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Grimoire Thread

Invictus

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
2,789
Location
Mexico
Divinity: Original Sin 2

GOLDEN ERA GAMES
[developer] Just now
Something Has Messed Up Grimoire So Badly I Can't Even Understand How It Is Possible
It has lost the ability with simple ANSI C file commands to overwrite a file or delete an existing one. I have never seen anything like it in thirty years of programming, never, on an application anywhere. "NO, DON'T OVERWRITE THIS FILE" is not a windows message. Has anyone ever heard of such a thing?

The sample savegames were uploaded by people pirating the software. That was a pirated version they uploaded. There were pirates asking for support on this forum. I don't know if they have introduced a very ugly virus into the program. I trusted them when I had a look at their samples but discovered later these are all pirated copies they were ASKING FOR SUPPORT for on this forum.

These are simple file commands to create, write and erase files. I took out ALL file commands to get permissions for user app files and rolled BACK to what was there before. There is nothing to these commands, no special windows tokens for users, no file specs on files. I deleted my target directory and started in a new one. The problem is still there. Grimoire can't even simple create files, erase them and write news ones. I have never seen something so messed up.

This is why we can't have nice things on this planet.

I am running my AV software with new definitions and trying some new things with file permissions, I have to work carefully and see if I can isolate the problem. These aren't fancy Windows file writes we are talking about. These are vanilla C commands working for 20 years, never had a problem of any kind.

I am really sorry about this and working constantly on the problem. It's a shame because the game was just now reaching a nice stable version before this nightmare. Now it has basically been sabotaged in Steam ratings and is giving newcomers a terrible impression of the game.
Yeah I had to play the pirated version for 4 whole days before I got my Steam Key... sorry but kind of hard seeing everybody play the game I backed more than 4 years ago
I think I will go back to my pirated .1 version until problems are sorted out. If my saves from .1 can work with the latest relase (.9) I guess I am good for a later version too
Anyway off to the lair of the black lich I go...
 

PowerTorment

Io-Interactive
Patron
Developer
Joined
May 1, 2013
Messages
680
Location
The Ninth World

GOLDEN ERA GAMES
[developer] Just now
Something Has Messed Up Grimoire So Badly I Can't Even Understand How It Is Possible
It has lost the ability with simple ANSI C file commands to overwrite a file or delete an existing one. I have never seen anything like it in thirty years of programming, never, on an application anywhere. "NO, DON'T OVERWRITE THIS FILE" is not a windows message. Has anyone ever heard of such a thing?

The sample savegames were uploaded by people pirating the software. That was a pirated version they uploaded. There were pirates asking for support on this forum. I don't know if they have introduced a very ugly virus into the program. I trusted them when I had a look at their samples but discovered later these are all pirated copies they were ASKING FOR SUPPORT for on this forum.

These are simple file commands to create, write and erase files. I took out ALL file commands to get permissions for user app files and rolled BACK to what was there before. There is nothing to these commands, no special windows tokens for users, no file specs on files. I deleted my target directory and started in a new one. The problem is still there. Grimoire can't even simple create files, erase them and write news ones. I have never seen something so messed up.

This is why we can't have nice things on this planet.

I am running my AV software with new definitions and trying some new things with file permissions, I have to work carefully and see if I can isolate the problem. These aren't fancy Windows file writes we are talking about. These are vanilla C commands working for 20 years, never had a problem of any kind.

I am really sorry about this and working constantly on the problem. It's a shame because the game was just now reaching a nice stable version before this nightmare. Now it has basically been sabotaged in Steam ratings and is giving newcomers a terrible impression of the game.
Wait- What does this even mean.

Can someone translate please?

As a programmer this mostly sounds like rambling to me.

Save games cannot contain viruses so that entire thing with AV is pure lunacy (or incompetence, you choose).

When ANSI file commands fail it is almost always due to file permissions - for instance reading/writing in a folder that is not accessible by the app. For instance, files in the program files folder can only be written if you have admin permission with the current windows user. Or alternatively this can be caused by the fact that his application is leaking win32 HANDLES. These are a limited resource and required to do file operation. Or maybe he is leaking file handles - that is even a more limited resource.

Also, the "NO, DON'T OVERWRITE THIS FILE" must be made by Grimoire itself somewhere - it not viruses or other libraries or other lunacy.

Come on Cleve, you know better than this. And how does he know that the saves are from pirated versions? Seems far fetched.
 
