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The Screeps detail seems like something that could be fairly easily pursued... there can't have been that many players of that game to begin with, let alone tho

The Screeps detail seems like something that could be fairly easily pursued... there can't have been that many players of that game to begin with, let alone those that would care so much about it that they would journal their thoughts about it. A quick check of the GitHub repo doesn't show he contributed code, but might he have opened an issue, contributed to docs? Might there be someone who was active in the community somehow (maybe showing up on leaderboards) until 2017?

ColanR 6y ago
If someone wants to check, I'd bet he at least forked or starred the github repo. A script to pull the list of those people, minus anyone whos been active since april 2017, would probably show his account.
- Componica 6y ago
  Looking at https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF The code that he writes is a blend of languages. The arrow operators -> is indicative of C/C++ but C/C++ doesn't use nil or function. It's like he thinks in C/C++ first which puts him at about my age mid-40s. Anyone younger than 40 would be using dots '.' due to Java/Javascript/Python instead of '->'. Does anyone else get that vibe?
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    PHP also uses -> and is still popular with those younger than 40. The lack of $ gives it away though. This is a very curious case indeed.
    - Componica 6y ago
      Definitely not drowning in $variables, he's 40 something.
      - Piskvorrr 6y ago
        If I were making paper notes, I would not bother with exact syntax - especially not for tokens which only exist for the machine parser's sake. In other words, I have written PHP pseudocode which definitely omits $. But these notes are generic enough to allow virtually anything C-descended.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Some colleges teach courses with C++, and if students or young programmers want to get into game development or graphics, they're often recommended to pick up C++. Systems programming is often taught using C++, if not C.
  - hultner 6y ago
    Wouldn't say that, I'm around 30 and grew up coding C, C++ and later, in my teens some Perl anf PHP, all these languages use the -> syntax and I still used that in my notes up until two or three years ago, I also use nil from my lisp adventures and prefer snake_caas. The first languages have I learned as a young child made an strong impression in my mental visualisation of programming concepts even of I haven't used them in many years. I found notes on my iPhone using the arrow syntax with snake_case variables. And from the pictures he looks about my age so I'd say 30 is a real possibility as well.
  - pulse7 6y ago
    On the 3. page of the scanned notebook [1] he mentions Java. [1] https://www.colliersheriff.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=94010 https://www.colliersheriff.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=94010
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
      Somewhat amusing to see the police highlighting "trust no one" as a note on p2p networking.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    Uh, I'm 28, and a lot of my college education was in C & C++, much more than Java/Python/... - in a large french university.
  - beowulfey 6y ago
    Based on the "being in tech for about a decade" his "initially looks old with the beard but has young looking eyes" and your comments here, I'd put him squarely in his 30s.
  - rxhernandez 6y ago
    A lot (I would be surprised if it's not the majority of EEs/CpEs) of electrical/computer engineers are taught how to program with C/C++; using that to understand what age someone is, is an error.
  - Bayart 6y ago
    I've just hit 30 and I still default to C or C-style to think about code. I've been formally taught coding with the K&R (while being introduced to Perl, Bash, PHP and LUA as a teenager), and I'm far from the only one.
- momothereal 6y ago
  I wrote a quick script through Github's API, and found 10 users[1] matching the criteria: * starred any screeps repo before May 2017, and no other screeps repo since then * no public contributions or events since April 2017 If someone has some time to do further filtering, ensure the users have not starred any GitHub repo since May 2017 I didn't go through forks but that would also be an avenue. [1] https://gist.github.com/aramperes/2363dc3434de6b494b28b5a658790bc2 https://gist.github.com/aramperes/2363dc3434de6b494b28b5a658...
  - strstr 6y ago
    A few of the users have the same in game username, and have been online recently.
    - withinboredom 6y ago
      I don't really trust the steam online thing. I once got a notification that my brother was playing a game and he was driving a car and his computer was off. No, his account wasn't hacked. We spent awhile and noticed that it seems to randomly say your online and playing if you disconnect for awhile (my account too).
  - Copenjin 6y ago
    This guy with his Screeps-Main repo is interesting, he also removed a txt file with some description of what he wanted to do: https://github.com/NihilRex/Screeps-Main/commit/e2c34e2112268d7efbc75426d81793e5ac942765 https://github.com/NihilRex/Screeps-Main/commit/e2c34e211226... The last things he did were in 2017. Edit: Nope, same user is on the forum, https://screeps.com/forum/user/nihilrex https://screeps.com/forum/user/nihilrex
    - momothereal 6y ago
