[ARG] The Pizza Code Mystery

Black Mesa Archive The Cafeteria
#4866

The specimen 21 goes into it. Anti-Mass Spectrometer? Maybe the beam, whatever the name is? Maybe “The Test Chamber”? I remember I had tested anti-mass spectrometer, but I was using OpenSSL to do the tests, which we know now that would not decode it. It’s the only thing that seems to be related to the “21 goes into 1”, Surface Tension, since in the shack there was a TV that was showing the Anti-Mass Spectrometer level opened in the editor, and the whiteboards, several of them have information about specimen 21, it also somewhat ties with cascade, since it was substituted by specimen GG-3883, which caused the resonance cascade. Has this been tried with AES or other cryptographic functions without using OpenSLL?

By the way, there was a page that Code_ had said he used in a previous ARG, and where storm probably took the SECOM encryption tool from. Maybe we don’t need to look any further if there is a tool there to decrypt AES or any other encryption that cannot be brute-forced.

EDIT: Found the page searching on this thread, https://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/download.htm there’s a tool called Krypta, which uses some a custom version of the ARCFOUR/RC4 block cipher, which would explain why OpenSSL would not work to decode it. This is a sample of how the output looks, it’s the second paragraph on this post using the key “BENALLOH PAILLIER”. Now, it is case sensitive and spaces can be a character, so there’s going to be several combinations that we would have to check for every password. Thoughts?

eb28e5beb735b2c78f0c4ae6bd245be27729f36456a093b609ca85ca4bcc707e67020f8d8dd85b110f0d1aab576c63112dec037e0983d62f1c060c0bd9d41d0ce230ad720aacee80b558bf40ca05a02dd8b3c3b56fbf76cad42620d1be46c3c368c5706c...
#4867

I found the texture with the Latin text you found in HC. The thing is, the text is only visible in the texture’s alpha channel. This is easily missed if you forget to check the alpha channel of a texture. BM have thousands of textures. Going through them all, by opening them up in VTFEdit one by one, is time consuming, meticulous and not to mention boring work. And imagine doing this every time there’s an update. Surely, there must be better things to do in life.

“Hacking” into the game’s files for clues may also be considered cheating in the eyes of the creator.

I tried it with a few passwords once a long time ago, but I remember it being cumbersome to use, especially if you are going to try a lot of passwords. It would probably be better to code our own version of it. I found the source code to it, but the site that hosted it crashed and lost all its data. Some of Rijmenants uploads were recovered, but unfortunately not the Krypta tool/source code. I still have the .zip file and I’m attaching it to this post in case anyone wants to have a look at it.

EDIT: The source code is in Visual Basic. A complete description of the encryption algorithm can be found in the readme.txt file.

EDIT2: Just something I wanted to mention on the topic of OpenSSL: Serpent is not among the symmetric block ciphers implemented in OpenSSL. So that may be another argument in favor of the Serpent cipher theory (see my post a few pages back for a theory involving the Serpent cipher.)
KRYPTA2120527142008.zip (16.5 KB)

#4868

If we have to make our own then it’s probably not the solution, though the readme has the algorithm with the steps to decode it, we could make just a simple decoding function and use one of the existing scripts that were already made to test passwords, still, it seems a waste of time without a solid guess for the password. I’ve just tested ANTI-MASS SPECTROMETER with every capitalization, with and without the space and nothing. Meh, we’re probably still lacking something.

#4869

Wow, I’m surprised people still remember that video, I made it over a year ago.

#4870

Just to put an official quote out there on it so nobody jumps to any wild conclusions later, the Rex Machinator graffiti in Hazard Course is not in any way related to the Pizza Code Mystery ARG. It was something I snuck into the mod without telling the rest of the HC team, but I do not now, nor have I ever, had direct contact with or any form of collaboration/instructions with Stormseeker (though that’d be cool, the man is a genius)

Also, just an fyi, while I’m unsure of the correctness of the initial Latin text as used in the texture (Google translate was used, since I don’t currently speak Latin) the translation further back in the thread isn’t what the source text I translated into Latin was by a long shot.