Joined
Apr 20, 2017
Messages
99
As a programmer this mostly sounds like rambling to me.

Save games cannot contain viruses so that entire thing with AV is pure lunacy (or incompetence, you choose).

When ANSI file commands fail it is almost always due to file permissions - for instance reading/writing in a folder that is not accessible by the app. For instance, files in the program files folder can only be written if you have admin permission with the current windows user. Or alternatively this can be caused by the fact that his application is leaking win32 HANDLES. These are a limited resource and required to do file operation. Or maybe he is leaking file handles - that is even a more limited resource.

Also, the "NO, DON'T OVERWRITE THIS FILE" must be made by Grimoire itself somewhere - it not viruses or other libraries or other lunacy.

Come on Cleve, you know better than this. And how does he know that the saves are from pirated versions? Seems far fetched.

Cleve is just tired and at the end of his rope. When nothing works and your entire reality seems to be crumbling around you it's usually because you did something very basic/fundamental wrong. When you're tired you overlook that and start grasping at more and more exotic and unrealistic scenarios to fit the facts.

Anyways the string comes from the save file dialog and the file gets written successfully, so my theory is that the file name has been swapped with the dialog string variable. Occam's razor.
 
Last edited:

Chamezero

Guest
game is released, massive amount of bad reviews is posted because nobody can run the game thanks to its ancient spaghetti code [YOU ARE HERE], game is pulled from the store 8 hours later, "ok guys give me a week to fix it incline is coming", darkness descends
 

Brancaleone

Liturgist
Joined
Apr 28, 2015
Messages
1,004
Location
Norcia
Not sure speculating about viruses in Grimoire is the best move right now, but I'm probably mostly Sapiens so can't see past the short term :negative:

Thank God all those Australian companies he single-handedly saved from their doom must have been using the best anti-viruses ever.
 
Self-Ejected

buru5

Very Grumpy Dragon
Patron
Joined
Apr 9, 2017
Messages
2,048
WTF Cleve!?
Why don't my saves from 1.2.0.7 work anymore!!!!!!

FFS, You can't keep expecting your players to start over every damn day!

This has literally gone from one of my favorite games of all time to one I will never load again (unless my saves work).

Changing review to "Negative."
 

Crospy

Learned
Joined
Aug 9, 2014
Messages
130
As a programmer this mostly sounds like rambling to me.

Save games cannot contain viruses so that entire thing with AV is pure lunacy (or incompetence, you choose)..

While it is true that antiviruses suffer from stupid false positive all the time and so triggering them is not evidence of a virus being anywhere, it is also true that.. you are full of shit and I hope you are not a dev working on any software I use on a daily basis, because your statement on the idea that "save games cannot contain viruses" is incompetence and ignorance on the highest levels. All programs have bugs. Some bugs are exploitable, like buffer overflows. An exploit can lead to code execution which can lead to.. you get it, running a virus on your computer. This is how a virus can propagate from a pdf file, from a word document, from a save game or even a game rom meant to be run in an emulator. Considering how buggy and incompetently done Grimoire is, it probably wouldn't take more than some light fuzzing on save files to find something. Games that don't have a sanitized save loading system were always a popular venue to hack consoles and allow the user to run pirated games, they were one of the main entry points in hacking the xbox, wii and 3ds. The same method that makes people happy to become pirates on their consoles is also a method someone could use to infest your computer.

There's a decent opportunity to fuck with Cleve's computer actually, since he's asking for players saves while trying to find fixes for reported shit.
 

mogwaimon

Magister
Joined
Jul 21, 2017
Messages
1,079
Cleve is just tired and at the end of his rope. When nothing works and your entire reality seems to be crumbling around you it's usually because you did something very basic/fundamental wrong. When you're tired you overlook that and start grasping at more and more exotic and unrealistic scenarios to fit the facts.

Anyways the string comes from the save file dialog and the file gets written successfully, so my theory is that the file name has been swapped with the dialog string variable. Occam's razor.

I've been in the same boat while trying to fix computer problems that seem illogical and insurmountable. I've had some crazy theories, yea, but at least they made some sort of twisted sense, what Cleve was saying made absolutely no sense. For one, if any scene releaser was going to go rogue and slap a virus into a release, they'd do it with a more high profile AAA game. It would likely be a bitcoin miner or some other sort of RAT, not some malicious piece of code that corrupts saves. On the subject of saves, Grimoire has no known DRM so a pirate group would have no reason to alter the way the game works or saves in the first place (I have seen illegitimate releases like Dead Rising 2 store saves in such a way that they would not work on legitimate copies of the game)

None of this touches on the simple fact that any of these possibilities wouldn't affect the code written by Cleve, excepting any sort of virus-related corruption. As an aside, if you're worried about something messing with your code Cleve, why aren't you keeping some redundant backups around to check against/preserve the integrity of the source?
 
