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Comment by thomasqbrady | Hacker News Reader

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?

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Required reading, IMO: 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.

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?

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

Hopefully, the developer still has logs and data for 2018 and earlier

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.

This is terrible news.

It’s great though how both the developer and community came together to help ID the guy.

>Do badges ever auto-unlock

That specific badge is for game ownership. I believe it's possible for games to be added to your account automatically in some cases (like an HD version given out for free to existing owners) which could unlock the badge without user intervention.

>or could this person have shared a steam account?

Definitely possible as well.

Ya. There was a game that unlocked a badge one year after your purchase for no reason than the anniversary of it

According to this https://steamid.uk/profile/76561198004426967 the friends are mostly canadian.

But it also says that one friendship is just 280 days old or something.

Algae pool, in the context of a list that contains "balanced nutri*nt? foods", is probably a food based in Spirulina. A green algae used in aquaculture. This seems to me like a check list [1] to assure that he didn't forgot anything after leaving a zone.

Is relevant because the man has been most probably poisoned. It was not a fast poison and it was painful but not too alarming. Not a bee, a wasp or a Bothrops. A plant or fungus, yes, could fit.

Is not suicide and terminal illness in my opinion. Nobody dies by starvation in presence of food.

But there is a third category that I was missing. Your own food. A too old Spirulina package can be contaminated and lead to slow poisoning. Emaciated in the context of plenty of food around and plenty of money means that he was deliberately refusing to eat while resting in the tent, this is a common effect of food poisoning.

[1] Speculating "Roach motel" can be an humorous surname for their tent. Nanites could be some kind of "armour", clothes or boots maybe.

Updated. There is a page talking about nutrition, protein and "trying different flavors". Fits perfectly with Spirulina powder that is used in protein shakes as the source of protein.

Updated again, Nanites are described in the context of a game later. This does not support my checklist hypothesis. Strange list. Maybe could be just a list of names for different worlds and items in the game.

Given it is followed by "Roach Motel (area/?quest)", it seems more likely this is something from a game idea.

You are right, I was unable to understand the last words

And one item of the list is just "screeps". I was wrong, Now It looks much more like a plan of things to think about while hiking. Maybe a plan to develop a startup based in energetic food and/or a videogame. This web shows a resume of his activity.

https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/fl-big-cypress-nat...

There is a mention about a non specified health problem also.

Disproved,

it reads "algae pool (area)", so is a game and all that I wrote above about Spirulina is wrong, as jml7c5 pointed correctly

I'm a Space Station 13 player - each server is very different, but there's nothing here I recognize from SS13.

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.

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.

Looking at 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?

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.

Definitely not drowning in $variables, he's 40 something.

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.

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.

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.

On the 3. page of the scanned notebook [1] he mentions Java.

[1] https://www.colliersheriff.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=94010

Somewhat amusing to see the police highlighting "trust no one" as a note on p2p networking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/2363dc3434de6b494b28b5a658...

A few of the users have the same in game username, and have been online recently.

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).

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/e2c34e211226...

The last things he did were in 2017.

Edit: Nope, same user is on the forum, https://screeps.com/forum/user/nihilrex

As someone else pointed out, it seems this user was recently active on Screeps forums, so ruled out.

You can exclude bandsaw1961 based on user pic and yacobjardon who was a student at Carleton University and a picture on his LinkedIn and career beyond 2017.

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.)

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.

He has an instagram profile with an update nov 2018.

You might be right

Here they are side by side https://ibb.co/4Zn4qqX

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.

Might be worth reaching out to other people working for "Xcite Media Group". 23 employees is small enough to know if someone went missing.

Damn, they really DO look very similar. Mike appears to have unattached earlobes, and MH's appear attached, however.

Maybe brothers or closely related.

Definitely several similar characteristics. Could be a brother.

It would be funny if the real Mike Hancoski googles himself and stumbles upon this thread.

Mike Hancoski as of 2018 was living in Denver, posted to Instagram and looks different than photos. I think you also missed Maxim2030 who is also in the list by momothereal. And also manhyper

Ahh thank you I had missed Maxim2030. Looks like manhyper updated his fork of screeps on February 11th?

Also saw Mike Hancoski's Instagram but it's odd he hasn't posted anything to his LinkedIn since 2014? Maybe worth awkwardly reaching out just in case?

Maybe he just stopped using LinkedIn? I think these are the same Mike:

Work photo (2018): https://thexcitegroup.com/xcite-family/mike-hancoski/mike-h/

Facebook (2019): https://www.facebook.com/mike.hancoski

We're hitting the end of the allowed reply indents but I think you're right modernerd. Looks like he's likely still active online.

Hancoski also has an active facebook page. I won't link it but I found it with a Google search and he last posted in Dec 2019.

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

I don't want identifying data leaked by my game hosts.

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.

Links :Transcripts of his complete notebook- https://imgur.com/a/eTphrRF

Here’s a link to the transcript of the notes typed out

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...

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