      As someone else pointed out, it seems this user was recently active on Screeps forums, so ruled out.
  - mynegation 6y ago
- alecbcs 6y ago
  Checking for users who forked the repo in 2017 and haven't been active since 2017 I got. - amidman - eqzus - Mike Hancoski (follows users from NY, wrote PHP code, his personal website domain wasn't renewed and is now available.)
  - grawprog 6y ago
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-hancoski-b342aa53 https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-hancoski-b342aa53 This guy looks like a clean shaven version of those pictures. Noses look the same. The eyes. No updates to the account since 2015.
    - lixtra 6y ago
      He has an instagram profile with an update nov 2018.
    - jack_riminton 6y ago
      You might be right Here they are side by side https://ibb.co/4Zn4qqX https://ibb.co/4Zn4qqX
      - getlawgdon 6y ago
        Do not look alike to me at all. different eyebrow shape and texture and possibly color, different teeth and different nose shape. nose on the right has a bulbous end quite different from shape on left.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      Might be worth reaching out to other people working for "Xcite Media Group". 23 employees is small enough to know if someone went missing.
    - tildeath 6y ago
      Damn, they really DO look very similar. Mike appears to have unattached earlobes, and MH's appear attached, however.
jhardy54 6y ago
Required reading, IMO: https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2937/a-strange-request-for-help https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2937/a-strange-request-for-h... I've spent a few days looking into this and haven't been able to find anything. There's also a big thing about "algae pools" "stock markets", etc, which didn't seem to be about Screeps. I tried to find games that had these mechanics, and ended up spending a bunch of time looking through Spacestation 13 forums, but I'm leaning toward these references being about a game that he wanted to invent.
- asphyxiac 6y ago
  OP, based on the Screeps thread, we have a purported Steam profile for MH. Did that yield anything? Edit: I know that folks thought this was a red herring. Checked the steam profile, power player badge was unlocked on 10/23 but Recently Played shows nothing (might be privacy settings) and last review was 3 years ago. Do badges ever auto-unlock, or could this person have shared a steam account?
  - chaostheory 6y ago
    With an all time peak of 357 players playing at a time, Screeps is still the best lead especially when you link it to a Steam account. https://steamcharts.com/app/464350 https://steamcharts.com/app/464350 Hopefully, the developer still has logs and data for 2018 and earlier
    - tedivm 6y ago
      That number is way off- the steam client came out well after the website version (they both connect to the same MMO server), and there are a lot of users who just use the website to play the game. The community- with the admins- put a lot of work into trying to figure this out. I lead a group who does analysis of other people's codebases by scraping data from the game, as a way to identify unique codebases (and players who use open source bots). The admins went through logs and we all poured through the game history looking for anything that might match up. The problem is that it looks like he may never have played the MMO. Besides having the shared server the game is also open sourced. It's extremely common for players to run either in the simulator or on their own private server while testing out their codebase. Looking at his journals (and a journalist did share copies of everything they had with us) I really feel that he was in the early draft phase thinking about the game but not actually playing yet on the shared server.
uberman 6y ago
This seems like this would be the way to go. Steam shows less than 200 players for March and April of 2017 and if there are logs that far back, the Screeps team can likely provide some data about users who dropped out in March or April of that year as well
- robotresearcher 6y ago
  I don't want identifying data leaked by my game hosts.
MereInterest 6y ago
A post on this topic is the top post on the screeps subreddit, but with no clear answers. Some posters found players who stopped playing unexpectedly during the appropriate timeframe, along with the group that player collaborated with. However, I don't know if there was any follow-up there, or if it was a dead end. https://www.reddit.com/r/screeps/comments/fnwhvr/who_is_this_screeps_player_a_man_without_an/ https://www.reddit.com/r/screeps/comments/fnwhvr/who_is_this...
withinboredom 6y ago
I wish we had better images of the notebook. I noticed a few constants `*_ENERGY_TARGET` which might be searchable if I could make out the first part. It seems that if any code exists for this stuff, it might be those constants come from real code.
- ravendawn 6y ago
  Links :Transcripts of his complete notebook- https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF Here’s a link to the transcript of the notes typed out
NhanH 6y ago
The screeps community spent alot of time on this and we got nowhere. Unfortunately the Screeps dev team is Russian based, so they declined to provide helps with their data. The journalist contacted players who were active in 2017 and earlier individually (I was one of those) in hope of getting some leads. But from what I knew, even though we had some suspected players, it ended up not getting the lead we wanted.