Self-Ejected

buru5

Very Grumpy Dragon
Patron
Joined
Apr 9, 2017
Messages
2,048
While it is true that antiviruses suffer from stupid false positive all the time and so triggering them is not evidence of a virus being anywhere, it is also true that.. you are full of shit and I hope you are not a dev working on any software I use on a daily basis, because your statement on the idea that "save games cannot contain viruses" is incompetence and ignorance on the highest levels.


You're implying that Grimoire could contain a virus, but how? Wouldn't someone have to tamper with Cleve's master-files before he uploads it to Steam to take advantage of any exploits in the coding?

And I don't think I've seen Cleve asking for people's saves on Steam.
 

Draxylon

Savant
Joined
Apr 18, 2017
Messages
221
Location
Iberia

GOLDEN ERA GAMES
[developer] Just now
Something Has Messed Up Grimoire So Badly I Can't Even Understand How It Is Possible
It has lost the ability with simple ANSI C file commands to overwrite a file or delete an existing one. I have never seen anything like it in thirty years of programming, never, on an application anywhere. "NO, DON'T OVERWRITE THIS FILE" is not a windows message. Has anyone ever heard of such a thing?

The sample savegames were uploaded by people pirating the software. That was a pirated version they uploaded. There were pirates asking for support on this forum. I don't know if they have introduced a very ugly virus into the program. I trusted them when I had a look at their samples but discovered later these are all pirated copies they were ASKING FOR SUPPORT for on this forum.

These are simple file commands to create, write and erase files. I took out ALL file commands to get permissions for user app files and rolled BACK to what was there before. There is nothing to these commands, no special windows tokens for users, no file specs on files. I deleted my target directory and started in a new one. The problem is still there. Grimoire can't even simple create files, erase them and write news ones. I have never seen something so messed up.

This is why we can't have nice things on this planet.

I am running my AV software with new definitions and trying some new things with file permissions, I have to work carefully and see if I can isolate the problem. These aren't fancy Windows file writes we are talking about. These are vanilla C commands working for 20 years, never had a problem of any kind.

I am really sorry about this and working constantly on the problem. It's a shame because the game was just now reaching a nice stable version before this nightmare. Now it has basically been sabotaged in Steam ratings and is giving newcomers a terrible impression of the game.

Warning anybody who posts to this forum for support for a pirated product you got off Dropbox or Megashare that you will be banned permanently, reported to Steam and it is likely they will remove your account for pirating products you got off Steam.

Whatever person who has proper programming knowledge and some experience in C knows this person (I would call him the ULTIMATE TROLL) is lying. I really really doubt a save could have code that could change a program, and I also really really doubt it could in a very remote way modify simple file IO in a System. That's nonsense.

I'm having a fun time reading this forum and related topics even in Steam. But I feel also sad, because all it's happening here makes me suspect this person and his game are an ultimate joke. Truly, it can't be made worse and in such a better maquiavelic way. I'm a programmer and I'm aware of the difficulty of a task of making a game like this, but Cleve is having such a beginner and not very professional mistakes that I doubt in his superior programming skills and experience.
 

mogwaimon

Magister
Joined
Jul 21, 2017
Messages
1,079
As a programmer this mostly sounds like rambling to me.

Save games cannot contain viruses so that entire thing with AV is pure lunacy (or incompetence, you choose)..

While it is true that antiviruses suffer from stupid false positive all the time and so triggering them is not evidence of a virus being anywhere, it is also true that.. you are full of shit and I hope you are not a dev working on any software I use on a daily basis, because your statement on the idea that "save games cannot contain viruses" is incompetence and ignorance on the highest levels. All programs have bugs. Some bugs are exploitable, like buffer overflows. An exploit can lead to code execution which can lead to.. you get it, running a virus on your computer. This is how a virus can propagate from a pdf file, from a word document, from a save game or even a game rom meant to be run in an emulator. Considering how buggy and incompetently done Grimoire is, it probably wouldn't take more than some light fuzzing on save files to find something. Games that don't have a sanitized save loading system were always a popular venue to hack consoles and allow the user to run pirated games, they were one of the main entry points in hacking the xbox, wii and 3ds. The same method that makes people happy to become pirates on their consoles is also a method someone could use to infest your computer.

