to have an opinion on everything, just keep an open view on the world. Don’t just plod through everything without taking a moment to appreciate what you are doing.

Do this and maybe you’ll end up more like Max. More like a better person. And don’t try to necessarily change the world, change your view on it.

Emotional layers

Having continued on this path of self-reflection were are now arriving at the very core.

This experience has finally had me realize that there is multiple layers(or segments or whatever to call them) of me. Sure, layering is a known psychological theory, but I didn’t realize just how accurate it was and that I too implemented it. There are those layers I show at work or when studying. I know it’s necessary to have some emotional separation, but that also makes be feel incomplete. And then there is that one layer at the core was affected by all this. Maybe that is the real me?

I’ve been under a lot of stress this semester, and as a coping mechanism I’ve had to segment myself to multiple distinct though-spheres(wtf is that word). Sure there is some crosstalk, but it has stayed low. While this has helped me to focus on the task at hand, I’ve began to feel the wearing effects of maintaining that emotional isolation.

There’s always been those segments, but lately they have been even more isolated. The pressure building up.

The outer layer is divided to two distinct things. There is one me for studying and another one for work. Protected by those there is the normal me for friends, gaming and living in general. But that is not everything. There have been occasional hints about an isolated layer below, but nothing really concrete.

But now this game pierced through all those layers and exposed that very core underneath, the ‘real me’ - or at least as real as it can get. There was a reason that core was isolated. It’s sensitive. And this game was . It cracked that isolation up. I’m in ruins. I’ve tried to keep everything from imploding, but it has not been easy.

Maybe the game was an escape?

Total(ish) immersion, or whatever?..

* * *

I’m actually having difficulty finalizing this section, as that would mean I accept all this.

Where has the time gone?

I don’t know how I would have fared had I not had an almost perfectly timed semester break this week. I still went to work, but didn’t have to worry about exercises and lectures. Instead I had time to focus on all of this: process everything(or as much as I could/can) and stumble for closure.

Like a comment in reddit said, it makes no logical sense for a video game or fictional characters to evoke this much emotion. But this is art, and art is supposed to have some type of an effect.

I wish I could stay in this moment forever. But then, I guess it wouldn't be a moment.

On 'Life is Strange'

A story first, skip ahead for the actual review.

Not long after the game's initial release I picked up the first episode and was immediately hooked. Played through it in a weekend, and then for a second time with different choices.

I immersed myself completely into the world and story, and it was intense. Couldn't even think about playing another episode for a whole week. It actually took well over a month before I could play the second episode.

And the second episode was even better. Now I had to take an even longer break.

When I finally resumed playing, both ep3 and ep4 were out, and ep5 just two weeks away. I tried to pace myself by just playing ep3 during one weekend, and then ep4 the next.

I failed. Ended up playing ep3 in a single day. And because it ended with such a cliffhanger I just had to play ep4 the next day.

That was a dire mistake. Now I'm broken and feel empty and hollow. Couldn't even function properly for the rest of the day(or the next).

* * *

This game is larger than life. The game's protagonist is a photographer, and through her eyes it is seen how vibrant and colorful the world actually is. The atmosphere is truly captivating and full of wonder, and the plot something unexpected.

It took a long time to quantify, but I finally figured out why the game resonated so strongly with me. My life is quite dull and boring, and immersing myself completely to the game world and its characters allowed me to break free from that grayness, and experience the full spectrum of the shades that is life.

There is also the role playing aspect. I'm normally not that social. I stick to the routine and am quite cautious on trying out new things. But the game's protagonist is social. Routine is broken by the unfolding events and that leads to trying out new things. Even the character interactions allow for experimentation thanks to the rewind ability.

This all is so much more than the gray ordinariness of (my) real life. The withdrawals from stopping playing are real and hit me hard. Combine this with an awesome plot that you can influence in a real way. Add a setting that allows to partly (re?)live what I kinda missed growing up. And finally add the very likeable protagonist, a great selection of songs and the very fitting and beautiful graphics(and not a single problem with performance).

6/5. Will play again - when I recover.

Be sure to read the second part, too.

(Also, there was a great opinion piece on PCGamer by Jody Macgregor, I highly recommend reading it.)

Plotting GPS data

Sometimes going out for just a walk isn’t that easy and some extra motivation is needed. Luckily I had just that extra: going for a walk allowed me to get some rather important real-world data for the GPS tracking service I have been working for quite some time.