ColanR 6y ago

If someone wants to check, I'd bet he at least forked or starred the github repo. A script to pull the list of those people, minus anyone whos been active since april 2017, would probably show his account.

Componica 6y ago
Looking at https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF The code that he writes is a blend of languages. The arrow operators -> is indicative of C/C++ but C/C++ doesn't use nil or function. It's like he thinks in C/C++ first which puts him at about my age mid-40s. Anyone younger than 40 would be using dots '.' due to Java/Javascript/Python instead of '->'. Does anyone else get that vibe?
- gabereiser 6y ago
  PHP also uses -> and is still popular with those younger than 40. The lack of $ gives it away though. This is a very curious case indeed.
  - Componica 6y ago
    Definitely not drowning in $variables, he's 40 something.
    - Piskvorrr 6y ago
      If I were making paper notes, I would not bother with exact syntax - especially not for tokens which only exist for the machine parser's sake. In other words, I have written PHP pseudocode which definitely omits $. But these notes are generic enough to allow virtually anything C-descended.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Some colleges teach courses with C++, and if students or young programmers want to get into game development or graphics, they're often recommended to pick up C++. Systems programming is often taught using C++, if not C.
- hultner 6y ago
  Wouldn't say that, I'm around 30 and grew up coding C, C++ and later, in my teens some Perl anf PHP, all these languages use the -> syntax and I still used that in my notes up until two or three years ago, I also use nil from my lisp adventures and prefer snake_caas. The first languages have I learned as a young child made an strong impression in my mental visualisation of programming concepts even of I haven't used them in many years. I found notes on my iPhone using the arrow syntax with snake_case variables. And from the pictures he looks about my age so I'd say 30 is a real possibility as well.
- pulse7 6y ago
  On the 3. page of the scanned notebook [1] he mentions Java. [1] https://www.colliersheriff.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=94010 https://www.colliersheriff.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=94010
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
    Somewhat amusing to see the police highlighting "trust no one" as a note on p2p networking.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  Uh, I'm 28, and a lot of my college education was in C & C++, much more than Java/Python/... - in a large french university.
- beowulfey 6y ago
  Based on the "being in tech for about a decade" his "initially looks old with the beard but has young looking eyes" and your comments here, I'd put him squarely in his 30s.
- rxhernandez 6y ago
  A lot (I would be surprised if it's not the majority of EEs/CpEs) of electrical/computer engineers are taught how to program with C/C++; using that to understand what age someone is, is an error.
- Bayart 6y ago
  I've just hit 30 and I still default to C or C-style to think about code. I've been formally taught coding with the K&R (while being introduced to Perl, Bash, PHP and LUA as a teenager), and I'm far from the only one.
momothereal 6y ago
I wrote a quick script through Github's API, and found 10 users[1] matching the criteria: * starred any screeps repo before May 2017, and no other screeps repo since then * no public contributions or events since April 2017 If someone has some time to do further filtering, ensure the users have not starred any GitHub repo since May 2017 I didn't go through forks but that would also be an avenue. [1] https://gist.github.com/aramperes/2363dc3434de6b494b28b5a658790bc2 https://gist.github.com/aramperes/2363dc3434de6b494b28b5a658...
- strstr 6y ago
  A few of the users have the same in game username, and have been online recently.
  - withinboredom 6y ago
    I don't really trust the steam online thing. I once got a notification that my brother was playing a game and he was driving a car and his computer was off. No, his account wasn't hacked. We spent awhile and noticed that it seems to randomly say your online and playing if you disconnect for awhile (my account too).
- Copenjin 6y ago
  This guy with his Screeps-Main repo is interesting, he also removed a txt file with some description of what he wanted to do: https://github.com/NihilRex/Screeps-Main/commit/e2c34e2112268d7efbc75426d81793e5ac942765 https://github.com/NihilRex/Screeps-Main/commit/e2c34e211226... The last things he did were in 2017. Edit: Nope, same user is on the forum, https://screeps.com/forum/user/nihilrex https://screeps.com/forum/user/nihilrex
  - momothereal 6y ago
    As someone else pointed out, it seems this user was recently active on Screeps forums, so ruled out.
- mynegation 6y ago
alecbcs 6y ago
Checking for users who forked the repo in 2017 and haven't been active since 2017 I got. - amidman - eqzus - Mike Hancoski (follows users from NY, wrote PHP code, his personal website domain wasn't renewed and is now available.)
- grawprog 6y ago
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-hancoski-b342aa53 https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-hancoski-b342aa53 This guy looks like a clean shaven version of those pictures. Noses look the same. The eyes. No updates to the account since 2015.
  - lixtra 6y ago
    He has an instagram profile with an update nov 2018.
  - jack_riminton 6y ago
    You might be right Here they are side by side https://ibb.co/4Zn4qqX https://ibb.co/4Zn4qqX
    - getlawgdon 6y ago
      Do not look alike to me at all. different eyebrow shape and texture and possibly color, different teeth and different nose shape. nose on the right has a bulbous end quite different from shape on left.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Might be worth reaching out to other people working for "Xcite Media Group". 23 employees is small enough to know if someone went missing.
  - tildeath 6y ago
    Damn, they really DO look very similar. Mike appears to have unattached earlobes, and MH's appear attached, however.

