I may have found the hint of what is chasing the Vasari

I can't decide whether this thread is troll bait or the first legit discovery on this issue....

In either case I'm sure it's worth following...

Considering this forum it could well turn out to be both.

I maybe just grasping at nothing here, but I thought I've seen some of those letters before (enchanting in Minecraft), and after some research I discovered a similar looking alphabet from old dos game. It doesn't look like it exactly but who knows.

I just translated it:

|\-.-NDRWEF/EDRDTEKRDAXDTVNR|RE

can't make any sense of that

looks like it has a smiley face

Well, either you stumbled upon something or it's a Red Herring..? Here, you can see two pictures which don't show up in the original Sins.

Do you see them..?

Hmm, well if that's what it translates too, it might be encoded. I'll run my old substitution cipher breakers on it and see if I can't get it to form anything. If anyone has a dedicated Caesar cipher tool may as well check that as well.

Edit: Actually, might you be trolling me? 

Yeah, at the very least this seems to be something in the Vasari language.

Actually I believe those are the pictures for the pirate lords. You see them in the full black market screen that no one uses anymore.

Whoa

this is a message from the editors

I must be the chosen one

Oh my! Isn't this quite the find!

Seriously GoaFan77, I thank for this. I am excited to see if anybody comes up with anything.

I am incompetent so I wouldn't really be able to decode it very well. But didn't somebody (was it Yarlen?) that said something about there being a reason for green suns in Sins? But then Yarlen just said recently that even he doesn't know, so nevermind.

This is cool.

Or you could be chasing the Vasari

All fear KrdaxDrkrun, or something like that.

This all makes sense...

The hint was supposed to have something to do with the new ships. Check.

It was supposed to be something with a texture. Check.

And it was supposed to be hidden in the files. Also check.

So you better not be trolling, GoaFan77.

Exactly! Krdax has been chasing the Vasari all along! He is the chosen one, destined to bring Vengeance on the murderous Vasari, humble the proud traders, and make the Advent his bitches! Just remember to share with the one who pointed you towards your glorious destiny.

I'm pretty sure Yarlen was just joining the trolls with all the wild speculation, but yeah, I'm pretty sure only Ironclad knows.

I am not (intentionally) trolling. I just happened to check the file while I was modding. If anyone wants to verify I didn't just add all that, its the FrigatePhaseAssualtNaniteSwarm-cl.dds file in the texture folder. This image is with the alpha channel removed and rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise for readability.

Now, if this message, if we can ever find out what it says, turns out to say "I am the Omnipotent Nanite Swarm, all will die before me!" or something, then yeah I guess we are no closer to figuring out what is chasing the Vasari, but I wasn't trying to troll here. Though given all the April fools jokes and the like about this topic, I am sure the trolls will come to this thread whether it ends up being the hint or not. 

The first two are technically just guesses on our part. Obviously new stuff is the best place to hide such a hint as they were working on it at the time, and all the game files except textures are in plain text, which are easily searchable and would be easy for us "Modders" to find, which the devs didn't want. But as you say in hindsight this is the perfect place to hide it (most modders don't change base textures, this is a small mesh with extra space on the textures, its a new unit, and it would not appear in any search algorithms, not even a color histogram as the text is in the same color as the texture).

I stopped chasing the Vasari cuz the Advent were a pleasant distraction.

However, I accidentally left this writing on that texture to show that I am the particle master. All fear my pewpews

http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&sa=N&biw=826&bih=432&tbm=isch&tbnid=CwZFk3CWR594nM:&imgrefurl=http://martianchronicles.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/frickin-laser-beams-fact-vs-fiction/&docid=SdK6TRruAvHqgM&imgurl=http://martianchronicles.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/azerz-pew-pew-pew.jpg&w=390&h=374&ei=G4dCUYK0MOTlyAGyjoGIDA&zoom=1&ved=0CFMQrQMwAA&iact=rc&dur=2&page=1&tbnh=141&tbnw=147&start=0&ndsp=8&tx=103&ty=66

Boobies?

I just saw that...

I thought I was tricky...

Dang it Goa, you snuck alien porn into the Sins forums again!

If the Vasari are resorting to Caesar cyphers, either Caesar was a very smart man or the Vasari are really lazy...

those letters derived from an episode of scooby doo. it says "rhaggy reed rome rooby rnack zoik!"

It only looks like that because I rotated the texture for readability. And have you been snacking on troll brains again?

Be glad it wasn't a Skirantra or a Ragnarov.

Yeah I don't know, but it would not surprise me if it is encrypted. And if we need alien supercomputers to solve it, that's not much of a hint is it?

There's also Aurebesh from Star Wars, but it doesn't look quite like that either...

Here's my issue with looking at meshes or textures...

I highly doubt that Ironclad orchestrated some extremely complex scenario of sharing what's chasing the Vasari by expressing that through the models or textures which of course would require them to communicate key details to the artists to express visually in a meaningful way.

More likely the texture artist responsible for this work made it entirely on his own and potentially scrubbed it from the final model.

That being said ...

Goa you said you rotated the texture?

Maybe the letters are off by 90° then and were meant to be read one at a time.

L

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k

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s

.

Maybe the hint is in the errors we get in dev.exe.

Just saying.

'"Surface" is an unknown entity.'

Oh

so that's why this error pops up...

The Terror of the Vasari is messing with my game files again!

Yeah I also checked Aurebesh, and arrived at the same conclusion.

This was the original. I can't say it is any more legible to me.

Not trolling but could the characters be inverse. Meaning get a mirror to see if it's backward... 

The thing that intrigues me is this. Why do we assume the characters are square-ish? When the image is placed verticle, the characters could likely be longer, etc. More than that, they could be in four difference orientations.

Hmmm ... I swear this looks familiar or at least feels like it should be, the style of it anyways I just can't place it. :'(