Watch Dogs: Troubleshooting Rage!

In this edition of the ultimate frustration that is technology, I'd like to give my readers a little taste of what it's like to be a dev, while at the same time not overloading everyone's brain with actual code or anything like that. No, rather this time around I'll be detailing my recent experience trying to get this game to work properly.

The Preamble:

Watch Dogs is, ironically, a game about being a hacker. I've never played the first one, but I got the second one for free back in 2016 when I bought this computer. So why is it "ironic"? Ah well... because...

July 5th, 2018: HACKED BY RUSSIANS

Yep... Ubisoft got hacked really bad in 2018 and my email and password were leaked to the dark web. I'm pretty sure that password has been leaked in other data breaches as well. The super ironic part is that this password, that I used for over a decade in my youth, has the word "hacker" in it. I think the dark web hackers got a kick out of it, as my account seemed to get a lot of attention and many alerts were going off that my account was being accessed from all over the world (or with a VPN: who knows).

My "hacker" password was my lowest level password, and I used it repeatedly on every single account that I didn't care about very much. If that password got hacked (and it did many times) I didn't care to much as the accounts it was connected to were largely trivial.

Aside experience

I just remembered that one time way back in the day a friend of mine from college (who introduced me to playing poker professionally) got annoyed that I ate his leftover pizza (after specifically telling me not to eat it) so he openly declared he would get his revenge. I scoffed at his threat. What was he gonna do?

He was able to hack my AOL instant messenger password (remember AOL?) because the security for recovering passwords back in those days was abysmal. AOL literally told him what my password was. All he had to do was get ahold of my laptop when I wasn't paying attention, go into my email, and recover the password on AOL IM and AOL LITERALLY TOLD HIM MY PASSWORD instead of having him create a new one! Can you believe that? Simpler times. And he also thought it was funny that he hacked a password that was basically "hacker", lol.

So how did he get his revenge?

He then used this information to log into accounts and make it look like I was cheating on my girlfriend with my ex. Eventually it turned into this big joke and he even drew this ridiculous picture in MS Paint of a stick figure-ish version of me and my ex getting busy and put it on the background screen of the laptop. What a joker. Damn I should have kept that picture for laughs. Oh well. He sure showed me!

Back to the real story:

I thought this was kinda funny that Russian hackers were after my account because... who cares? Take my Ubisoft account. See if I care. Have fun playing Watch Dogs 2... I got it for free with my graphics card in 2016. lol.

The story has since evolved.

So eventually at some point I was tired of seeing emails in my junk mail folder telling me I'd been hacked and that people all over the world were accessing my Uplay account (in addition to attempting to hack my Facebook). I can't remember exactly but I probably experienced some other kind of security scare and I decided to clean up my defenses and set up F2A and get all my accounts in order. I remember this being kind of a pain in the ass because there were some technical difficulties with Google Auth F2A but eventually I got it all up and running and my Uplay account was fully back under my control with no one else being able to access it.

So I log in and what do I see?

The baby Russian dark web hacker that had access to my account for so long... had ADDED games to my account. LOL! Who does that!?! He must have really liked Watch Dogs 2 so much that he unlocked Watch Dogs 1 on my account. Also it looks like an Assassin's Creed (4) game is on here as well. How weird is that? So weird.

In any case, Watch Dogs 2 was kinda fun... it was basically a Grand Theft Auto clone with the twist of being a master hacktivist trying to fight the man and whatnot. Like I said I haven't played the first one yet, but it seems much darker and a lot more like you're the anti-hero. In the opening scene you're daughter gets killed and it seems like the plot is that you're out for revenge. Seems interesting, so yesterday I downloaded it and booted it up and...

It was the Russian version of the game.

lol, everything was in Russian. I couldn't even navigate the menu because sadly, I don't know any Russian.

Youtube to the rescue.

I quickly found this video that showed me how to switch the language to English. I really thought it would just show me how to do this in game, but again, ironically, it's having me do it all Linux hacker style, going into skuconfig.dat and changing the variables in Russian to 0 and English to 1. I booted up the game and the menu was in English. Success!

Hm yeah... but then I started a new game... and it had English subtitles, but the voice was still in Russian... not exactly what I was looking for. I was hoping the cold-open just happened to be in Russian, but then the game started and it was still Russian so... damn!

I found this other video that gave me the same advice as the previous one, but this time there is another way of going about it which involves going into the registry and changing variables. And before I go any further, it's important to note that you should NEVER go into the registry and mess with stuff unless you know exactly what you are doing. I was extremely skeptical about doing this at first, especially with the hacker-theme in mind, but after following the instructions it was very cut-and-dry, as all I was doing was changing language variables from the Russian code to "en-US". No harm in that.

You know what I ABSOLUTELY WAS NOT A FAN OF?

