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2. Pre-study

Upon asking in the server if there's a way to see the final leaderboards the next day, I was told by one of the regulars (who seems very dedicated to the AAC craft, to an impressive level that I hope applies to the rest of their life cause if so they'll make it pretty far) that there used to be one but capitalism ruined it. At this point I think 4 things:

  • This has been done before
  • WayBack Machine probably archived it
  • The game's code is clearly pulling from a server somewhere, and unless it's hella protected I can probably just curl it or something
  • I have poked around in this game's files enough at some point many years ago I was able to edit textures, so I can probably access, somehow, the URL it's using
    • if I recall correctly, it was made in Unity or something. Whatever it was, there were unpacking tools I was able to download way back then and use that weren't AAC specific (aka, likely will not have vanished off the face of the internet by now)

WayBack Machine attempts

I looked around for links to the leaderboard in the discord and found a lot of people complaining it was broken, one that was once hosted on Witch Beam's site (it returned an error and had no results on WayBack), and one hosted on some strange non-https site that threw an error but DID have a WayBack Machine listing.

So I ctrl+S's the site to look thru its code, hoping it would point to the location of the leaderboard. Alas, either I'm inept (very likely) or the leaderboard was compiled on this 3rd party server then served as static content, because there was nothing I could find in there. I don't blame them for that, because this is also my plan! lol

Steam Leaderboard attempt

Seemingly, Steam (the video game company/platform) is managing these scores on the backend and serving that data ingame. Indeed, this was pointed out by a different user in the server. In another episode of me possibly being inept, I did manage to find the leaderboards in Steam. They were per-level as well as for Boss Rush and Infinity Drive (which is apparently not actually infinite??? idk, who knew. not me... yet 😈😈😈). Not only does it not have Daily Drive at all (that I can find, again, I may be inept), it only has the top 200 people, and they're lifetime stats (over 10yrs), not daily. So I will have to find another way!!!

Next page: Down and Dirty!