#4871

There is another neat way to browse through the game’s textures other than unpacking the .vpk’s and opening up the textures in VTFEdit, and that is to use the in-game texture browser, mat_texture_list. Load up a map, and then type [tt]sv_cheats 1[/tt] and then [tt]mat_texture_list 1[/tt] into the console. Make sure to click the “Show All Textures” check box, otherwise it’s only listing the textures visible in the current frame.

What’s great about this method is that it also shows the alpha channel of the texture where it exists.

We should browse through the textures in all the maps to make sure we didn’t miss anything, but I doubt we’ll find anything new.

20160531212236_1.jpg
20160531212236_1.jpg1920×1080 509 KB

#4872

That really is a nice way to browse the textures, but @Flavrans stated in the author’s eyes it will be cheating.
On the other hand, we are still stuck on the same clue for the last year or so.
So i say go for it, browse it with that method you showed.

#4873

As my professor once told me, “It’s not cheating - It’s using your resources wisely.”

#4874

The question is: How much more of a cheat is [tt]mat_texture_list[/tt] than [tt]noclip[/tt]? Both are in-game console commands that only work with [tt]sv_cheats[/tt] enabled. Code A and Code C could only be found through noclipping in the game. Of course, one might say that [tt]mat_texture_list[/tt] is a much more powerful tool than [tt]noclip[/tt], and therefore is not in the spirit of the game. But considering it’s a tool that’s available in-game, I think it’s somewhat difficult to see where the line goes.

#4875

The only rule afaik is no hacking, after all one of the codes, IRC clue 5, could only be solved by brute-forcing it. By the way, the CSM seems that was not ARG related after all.

https://twitter.com/craigmirfin/status/731497367988502528

#4876

You mean that mysterious CSM acronym on Stormseeker’s Steam profile?

Heh. I had completely forgotten about that. It’s interesting now, in hindsight.

In case anyone’s wondering what we’re talking about: Back in 2014, developer your-name-here posted this comment on Stormseeker’s profile:

remember that time when xen

Stormseeker replied with:

I… C an’t S trictly M emorise that, no >_>.

He later deleted the comment after we started speculating about it in the forum thread.

EDIT: Just adding this quote here for some context:

#4877

Well if everyone would say that, then it’s not cheating, but improvising. It’s not bad, but it’s also not really respectable.
It’s not the same doing work normally and using a shortcut to get an advantage.

But “noclip” is the only option we have in order to browse the maps in the game looking for clues, while still
keeping inside the line of “not cheating”…

#4878

Where is this directive of “no cheating” coming from? We were only advised some time ago that hacking websites would not be required…

#4879

The entire nature of ARGs is that it is possible for shortcuts to be found. I do believe that Storm himself said that there might be shortcuts uncovered throughout the course of this game.

#4880

Actually, we were very early on warned that attempts to hack anything will lead to the ARG getting closed down. And, as you say, we were also advised that hacking would not be required. This was so that people wouldn’t do things like attempting to brute force the SSH/FTP logins on the web servers.

But there was no “no cheating” directive. It was just me who started talking about cheating because I felt bad about decompiling the maps to look for new pizza locations and other potentially interesting stuff in the STU Update, after a dev came in here to check if people were finding the new hidden pizza locations.

I know that from a game developer’s perspective, if something has been hidden in a game for people to find, it’s disappointing if players first find it by mining the game’s files, thus bypassing any potential game logic, rather than finding it in the game the way it was meant to be found.

One example of this: @JeffMOD, one of the devs on the Hazard Course team, was clearly disappointed when some guy had found the .wav file with the morse code signal in it, and decoded it, before anyone had reported finding the actual radio in the game where that morse code could be heard.

#4881

Unless the method in which the asset is found in-game is really a key to the puzzle, not just the asset itself.

#4882

That’s not a particularly bad idea. I’m not familiar with Source Engine all that much, so does anyone here have any ideas of hiding secrets within the game with console commands?

Or rather, are we able to see if it tracks any particularly odd values in the save data? I wonder if it tracks the amount of secrets you’ve seen or if your have all achievements or not.