There's a decent opportunity to fuck with Cleve's computer actually, since he's asking for players saves while trying to find fixes for reported shit.

There's a massive difference between using Bannerbomb to trigger a buffer overflow so you can install Homebrew Channel over one of the IOS portions of the Wii OS and coding a targeted virus for a system you presumably had no prior physical access to created to directly alter source code in an application to break save game functionality. I mean both are technically possible but they each have significant time investments and legal risks involved while only one of them has any real benefits beyond "do it for the lulz"
 

Crospy

Learned
Joined
Aug 9, 2014
Messages
130
I really really doubt a save could have code that could change a program

Yeah, things like the Zelda save game entry points to hack into the 3ds have never existed. It's all mythical. You can't make a game crash and run arbitrary code put into a malformed save game, you're just dreaming folks, sleep tight.
 
Joined
Apr 20, 2017
Messages
99

GOLDEN ERA GAMES
[developer] Just now
Something Has Messed Up Grimoire So Badly I Can't Even Understand How It Is Possible
It has lost the ability with simple ANSI C file commands to overwrite a file or delete an existing one. I have never seen anything like it in thirty years of programming, never, on an application anywhere. "NO, DON'T OVERWRITE THIS FILE" is not a windows message. Has anyone ever heard of such a thing?

The sample savegames were uploaded by people pirating the software. That was a pirated version they uploaded. There were pirates asking for support on this forum. I don't know if they have introduced a very ugly virus into the program. I trusted them when I had a look at their samples but discovered later these are all pirated copies they were ASKING FOR SUPPORT for on this forum.

These are simple file commands to create, write and erase files. I took out ALL file commands to get permissions for user app files and rolled BACK to what was there before. There is nothing to these commands, no special windows tokens for users, no file specs on files. I deleted my target directory and started in a new one. The problem is still there. Grimoire can't even simple create files, erase them and write news ones. I have never seen something so messed up.

This is why we can't have nice things on this planet.

I am running my AV software with new definitions and trying some new things with file permissions, I have to work carefully and see if I can isolate the problem. These aren't fancy Windows file writes we are talking about. These are vanilla C commands working for 20 years, never had a problem of any kind.

I am really sorry about this and working constantly on the problem. It's a shame because the game was just now reaching a nice stable version before this nightmare. Now it has basically been sabotaged in Steam ratings and is giving newcomers a terrible impression of the game.

Warning anybody who posts to this forum for support for a pirated product you got off Dropbox or Megashare that you will be banned permanently, reported to Steam and it is likely they will remove your account for pirating products you got off Steam.

Whatever person who has proper programming knowledge and some experience in C knows this person (I would call him the ULTIMATE TROLL) is lying. I really really doubt a save could have code that could change a program, and I also really really doubt it could in a very remote way modify simple file IO in a System. That's nonsense.

I'm having a fun time reading this forum and related topics even in Steam. But I feel also sad, because all it's happening here makes me suspect this person and his game are an ultimate joke. Truly, it can't be made worse and in such a better maquiavelic way. I'm a programmer and I'm aware of the difficulty of a task of making a game like this, but Cleve is having such a beginner and not very professional mistakes that I doubt in his superior programming skills and experience.

It's perfectly possible to infect a system through a save if the program loading the save doesn't sanitize inputs properly - any vector for external input to enter the system has to be treated as potentially hostile. Actually, anybody with knowledge of C would know that's true.

Is it it likely? No, it's far-fetched - but just in the same way that loading a V1.207 save can CRASH GRIMOIRE - a well-crafted save could take the machine on a wild ride.
 

Draxylon

Savant
Joined
Apr 18, 2017
Messages
221
Location
Iberia
I really really doubt a save could have code that could change a program

Yeah, things like the Zelda save game entry points to hack into the 3ds have never existed. It's all mythical. You can't make a game crash and run arbitrary code put into a malformed save game, you're just dreaming folks, sleep tight.

c'mon, it's not comparable. Anyway, I wish Cleve could isolate and find the problem. I'm enjoying twitch and youtube streams, specially Baxander's LP. The funny thing here is: I don't have the game and I won't buy it in a short term (probably when in GOG) but I can't stop thinking reading ad watching about this game since its release!!
 

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