During those walks I had the idea to further use the recorded data. The forest was filled with paths and I thought it’d be great to map those. And maybe even have some kind of heatmap of the most traveled routes!
Work, studies, gaming and general procrastination kept me busy, but here it finally is:

Investigating TCP timeouts

As hinted by an earlier post, one of my latest work projects was a building a WebRTC based video streaming system. This system features a Websocket backend server handling the client sessions and signaling, written in Python with Gevent. My co-worker was performing some testing and everything seemed to be working just fine. Except one point he encountered a situation, where the server insisted another client was already connected, when it clearly wasn’t. Even netstat said that the TCP connection was ‘established’.

Some Websocket client connections were arbitrarily staying open even if the browser was closed! I had just added some hooks to the server to better detect disconnected / timed-out clients and a good guess was that I had messed something up. Nope. Debugged the thing for hours but couldn’t find single bug.

That is, until I tried toggling network connections. Being a system targeted for mobile devices, one facet of testing is to check how well it works with different network connections. If the network connection was turned of while the client was connected, the server couldn’t detect that until after about ten to fifteen minutes, even though it was sending keep-alive packets every 20 seconds. Strange indeed.

But maybe it wasn’t, maybe the write call was blocking the specific greenlet? That is an easy thing to test, just dump some stack traces. But nope again. How about if I run the server via strace and try to spot the writes there? It took bit of an effort, but the strace output revealed that the write calls were performed just fine! This is starting to be most troubling…

But then a revelation; write returned EPIPE. After quite a bit of research I had finally found the reason for this behavior: TCP timeouts. Turning off the network connection really did what it did. It turned off the connection without giving the protocol stack time to say its goodbyes. The server then though the client just had a really bad connection and tried resending the queued data with an exponential delay back off per TCP spec. My math didn’t quite match, but in an old thread the total timeout was calculated to be 924.6 seconds with the default TCP parameters. This was quite close to the actual timeout observed with the server.

* * *

I sighed and changed the keep-alive protocol so that timely replies were required instead of just relying on failed writes. Now it works beautifully.

Tl;dr: TCP was just really hard trying to resend data after it detected packet loss, only giving up when about fifteen whole minutes had passed.

Investigating slow startup of a gevent-based server application

Fast iteration time is critical when developing new things, and everything is fine when the server takes half a second to start. But when that server takes ten seconds to start, that's when things get annoying. So annoying that I had no choice but to spend several hours digging around for a reason for that slowdown.

The server in question was a Python/gevent/pywsgi server kinds of which I have been using quite some time now. And this was a new problem, one I had not previously encountered before: of course I wanted to get to the bottom of this.

First I tried to place some strategic print statements here and there, but those didn't help. Next I fired up the debugger and suspended the process during the startup. Nothing low-level blocking socket creation, and gevent has happily running its event loop; can't be its fault. Gevent has always done a great job not blocking anything, so that couldn't be it. (This is where I made a 'mistake', see the last paragraph.)

I was determined that it was something low-level, so it was time bring out the big guns: API Monitor. It could log every low-level API call, and then it would just be matter of digging through them all. And there indeed was some digging to be done. Then finally I found what I was looking for. The gevent event loop really did spin as it should, but the socket began processing data only after a gethostbyaddr-call returned.

That strange character is actually FE 80 00, rest of the address not rendering as a string.


This low-lever function was taking a long time to execute, and was actually executed in another thread, communicating its results via a socket. back to the main thread. For its argument it was given a link-local IPv6 address of (the first adapter from ipconfig) Hyper-V bridge adapter. Maybe due to some kind of misconfiguration or whatever that call took an excessive amount of time.

Now that I knew what was happening I wanted to know why. Intuition brought me to gevent's socket.py wrapper, where I inserted some tracking code to its implementation of gethostbyaddr. That in turn told me that as part of creating the socket the server's environmental variables were initialized. One of these was SERVER_NAME. If it was not already set, it was resolved via getfqdn - which called gethostname and that devil-ish gethostbyaddr. Only after the server name was resolved could the socket begin accepting connections.

Now that I had the general reason I didn't want to bother myself more that I had to. As the mechanism was already there, all it took was to pass environ={'SERVER_NAME': 'whatever'} as a kwargs to WSGIServer.

* * *

Had I though a bit more before letting go of the debugger and starting the API Monitor, I would probably have though about looking at the individual greenlet stacktraces. Those would have clearly told that the getfqdn call was blocking the main server greenlet.

WebRTC primer

As a relatively new technology WebRTC is still quite unheard of even though it will likely be the next Big Thing. It offers a whole new way to create interactive peer to peer multimedia applications within a browser - without requiring any additional plugins. Support is already built-in to the newest versions of Chrome on both desktops and Android. Firefox and Opera also have WebRTC capabilities, but still have some features missing.

It's bit of a chicken-egg problem really. There is not yet widespread adaptation so development doesn't have the highest priorty, and the development is not the highest priority because there is no widespread adaptation. While I can't really do much about the APIs, I can still try and present my take on the basic WebRTC connection flow. Hopefully this helps someone to create a cool WebRTC application and thereby indirectly contributing to development priorities.

