Storm said less than a month ago on the Crossfire LambdaGeneration stream that there are clues we haven’t found that are possible to get. We really need to focus on finding those so we can really figure out the code. I’m willing to bet there’s a “secured site” we need to find more than a hint in-game. However, it could always be both.
But we should more closely analyze the data bank write thing it’s suspicious.
If I’m not mistaken, that databank-server write thing is only in the mod release.
materials\models\props_questionableethics\qe_console_wideB.vtf (3 frames)
materials\models\props_questionableethics\qe_console_wideB2.vtf
In the Steam release, the textures in those two files of the same names look completely different.
ok, so some more updates, if some of these have been touched on before, my bad, I haven’t finished the whole wiki yet, almost there. so 21 into 1. the clock theory and modular math is sound, first up, I found this clock. the clock time is 10:12, theres your 21 into 1. something that goes with it though is some audio, for whatever reason, I can not get shadowplay to record in game audio. so ill post a video of the clock and some cell phone recording of the audio that is heard on the pc near the clock. ive also heard it in a guard room near the part where you have to jump from suspended boxes from one end of the room to the other, sorry not more specific. but you can hear a code in the cell phone video, maybe morse code, or something else, ive not figured it out yet. someone might have a better idea of it. also, this is a good read. https://www.ciphersbyritter.com/NEWS6/CASCADE.HTM
so we are going to have multiple keys, need to figure out the order to apply them. fun fun.
here is a link to the cell recording, again, sorry for the quality, I’m having a problem with shadowplay recording. youtu.be/vDXTT88AVfU
now this video is actually where I’m hearing the audio with what sounds maybe like morse. youtu.be/nLBsJ78UbZo
here is the clock., no matter how many times the second hand goes around, it never advances either hand. this also goes with the image below.
youtu.be/MFNM2hiyL2M
EDITED FOR LACK OF MATH ABILITY… f
also, some of the photos around, heady lamar, shrodingers cat … etc etc… they also point to some things that I haven’t worked out yet, for instance heady lamar was also an inventor, credited with spread spread spectrum technology…look familiar?
also this picture, which got me thinking about the spectrums. we have blue shift, red shift, green, yellow, and so on. also, you can find guard shift schedule information in the game. guard rotations color coded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift
GREEN SHIFT 2100 TO 1000
YELLOW SHIFT 0900 2200
notice the color shifts. this is a lot of information from all over, some of it may have been touched on before, some maybe not, I don’t know. maybe someone will see something or hear something and make some sense of it. as for being near a solution, I believe I have the solution for the modular math, but there are other keys, and we still need to figure out the order in which to apply. I was over confident, and I apologize for that, I didn’t think there would be this many keys.
one last thing and its probably nothing, but the team page with the 404 errors, if you read through it, it talks about proper timezone date and some other things. has anyone tried changing their pc’s time and date and other info it talks about on the page and messed around with it? just curious.
https://www.blackmesasource.com/team.html
7x + 1 doesn’t produce the sequence 7 15 43. It can produce two of those numbers, but not 7 itself without a really wacky fraction (6/7) as the value of x.
x = 0, 1,. 2,
3, 4, 5, 6, 7…
7x + 1 = 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, 36, 43…
yup yup, you’re right.
@drgibbles where about in the game is that sound from?
EDIT : I found it. It sounds like a zip drive/printer/something a PC would make when writing infomation to something. distinctive beeps/pulses, it last for about 15-20 seconds before repeating itself.
I’ve heard it twice so far, towards the beginning of the game. once where that pc with the rotating black mesa symbol, in the offices where vortigants first warp in, and before that where there is a large gap witg suspended boxes hanging where you have to jump from one to another to get to the other side. Below is where you see the first bull squid
yes, the rythym is pointing to something though
Most of those events and objects, and tasks that you do on the exception of the vortagants spawning in the first map of office complex also happen in the original Half life however the monitor that you mentioned is not in the original game but is not important to the ARG and the only monitor that i can think of that is important is the on that stands out from the rest in questionable ethics office near code b.
so you don’t think the rhythm is anything? not being snooty, just asking your opinion. I don’t think the monitor is important at all, but the audio that goes with it I think might be, ive heard it in 2 different areas.
can someone please try and transcribe the above audio to morse code? I’m having a hard time with it
Its not coming from the actual monitor but the PC below the desk, i moved the monitor from the room to the other side of that area and the sound stayed. I think its just a PC sound added to the Tower in that room.
imbxlinklsxjohn so maybe somone can think of something that fits that beings with I’m and ends with john
A key for what? And how did you come up with that?