jhardy54 6y ago

Required reading, IMO: https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2937/a-strange-request-for-help https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2937/a-strange-request-for-h... I've spent a few days looking into this and haven't been able to find anything. There's also a big thing about "algae pools" "stock markets", etc, which didn't seem to be about Screeps. I tried to find games that had these mechanics, and ended up spending a bunch of time looking through Spacestation 13 forums, but I'm leaning toward these references being about a game that he wanted to invent.

asphyxiac 6y ago
OP, based on the Screeps thread, we have a purported Steam profile for MH. Did that yield anything? Edit: I know that folks thought this was a red herring. Checked the steam profile, power player badge was unlocked on 10/23 but Recently Played shows nothing (might be privacy settings) and last review was 3 years ago. Do badges ever auto-unlock, or could this person have shared a steam account?
- chaostheory 6y ago
  With an all time peak of 357 players playing at a time, Screeps is still the best lead especially when you link it to a Steam account. https://steamcharts.com/app/464350 https://steamcharts.com/app/464350 Hopefully, the developer still has logs and data for 2018 and earlier
  - tedivm 6y ago
    That number is way off- the steam client came out well after the website version (they both connect to the same MMO server), and there are a lot of users who just use the website to play the game. The community- with the admins- put a lot of work into trying to figure this out. I lead a group who does analysis of other people's codebases by scraping data from the game, as a way to identify unique codebases (and players who use open source bots). The admins went through logs and we all poured through the game history looking for anything that might match up. The problem is that it looks like he may never have played the MMO. Besides having the shared server the game is also open sourced. It's extremely common for players to run either in the simulator or on their own private server while testing out their codebase. Looking at his journals (and a journalist did share copies of everything they had with us) I really feel that he was in the early draft phase thinking about the game but not actually playing yet on the shared server.

uberman 6y ago

This seems like this would be the way to go. Steam shows less than 200 players for March and April of 2017 and if there are logs that far back, the Screeps team can likely provide some data about users who dropped out in March or April of that year as well

robotresearcher 6y ago
I don't want identifying data leaked by my game hosts.

MereInterest 6y ago

A post on this topic is the top post on the screeps subreddit, but with no clear answers. Some posters found players who stopped playing unexpectedly during the appropriate timeframe, along with the group that player collaborated with. However, I don't know if there was any follow-up there, or if it was a dead end. https://www.reddit.com/r/screeps/comments/fnwhvr/who_is_this_screeps_player_a_man_without_an/ https://www.reddit.com/r/screeps/comments/fnwhvr/who_is_this...

withinboredom 6y ago

I wish we had better images of the notebook. I noticed a few constants `*_ENERGY_TARGET` which might be searchable if I could make out the first part. It seems that if any code exists for this stuff, it might be those constants come from real code.

ravendawn 6y ago
Links :Transcripts of his complete notebook- https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF Here’s a link to the transcript of the notes typed out

NhanH 6y ago

The screeps community spent alot of time on this and we got nowhere. Unfortunately the Screeps dev team is Russian based, so they declined to provide helps with their data. The journalist contacted players who were active in 2017 and earlier individually (I was one of those) in hope of getting some leads. But from what I knew, even though we had some suspected players, it ended up not getting the lead we wanted.