#4883

I don’t even know if anyone’s found it legitimately yet. As I said in the linked post, it’s not like it’s hard to find. :stuck_out_tongue:
For that matter, even with the morse signal being located, I don’t think anyone’s done anything with it, which is even more disappointing.

That said, if something is hidden inside a material’s alpha channel, I don’t think Stormseeker could reasonably expect anyone to find it without using engine or modding tools, since the alpha doesn’t show up ingame. (kind of its purpose, lol)
Since everything else has been designed to be findable either ingame or online with this ARG, I doubt we’ll find anything by searching through all the DTX5 (alpha-compatible format) vtfs. Would be kind of inconsistent, and with the amount of thought he puts into things, I doubt that’s something he’d do.

Has anyone actually plotted out the Pizzas in STU? I’ve been watching FMA recently, and while I doubt he’s gone off and made an alchemy circle out of them, maybe putting down some dots in the pizza models’ origins and plotting some lines between them could shed some light on their purpose.

(Also, where are they located? I haven’t noticed them in my noclip adventures)

#4884

I noticed the flashlight can make some textures appear or disappear within the game.

#4885

There’s one thing that can’t be found in-game, and that’s the message found in the comment field in qecode.ogg. The message seems to be a reiteration (or a rephrasing) of a clue found in the solution to the IRC clue 5 puzzle, so it’s definitely ARG-related. Apart from more pizzas, the only other thing we’ve found so far in the Steam release, is the “Awesumz” text on Dr. Sezen’s computer monitor (However, there is yet another thing: a comment in one of the QE .vmf’s signed with Dr Horn, saying that the map is possessed and wants to kill you. But I think it’s probably just a tongue-in-cheek comment about the map, or a warning directed at modders that the map may be difficult to work with.)

That said, we don’t really know if there’s anything more to be found in-game. After all, the puzzle we are stuck on was part of the web-based part of the ARG. However, Storm did say in a livestream interview that “the key is to keep looking for clues in the game”. And in a more recent interview, he apparently said: “There has been clues that would lead them to solving the latest bit, but they’ve not found it yet.”

There aren’t that many new pizza/graffiti locations in STU, so I don’t think there’s enough of them to form any kind of shape or pattern.

Here’s a list of all the locations that are new in the STU update:

[code]“The Pizza is a LIE!” graffiti:

bm_c2a2c -808 1944 463.537
bm_c2a5g -1480.17 -1536 748.379
bm_c2a5h 824 -3040 1200
bm_c2a5h 824 -3040 1232
bm_c2a5h 824 -3040 1264
bm_c2a5i -205.46 -1443.83 -7.62939e-006
dm_bounce 662.0992 1433.554 531.2
dm_bounce 662.099243 1433.553955 531.200012

Pizzas:

bm_c2a2c -2392 -2649.81 917
bm_c2a5g -1481.79 -1492.42 721
bm_c2a5h 768 -3120 1136
bm_c2a5h 792 -3152 1208
bm_c2a5h 800 -3088 1160
bm_c2a5h 832 -3152 1184
bm_c2a5h 864 -3104 1144
bm_c2a5h 872 -3128 1208
bm_c2a5h 896 -3064 1128
bm_c2a5i -202.522 -1482.22 9[/code]
(The new pizza location in OaR made me chuckle.)

Complete lists of all the other locations can be found on the wiki:

There are at least one pizza and one graffiti that I couldn’t see in-game, and a few graffitis have been hidden so well that you couldn’t possibly find them while noclipping around “normally” without knowing exactly where they are.

A few pizza locations stand out more than the others, so much that I have given them names:

  • The Very Large Array of Pizzas (background12) (I don’t know if this means anything, but one of the pizzas, unlike the rest of them, has been positioned slightly above the floor, but falls to the floor due to “gravity” when the map is run.)
  • The Wall of Lies (background10)
  • Pizza for Two with an Octodog Surprise (bm_c3a2c - Lambda Core)
  • The Pole Dancing Pizzas (bm_c2a5h - STU)

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