I’m having an extremely hard time following what you’re attempting to do and how you’re going about it. Could you please elaborate in detail on your line of thinking?
no problem. the amount of information and clues on this puzzle is staggering, so I try to hop back and forth through codes that have been found, and deciphered already, stuff that hasn’t, numbers I find in game, colors I find in game. names on the wall and so on, so it comes across fairly jumbled. theres hundreds of pages on this stuff and I don’t know what all has been tried and what hasn’t. I’m using several decryption sites at the same time trying to find patterns or clues. currently I’m trying to find something in the grilled picture image. there have been so many things pointing to inverse or opposite factors it seems to me that will be a big part of the solution. Dr. Horn, Dr. Halo., halos are the opposites of horns. the Dr. halo software was used back in the day and would have 2 separate files that were combined into 1. so on the grilled pizza image I keep thinking there is something else there. I know NOTHING of coding or java or anything like that. so going through that stuff is a learn as I go. I have tried converting it to a text file and trying to find hidden text that way, also I’m trying to figure out what Huffman coding is, The file said it was likely encoded with huffman code. I know its a code used with images so maybe I could I figure out something that way I have also tried inverting colors and zooming in to the pixels as close as I can , finding multiple different colors, but I don’t know if its anything or not. I can post a pic. I’m also convinced that the 21 goes into 1 is a play on modular math or clock math, where the remainder is important. so the numbers in the halos text I have been trying numbers divided by 21 and taking the remainders and trying to line them up as an affine cipher. like b32003a I would change to , 32/21= 1 r 11= b11003a, but where the 11 falls on the alphabet is where im stuck/working on. and different variations of that. I also believe the puzzle setup to be based off off the kryptos puzzle which has been mentioned a few times. consisting of morse code, Vigenère Ciphers, and modular transposition, with the keywords being benalohpaillier and halos. I have also been trying to re-arrange the letters and hoping to get something that way as well. right now the numbers in the puzzle is what is giving me the problem. I believe them to be based off the modular math, then assigning the numbers their corresponding letter. once that is done, running the vignere ciphers. ill post a couple of links of the sites I have been using and reading through. to break up the monotony sometimes ill take what I have, run a shift on it and start throwing it at different decryptions. the above 15character password ending in john I got from running a shift on the halos text and using a tool to try and guess the password and characters numbers. last night when IMxLINKx JOHN showed up it made me think of some of the messages that had been mentioned before, talking about dr. welsh, setting up a link and some other stuff. this is how I got that possible pw above. https://www.mygeocachingprofile.com/codebreaker.vigenerecipher.aspx I ran this shift a32b003l35qpvz66577r24n14ur919064346w131p7u54ax82urx03w022615777247923sr21o62pd4182e91r3x267o545tmcstssb0261510w4ewp1w87bz33r7v77131309by4280xm4243v1154s044y9cx6296m9xsf7397e4390987br63203ds0sw40278b3…
and I try different passwords, or different character numbers or autodetect. and it will generate 500 different combinations that could work, if you see something that clicks, you change the pw and try again. these are a few that popped up.
Key #1: imbxlinklsljohn
Key #2: imbxlinklsxjohn
Key #3: imbxlinklqljohn
Key #4: imbxlinklqxjohn
Key #5: imbxlinkbsljohn
it goes on quite a bit more. so I don’t get burnt out on 1 thing I’m constantly working on as many things as I can at once, sometimes things pop up that look like they need more of a closer look, and I will post it up, maybe someone will make something of it, maybe not.
I think once we get the numbers handled that we will be able to decode some stuff using something like this.
HALOSBCDEFGIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZH
ALOSBCDEFGIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZHA
LOSBCDEFGIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZHAL
OSBCDEFGIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZHALO
SBCDEFGIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZHALOS
BCDEFGIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZHALOSB
CDEFGIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZHALOSBC
DEFGIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZHALOSBCD
EFGIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZHALOSBCDE
FGIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZHALOSBCDEF
GIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZHALOSBCDEFG
IJKMNPQRTUVWXYZHALOSBCDEFGI
JKMNPQRTUVWXYZHALOSBCDEFGIJ
KMNPQRTUVWXYZHALOSBCDEFGIJK
MNPQRTUVWXYZHALOSBCDEFGIJKM
NPQRTUVWXYZHALOSBCDEFGIJKMN
PQRTUVWXYZHALOSBCDEFGIJKMNP
QRTUVWXYZHALOSBCDEFGIJKMNPQ
RTUVWXYZHALOSBCDEFGIJKMNPQR
TUVWXYZHALOSBCDEFGIJKMNPQRT
UVWXYZHALOSBCDEFGIJKMNPQRTU
VWXYZHALOSBCDEFGIJKMNPQRTUV
used with the key of benalohpaillier
as for sites I have been using, the best resource I have is this one
https://www.austininc.com/SciRealm/KryptosSim.html
also these
https://www.elfqrin.com/codecracker.php
https://www.mygeocachingprofile.com/codebreaker.vigenerecipher.aspx
https://www.robertecker.com/hp/research/leet-converter.php?lang=en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_arithmetic
https://www.math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Projects/KarlWang
https://cryptography.wikia.com/wiki/Affine_cipher
That actually clears it up quite a bit. Nice work, man!
EDIT: I see Stormseeker’s site is still down. What happened there, or do we know?
From what I understand, someone reported on his steam profile that CS winter map page (on his portofolio) now links to "some shady stuff" . Since then, I was unable to access the site, so I suspect he is doing some changes.
This is similar to how one of the parts of the Kyptos Statue was decoded, looking at the steps with the infomation we have i defiantly think that way Kyptos was decoded is the way we need to do this. Now when looking at the website below, swap out Kyptos for Halos, and then use Benaloh for part one and Paillier for part two. im assuming we would do the numbers the same by adding on 0 to 9 after the alphabet, so HALOSABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789 accross the top, Benaloh down the side, and then transpositioning the whole Halos Text File.
yes, I think something along those lines, the code already having ABCDEF, leaves room for twenty more characters to get a mod26 for the alphabet. So it may or may not have numbers at the end of it. I’ll try it all ways, the way you suggested and other variations until we get something solid,
Something else I saw last night, and this might be nothing. One or the shifts I ran ended with this.
Plzz41x300x11w, I know there are questions about x01 and x02, but the last word looking pretty much like pizza made it stand out
I don’t know anything about messages in images, does the above image of the triangle mean anything with the extra pixles like there? when you try and fill it in with color, it does not fill the whole triangle, where the pixels are it does not fill anything there. so I don’t know if that is significant in any way
Ps, does anyone have any type of software that can extract the bit information from grilled pizza. Jpg, and maybe the rgb info for each bit? And has anyone downloaded the bmrf.us video and taken it a part?
I think you mean “HALOSBCDEFGIJKMNPQRTUVWXYZ0123456789”, otherwise you’ll have duplicate letters for ‘H’, ‘A’, ‘L’, ‘O’ and ‘S’. Anyway, that’s a 36-character alphabet.
But the question is: How will you go about converting the 16-character alphabet (“0123456789abcdef”) code that is the hex code into a 36-character alphabet code that can be decoded with the 36-character alphabet setup you are describing?
Those “extra” pixels are JPEG compression artifacts, no doubt. These artifacts are most visible around high-contrast edges. JPEG also processes the image in blocks of 8x8 pixels, and as a result you’ll often see blocky structures in the image (as you can see your image, there’s something that looks like a staircase structure going up the sides of the triangle).
There are many programs that can save an image as raw RGB data. GIMP, for example.
Note: If you do any work on the grilledpizza.jpg, use the original file from stormseeker’s site, not the one from the wiki as Wikia may have recompressed the image since it was uploaded to the wiki. While stormseeker’s site is still down, you can find the original file in the archive available here (you’ll need 7-Zip to extract it).
EDIT:
Shortly before the countdown counter appeared on the bmrf.us site, a pre-countdown video appeared on the main site https://www.blackmesagame.com. In the HTML source code there was this:
<!-- Start Homepage -->
<div id="homepage">
<style>
.unforeseen-consequences {position: absolute; top:0; left:0; background: #000; width:100%;height: 100%}
.unforeseen-consequences video { width: 100%; height: 100%}
</style>
<div class="unforeseen-consequences">
<video autoplay loop>
<source src="video/3.mp4">
<source src="video/3.ogg">
<source src="video/3.webm">
<p class="warning">Your browser does not support HTML5 video.</p>
</video>
</div>As you can see, the CSS class for the div element containing the video was named “unforeseen-consequences”. It’s possible that this was just part of the Steam Release promo campaign, that the Steam Early Access Release of Black Mesa was code-named “Unforeseen Consequences”, and thus it’s not to do with the ARG directly.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
