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Electronic Messages

This chapter documents the electronic messages that the hacker receives either through triggers or collecting them. This means e-mails (including video mails), logs and data fragments - everything the "Multimedia data reader" can show.

Text Format

The text resources for the messages contain both the content, as well as the meta information, encoded in text form. Any such message resource has the following string blocks:

1 line   Meta info
1 line   Title
1 line   Sender
1 line   Subject
N lines  Verbose text
1 line   Empty
M lines  Terse text
1 line   Empty

The Meta info line describes what to show additionally. This text has the following format:

meta-info := [event " "] [color " "] [left-mfd] ["," [" "] right-mfd]
event     := ("i" hex2) | "t"
color     := "c" hex2
left-mfd  := dec
right-mfd := dec

Examples:
"13, 18"
"i17 8"
"t cD1 23,23"
"cD1 23,6"

For most of the messages, at least left-mfd is specified. left-mfd and right-mfd are decimal offset numbers that refer to the image to show in the respective MFD. The offset is based on resource 0x0028. If left-mfd is greater or equal 256, then the message refers to a video mail. Video mails don't have an MFD image.

If specified, the color field identifies a hexadecimal colour palette index. This colour is used to draw the sender and subject lines.

The event field chains messages together. "i" events identify the message that must immediately follow the current one; The hexadecimal number is the offset for the next message (based on resource 0x0989). Such interrupt messages then have "t" as event.

The vanilla resource files contain a few messages with errors in them: There are some "stub email" messages with empty header lines, the text "stub email" twice and only one terminating empty line. Furthermore, there is one message in gerstrng.res which misses the terminating empty line in the terse text.

Text Content

Within the texts, the substring $N is the placeholder for the name of the hacker.

Audio

Corresponding audio resources are based on ID 0x0AB5. If an electronic message with ID X has audio, the audio will have resource ID 0x0AB5 + X. (Also: resource ID of text resource + 300)

These audio resources are MOVI resources with only the audio component. The audio recordings are stored in the files citalog.res (English), geralog.res (German) and frnalog.res (French).