There is a FAQ at the end of this post. Please read it before asking your own questions. You will probably have questions. I may have already answered them.

---

Hi everyone. We over here in TechComm have gotten clearance from Plotside to offer a bit of a new thing for the game. I am personally very excited about it, despite what you might infer from the numerous caveats and warnings below.

A bunch of you probably remember that last game I was over in the Science Center helping people out with passwords and such for the Autoforge, trying real hard not to break immersion, and everyone's wrists were about to fall off from all the handwaving we were doing trying to justify D-Trip hanging out and helping people. I'd like to avoid that this time. I would have handed it off to Thomas, but he's had horrible overtime hell at work and I've had similar levels of difficulty concentrating on anything that's not work or destressing from it.

So, sorry about that. Hopefully this will make up for it.

I've gotten clearance to put the Autoforge on-line, available over the normal Internet, for the next week, pre-game. We want to let everyone PC-side make sure they can access their AMPs and we want to allow you to look up how many resources you had deposited.
More to the point, I can't guarantee I will be up and at the site at a reasonable time Saturday morning, as I'm staying off-site. So if there is as much IT-related trouble next event as there was last event, I may not be able to help *at game*. And it was kind of silly the first time we did it. So I'm going to try to handle that stuff in the next week.

The autoforge is currently up and running at macilnya.org:7000. It's serving HTTP over a nonstandard port, so some of you behind corporate firewalls may be SOL; sorry about that.

There are ways that this can be abused. Please don't. In fact, please don't even speculate hard on how this can be abused. If your intent is to "help" with security, send me a PM, don't post your speculation in a reply to this thread.

Here is what you are allowed to do:

1) Ensure you can login. To do this, if you have any problems with logging in, or if you never migrated your account, or you forgot your password, *send Jim Waldrop a Private Message*. You are communicating with me as Jim the guy working on the game's tech stuff, not as D-Trip the businessman; D-Trip does not get to know about the things in the Autoforge. If this arrangement is unsuitable, you can put in a Help Request, and some kind soul Castside may be able to play intermediary and anonymizer, but we don't guarantee that.

2) Check your balance.

3) Transfer resources to other people. This is legit right now. If Derek and Plot decide to disallow this, we will alter this message and roll back any changes; we have that capability.

4) Preview AMPs you can produce. To do this, go to the "Production" tab, and type in the name of the procedure, followed by AMP. The system does not know what skills you have, and as such will assume you are not cheating.

DO NOT ACTUALLY PRODUCE ANYTHING. You will at best make paper shoot out across my server room floor and at worst crash your connection as it determines that there is no running printserver, depending on whether I plug in the AMP printer to document any hilarity that might ensue when one of you invariably presses the button anyway. DO NOT PRESS THE PRODUCTION BUTTONS.

5) Preview experiments you can produce. If you had experiments last event, they came in a bottle with a code on the bottle. In the Autoforge, they are "Experiment ???0X-0105 AMP", where ??? is 3 or 4 letters, in all caps, corresponding to the first three characters of your character's last name, or your first initial plus the first three characters of your last name if you do not have a unique last name.

So for D-Trip, Experiment AMPs would be under "Experiment LON0X-0105 AMP".
For, say, Albrecht Detweiler, member of the large Detweiler clan, Experiment AMPs would be under "Experiment ADET0X-0105 AMP".

Again, don't press the production buttons.

Anyway! That's a lot of text, thank you for reading all the way to the bottom. I really hope that this works out cleanly and we can expand this a bit.

---

What is my password? Send Jim Waldrop a Private Message.

Was my Autoforge account ever imported from the old system? Send Jim Waldrop a Private Message.

Help, the Autoforge is down. Send Jim Waldrop a Private Message, or if you have other means of contacting me, do so. I will try to bring it back up. Do not contact me out of band for anything related to the Forge that is not "the site is down"; I am going to be keeping the PMs as sort of a paper trail.

Can I attempt to hack or break into the Autoforge? No. This is cheating. This not even "lulz let's see if my e-peen is longer than Jim's" level cheating, it's just entirely bad form. The Autoforge web app is not hardened against malicious, mischievious, or ill-advised penetration; I have no doubt you could find some way to get in, just as I am pretty sure I would see it happening. If someone tries to attack the Forge I will just shut it down, and everyone can deal with it in the science center like always. Don't ruin it for everyone else.

I couldn't help myself, and despite it being explicitly listed as cheating I went ahead and pentested the Autoforge! Oh my gosh your webapp is so insecure! How can anyone not have hacked it already!!1! Sure. OK. Great. If it is that earth-shattering, DO NOT post your findings or worries on this thread. Send Jim Waldrop a Private Message.

Can I just go poking around and seeing what it takes to make different AMPs? No. This is cheating. I will be going through and making sure that nobody has done this kind of exploration. If it is not on your character sheet, don't try to pull it up in the Production interface.

Has the Autoforge been hardened against present-day Internet traffic? No. It is a toy webapp, written in a very lightweight Python-based rapid web development framework. The only thing that matters is that your password is stored as a SHA256 hash, so even if we were dumb and the box gets owned and you were dumb and used the same password here as you used elsewhere, everything should still be fine.

Can I transfer resources to other people pre-game? Yes. Derek and Plot have *currently* signed off on that. In the unlikely event that we or they change our minds, I will simply roll back the DB to the state it was in at the end of the last event, and I will tell you here.