Looking in my registry and seeing a bunch of entries that aren't even in English. The fuck? When did I get hacked by China or Korea or whatever that is? lol. And then I remember that I've had this computer since 2016 and I've never reinstalled the operating system. Who knows what's floating around this hunk of insecure Windows 10 code. Luckily my crypto is pretty damn secure on hardware wallets and time-locks and whatnot, but still. Not great.

So in the data_win64 folder that contains the skuconfig.dat file I noticed something... I don't even have the English sound files. Makes sense, they are pretty massive. Wouldn't make sense to have someone download 10 different languages when they are only going to use one of them and each file is 1.5 GB. I now realize that I need the sound_english.dat and sound_english.fat file to be in this folder for the language change to work. Unfortunately that could be difficult seeing as the game is from, 2014? Many of the links I found were broken.

Nice this guy solved it... in May 2014...

Looks like there are actually 4 files than I need.
Two more in a folder called Windy_City; whatever that is.
I bet I'd know if I actually played the game.

Hm, shit.

https://steamdb.info/depot/243437/

Yes, this!

These are the files that I need... how do I download them, steamdb.info? Oh, it's just a website that lists the files on Steam, it doesn't actually let you download them... god... damn it.

Speaking of 2014...

Remember CDs and DVDs? lol. This game is so old it existed as a DVD. My computer from 2016 doesn't even have a DVD player (although my previous computer did). WILD. How quickly tech can become irrelevant. This time was a crazy transition for the gaming industry where games had to be provided online and downloadable through the Internet. What an insane concept that was back in the day. Gigabytes of data downloads? No more disks? That's crazy! Welcome to the future.

God damn you Justin Sun

And then I come to realize that this is really all Justin Sun's fault. Isn't everything? There was a time when I thought Justin Sun was going to fix so many problems and bring so much value to crypto. Funny eh? I was VERY IMPRESSED that he bought the Bittorrent client for 140 million dollars back in the day... let me find that post...

Tron Bought Bittorrent for $140 Million

Hm, yep... I was pretty damn stoked on this news. Justin Sun was going to fix the problem of monetization on p2p file sharing, or so I thought. I'm convinced that in some parallel universe Justin Sun is the greatest hero and champion of crypto in the world. But in this dimension we have to deal with Bizarro Justin Sun, a virus and a leech that makes the ecosystem stronger by attacking it like an asshole.

If Justin Sun had actually delivered on what he should have done, I'd be able to go into the Tron ecosystem right now and download these files for a couple of pennies. Someone would have them, and I'd gladly pay a couple of pennies to get them. Hell I'd even pay a full dollar at this point!

The problem with p2p torrents is that the financial incentive to play nice is lacking. This leads hackers to imbed viruses and spyware into files like hacked games so they can turn a profit by distributing the file to anyone that downloads them. If crypto p2p file sharing existed it would be MUCH easier to not only confirm that files didn't have viruses in them, but also pay seeders and uploaders for their services (even if only a tiny amount). It's possible that one day the SPEAK network will solve this problem with their protocol, but that is yet to be seen as we are still waiting on previous promises to be fulfilled. I'll trade Sun for Hensley any day. I believe he will eventually solve this problem with SPEAK incentives projected onto the IPFS model.

I told myself I wouldn't do this...

I downloaded a uTorrent client and went onto Pirate Bay, looking for the missing files. I quickly came to realize that the files could not be isolated and instead the hacked files existed as images. This is how I came to realize that Watch Dogs existed on DVD. ISO files are image files ripped from disks and can be burned onto disks with a DVD/CD burner (they can only be accessed directly with a mounting emulator like Daemon Tools). Ah those were the days. So many illegal CDs on my spool. So many games I never paid for.

But I promised myself I wouldn't be doing this kind of shit anymore because I really shouldn't be fucking around considering all my crypto shenanigans. Am I really going to risk losing thousands of dollars so I can pirate a video game? Seems pretty stupid. So at this point I just kind of gave up. I couldn't find the files... I don't want to be installing random pirated versions of the game, even though that would fix my problem.

At this point I might play the game in Russian. English subs are working and it might be fun to play it like this like I'm watching an anime in Japanese. Unfortunately during my travels I read that the Russian voice acting is worse than the English voice acting... which is unsurprising because the game was designed in America. Oh well, maybe I'll play it in Russian anyway!

Conclusion

And now you all know what it's like to be a developer on Hive or anywhere else. You can troubleshoot a problem for hours, get nothing done, but still learn a bunch of random shit along the way that doesn't help you solve the current problem. This is why senior devs that have been at this for over a decade are so valuable! They don't get caught up on the snags that the rest of us noobs get stuck on.

Hive already pays users to blog. I believe the ultimate function of Hive will be to pay users to learn. If we can train an army of devs, many of our problems will melt away and we can scale up in ways that were never dreamed of... but that's a topic for another post.

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