Freelance systems developer
Freelance systems developer. I work close to the metal: networking, engine internals, backends, and the security work that goes with all three. Nine years of it, starting at fourteen.
The through-line is verification. Signed releases, build identities that refuse a mismatch instead of hoping, and update paths that fail closed rather than guess.
Neither of these products is mine. The work in them is. That is what contract work looks like, and it is most of what I do.
thezconnect.com
A student network built around a single card: campus discounts, mentorship and opportunities in one membership, with the partner and branch tooling behind it.
I develop and maintain it for the people who own it. Next.js and Node on the front, Prisma over Postgres underneath.
A cross-platform port of Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour. The game and the engine are not mine. EA released the source under GPL v3, and a chain of community forks did the foundational work long before I touched it.
We took fbraz3/GeneralsX as the base and built on top of it: getting it building on the Mac, then getting all four platforms into the same match without desyncing. Twelve players is next.
now
I take contract work: systems, networking, backends, and the security side of all three. The Z Connect is a product I develop for its owners, and GeneralsX is a port I contribute to. Neither one is mine.
now, side
now
The sister company that runs everything behind Betarabia, under the same ownership.
now
The part of the work I am best at is the part I cannot show you. Findings belong to the companies that commissioned them, and a writeup with a recognisable target costs them more than it credits me, so none of it is published. Ask me directly instead.
at 14
Where it started, on Growtopia: save.dat builders, mods, proxies and internals, and I ran Nusumu.wtf. Taking apart a binary someone else shipped, and working out what the client could be made to say to the server, is where everything above came from.
Two kinds of work. Say which one, and what the system or the target is. I will tell you if it is a fit before anything else.
GeneralsX needs your own copy of Zero Hour installed. It ships no EA game data and does not modify your existing installation; it installs beside it. The engine is GPL v3, built on EA's source release and the community forks credited above; source at github.com/wh1ter0se69.
Apple silicon only. The zip carries the engine and everything it links against, including MoltenVK and DXVK, so nothing else needs installing. It carries no game data.
b9c56801bde1739c9c1d909fbb227fc66fb4d24c85f685dbf633f6248c2d5545
shasum -a 256 GeneralsXZH-macos-arm64-04844598d.zip
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine GeneralsXZH.app
This app is not signed or notarised, so macOS will refuse it on first launch and say it is damaged. It is not damaged; that is what Gatekeeper says about everything without a paid developer certificate. Check the hash above first, then remove the quarantine attribute and open it. If you would rather not, that is a reasonable position and you should not run it.
You need your own copy of Zero Hour. I cannot ship it: the game data is EA’s, and handing you 2 GB of it would be piracy no matter how the rest of this is licensed. GeneralsX is an engine — it replaces the executable, not the game.
Four steps, about fifteen minutes, most of it waiting for a download. Each one ends with something you can check, so you find out immediately rather than at the end.
You need the game’s data files. Which route you take depends on whether you have a Windows machine to copy from.
Zero Hour is a Windows title, so the Mac Steam client will never offer it. On the PC, the folder is:
steamapps\common\Command & Conquer Generals - Zero Hour
Copy the whole thing to the Mac over the network or on a USB drive. Retail and Origin installs work too — any complete Zero Hour folder.
SteamCMD will fetch a Windows depot onto macOS if you tell it to. Install it, then run the command below and enter your Steam password when asked.
brew install --cask steamcmd
You must already own the game. This signs in as you and downloads nothing you do not hold a licence to.
steamcmd +@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType windows +login YOUR_ACCOUNT +app_update 2732960 validate +quit
You have a folder containing Command and Conquer Generals Zero Hour.exe
and a pile of .big files. If there are no .big files you
have the wrong folder — you want Zero Hour, not the original Generals.
The engine reads its data from exactly one folder. Copy the contents of
your Zero Hour folder into it — the .big files and the
Data directory, not the folder itself.
~/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH
If you used SteamCMD, the download landed inside SteamCMD’s own
steamapps/common directory. Move that folder’s
contents here.
ls ~/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH/*.big lists around two dozen files. If it
prints No such file or directory, the contents went one level too
deep — look for a nested folder and move what is inside it up.
Optional, and it is the reason you have no music. Zero Hour ships seven music tracks. Its music list asks for fifty-seven — the other fifty are in the original Generals, and Zero Hour installs carry only a stub in their place. So Zero Hour on its own gives you sound effects and silence where the soundtrack should be. That is expected, not a broken install, and nothing you reinstall will change it.
If you own Generals as well, put its files here and the soundtrack comes back:
You only need Music.big from Generals, not
the whole install — the engine mounts any archive it finds in that folder. Copy it,
do not move it, and leave Zero Hour's own Music.big
where it is: the two share a name but are different files, and Zero Hour's
is a stub that belongs to Zero Hour.