Jim, I owe you copious amounts of beer/liquor/adoration/hugs/et al. Thank you for this!

Thank you again for the help last time. I can only hope this means you get to play for the full event this time.

Thank you so much getting this up and running! They shall miss you over at Autoforge: The Larp but we'll be glad to have you back.

---

-Josh Marcus
Head of Plot, FI 3

Jim,
*SQUEEZE* *TACKLEHUGGLES* THANK-YOU!!!!!!!!
I'd also proclaim my love, but I'd think cassie would have words with me, but honestly I really want to say thank you. I really appreciate this. I'll be looking into it tomorrow and send along any feedback.

~Bri

I have a question, and I figured I'd ask it here, as its a general one.

I have some actual resources. Can I add them to the autoforge and then hand them in at checkin? Or, do deposits have to be made in game?

Please make all deposits in game!

Thanks for asking,

---

-Amber
Retired Logistics Goddess

Neve O'Brien(RIP), Magnus Sulara Oratia Somerton, Songbird, Elias Amory, Dr. Ara Grintner (formerly ZG) , Jane Sawyer, and Grace (just Grace)

Further news on the Autoforge front:

All Device Blueprints in the website's system as of the Spring 1 event, and some Blueprints for this event, are in the Autoforge. I need to explain a bit about how Projects work in the Autoforge now.

---

PROJECT NAMES AND AUTHORIZATIONS

A user accesses a Project by typing the *exact* name of the Project in the Project Name field on the Production tab in the Autoforge interface.

Now, some of your Projects have ridiculously long and convoluted names. So we have a concept called an 'authorization'. Right now, we have this set up in a very permissive mode. The first time you enter your *exact* project name correctly, an entry will be made in the Authorizations table in the Autoforge database. From then on, you'll be able to auto-complete for that name in the Project Name field. I personally have something like 40 things I can build in the Forge; this makes it very very easy to pull up what I want.

I've populated some authorizations for some of you. I do not have the information, nor do I really want the information, as to who has what, so you will likely find that if you have any authorizations at all, they are incomplete. (If your name was in the device name, I have a pretty good idea that you're authorized for it, for example.)

If we need to, we can also take away the ability for you to self-authorize for projects; a staff member would have to enter every authorization at that point. We can also make it so that you have to be authorized for a project to pull it up in the interface. Taken together, that locks the Forge down and makes this a bit safer. That's the safety valve if we find that this is being abused.

Now, some of the Device Names in the website data were misspelled or malformed or simply Wrong in some way, so I have edited around 5-10% of them. Once you've tried to check the blueprints for all of your devices, if you can't get to some of them, send me a PM.

---

BLUEPRINT COSTS

Engineers.

You will note that some of the blueprints in the Autoforge have slightly different costs.

This is because your original costs were wrong.

There is a formula to device costs. I am not going to post it here, but it is IG information and has been verified OOG. The Autoforge generates the costs of blueprints based on this formula, the Optional Cost of a procedure, and a device-specific 'filler' component.

Based on the amount of sometimes slightly broken and sometimes just plain wrong blueprint prices I saw when processing this pile of data, every Engineer in this game was getting off very easy for several of their Blueprints. That has been fixed. I would apologize for the inconvenience, but frankly, every damned one of us was cheating, whether we realized it or not, so now we can all stop together.

If, however, we've gotten the wrong level for some of your devices, that's a bigger issue. Please send a PM if you think something is way out of whack.

---

FUEL-EFFICIENT DEVICES

Some of your devices are Fuel-Efficient. That information was not retained in the info-dump I got. If you have a Fuel-Efficient device, send me a PM with the Upkeep Cost for that blueprint, and I'll fix it.

---

So. Engineers. Please, login to the Autoforge, and see if this works for you.

Send me these things over PM, if you need to:
* A list of devices that you can't find but that are on your sheet
* Any blueprints that are waaaay different price than you remember
* The Upkeep Cost of any of your Fuel-Efficient blueprints

-- Jim

---

timothy xavier

Many of you may not have blueprints on your sheets that you are awaiting on. This was, in part, the cause of Derek's posting about format. The second cause being my delaying handling of these devices and items for which I apologize. I will see about fixing what we can during game and before hand.

I shall endeavor to get your blueprints into the AF as well, manually, that way, you will have access to the blueprints and their costs... but I cannot make promises. If you have troubles, put in a help request, contact me, and / or email Jim.

---

Thomas Schlapp
Head of Technology
Future Imperfect

Also, because I have not sanity checked these (rather few) device costs, if you feel slighted at all by this change please let me know. If you lost 2 carbs in the conversion cost, just add them after you make the device or just, as we have been, transferring the spent resources to the prepared procedure account instead and get tags from logistics (if you do not already have them).

That said, there DOES appear to be a discrepancy in the cost of some devices. We will go over them en masse over the "off season" and see if they cannot all be corrected.

---

Thomas Schlapp
Head of Technology
Future Imperfect

Trust and love guys.

Thanks for everything you've been doing!

OK, everyone, I hope you enjoyed this test of the Catalyst Autoforge system. Sometime late-ish tomorrow evening I will be bringing the system down and copying the database over to the machine we actually use for the AF during game. Please get your pre-game transactions done by then.

(This goes for cast-side data entry as well.

-- Jim

---

timothy xavier