But please note that this text is written as part of a project I've been working on and is not meant to be the singular introduction to WebRTC, nor is this meant to primarily be a tutorial. If you are looking for a more thorough introduction, see the great tutorial on HTML5 Rocks. After you have read that tutorial and still feel disoriented, I hope you came back here and read what I've written. Hopefully at least my diagram will clarify something.

WebRTC connection flow

In short, to establish a connection between two peers the following needs to be done:
  • Create a signaling channel between the peers
  • Get local media, and negotiate codecs
  • Perform interactive connection establishment assisted by the signaling channel
  • And finally start streaming data
This is my take on the issue. It is not the one and only way to do things, especially with the signaling channel. But then again, signaling is not covered in the WebRTC specification even though it's a very important piece of the puzzle. The easiest way is to roll your own asynchronous server using something like python-gevent or node.js, but you could as well adapt something like SIP or XMPP for this purpose.

At the very beginning both of the clients connect to this signaling / management server and mutually agree on a session. Later they then use this session to exchange the messages necessary to build their own direct connection with the steps illustrated in the diagram 1 below(use a state machine, you'll thank yourself later). Most of the functions in the diagram refer to the WebRTC-stack but some are just to illustrate a point. Also note that some functions might fail due to user actions, and some due to timeouts. Application-defined timeouts can also occur waiting for state transitions. Finally, the traffic between the peers is the traffic via the signaling server.

Diagram 1. Basic connection flow

Reverse engineering a binary code modification of an Unity3D game

This happened a while ago, but found the time to write about this only now(no surprises there).

* * *

So, during a casual conversation it came up that a single player FPS game I used to play on Android also had an official PC version. This made me quite happy, though my joy was crushed soon after: 60 degree field of view is the recipe for instant headaches. disorientation and general discomfort.

But I won’t let that stop me! No way. Although I’m quite a noob, I’ve still had some success reverse engineering various games. The game uses Unity3d web player, so I’ll just unpack that and find some strings referencing fov, and then take a look at the code and modify that pesky 60 to a more manageable number. Not that easy. And yeah, it’s not C, but C#. That’s a whole different kind of beast with it’s execution model.

But hey, there actually seems to be a CheatEngine table on Google with fov mod! Piecing it together I was finally able to modify the fov with it. Great, I just downloaded some stuff and pressed a button. l33t hax.

* * *

So, how does that thing work? Well, I also found out that the game’s code was not obsfucated. Running the game dll through a decompiler produced lovely human readable code. And look! A camera class! And it has that pesky 60 fov hardcoded in to several places! Maybe the CE script searches for it and replaces the entries? Converting 60.0f to hex and doing some manual comparisons verified that to be the likely scenario.

Then some more reading about C# IL code etc. and comparing the bytes in the script with the IL code of the relevant camera methods. Perfect match! Indeed the CE script was searching for the camera code and replacing it with one where the hardcoded fov value was different. This also explains why the script didn’t work if a level was already loaded. The IL code was already JIT compiled to another form.

* * *

This discovery means that I can look for arbitrary code in the game, parse the IL dump with my Python script and then make the relevant changes. Then use that same CE script to replace those parts of the game’s code.

Using this new ability, I also found that pesky code that was responsible for aim assist. A few NOPs and welcome full manual aiming! Though, some time later the game received an update, breaking the aim assist disabling. I’d like to revisit that section of the code some day and see what needs to be done to fix it.

Some thoughts about the new desktop – part II

So, a new desktop and life is wonderful? Sure, maybe for a month. Then the random BSODs started to happen. Then some more BSODs, at worst daily. Long hours of analyzing minidumps, tracking possibly bad drivers, upgrading and disabling them. Reading message boards. Adjusting power settings. Adjusting voltages. Running memtests. Nothing seems to be helping and nothing helpful emerges. I’m beginning to suspect the BSODs have something to do with sleep or hibernate, but nothing conclusive as the BSODs take too long a time to get certainty about the causality. Might just as well try upgrading to Windows 8.1 now that all hope is lost.

Of course setting up a fresh OS install brings daily restarts, so the BSODs seem to be gone for a moment. But then, again, they start happening. Checking drivers once again, nothing. Well, it was as if removing Gigabyte's chipset drivers somewhat reduced the BDOSs, but they were not gone completely. Then, with heavy heart, I disabled the sleep-mode just to test it. No more BSODs.

* * *

Now, according to dump files, it’s been almost four months without a single BSODs. A hardware problem with sleep-mode RAM voltage regulation? Software issue? No idea…