~/GeneralsX/Generals
Owning Generals is not the same as having it downloaded, and on macOS the Steam client will not offer it — it is a Windows title, exactly like Zero Hour. Fetch it the same way, with a different app id:
steamcmd +@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType windows +login YOUR_ACCOUNT +app_update 2229870 validate +quit
Check: the Music.big you
end up copying should be tens of megabytes. If it is about 768 KB you have picked
up Zero Hour's stub again, and it contains no audio.
If you do not own it, everything else works — you simply play without music. There is no other source for those fifty tracks: they ship only in the original game, and nothing here can supply them.
Unzip the build anywhere you like. macOS will refuse it on first launch and say it is damaged. It is not: that is what Gatekeeper says about everything without a paid Apple developer certificate, and I do not have one.
Right-click GeneralsXZH.app, choose Open, then
Open again in the dialog. That is the whole step, and it is the only time
you need to do it. Verify the checksum published above first if you want to know
you have the file I built.
If right-click → Open does not offer the second button — some macOS versions hide it for quarantined apps — clear the flag from a terminal instead:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine GeneralsXZH.app
If you would rather not run an unsigned binary, that is a reasonable position and you should not run it.
The app opens instead of bouncing. If you used the command, it prints nothing —
silence is success, xattr only speaks up when it fails.
In the folder you unzipped there is GeneralsXZH.app.
Right-click it, choose Open, then Open again on the warning. No
terminal. After the first time you can double-click it like any other app.
Ignore run.sh. It sits beside the app
and does the same job, but macOS opens .sh files in
whichever editor claimed the extension, so double-clicking it launches a text
editor rather than the game. The app is the one you want.
To play with other people, choose Online from the main menu. You do not type a server address — the game finds the relay itself.
You reach the main menu with music playing. Everyone in a match needs the same build, so if a friend cannot join you, compare the version in the corner first.
Windows updates itself through the launcher. macOS has no launcher yet, so you replace the app by hand — it takes about thirty seconds, and you do not touch your game data.
GeneralsXZH.app over your old one,
replacing it.~/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH is untouched by
any of this. Your game data, maps and settings stay where they are — only the engine is
replaced.
Everyone in a match must run the same build. Mismatched engines refuse each other rather than desync halfway through a game, so if a friend cannot join you, the first thing to compare is the version in the corner of the main menu.
~/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH looks like.~/GeneralsX/Generals if you own it. Do not
reinstall — it will not help.RelayRoom line in your Options.ini.Maps built for this engine. Drop the folder into your maps directory —
~/Library/Application Support/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH/Maps on macOS,
~/.local/share/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH/Maps on Linux,
Documents\Command and Conquer Generals Zero Hour Data\Maps
on Windows. Every player in a match needs the same file.
One folder per map, named the same as the map itself —
Maps/MyMap/MyMap.map — with the .tga
preview and map.ini beside it if the map shipped with them.
Restart the game and it picks them up.
Not the Maps folder inside the
game directory. That one holds the official maps and is only read from a cache built at
release time, so anything dropped there is silently ignored.
Twelve spawns on a circle, each an exact rotation of the last, so no start position has a better expansion, a shorter path to the middle, or a closer neighbour than any other. The middle is raised ground holding the shared resources. A generator writes it and a validator checks all of it — equal radius, equal neighbour distance, identical per-spawn supply, and a middle that looks the same from all twelve.
See the layout — high ground is lighter; gold is supply, blue oil, red hospitals, white the twelve starts.
Not a ring — a square pit with two kinds of seat. Eight sit on the edges and four in the corners, and they are deliberately not equal: a corner seat reaches $48,400 against an edge seat's $64,300, and pays for it by holding half as much approach front. The measure that matters is that no seat is better overall, not that every seat is the same. See the layout.
Eight seats in four walled compounds, every one a single orbit of the same template, so each measurement comes out identical rather than merely close. See the layout.
| Platform | Arch | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | x86-64 | available |
| macOS | arm64 | available |
| Linux | x86-64 | unreleased |
| iPadOS | arm64 | unreleased |
This executable is not code-signed. Windows will warn you, and you have no reason to take my word for any of this. Check the file yourself before you run it.
aaaafce7f973223c550ded6867ce67700ca8e364bedb9733ae0b5c52644d7a3b
certutil -hashfile GeneralsX-Setup-aaaafce7.exe SHA256
Get-FileHash .\GeneralsX-Setup-aaaafce7.exe -Algorithm SHA256
Those 64 characters are the hash the installer itself enforces. If what you compute does not match what is printed here, do not run it.