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.
7351b372a96d4a75f3726e3752d4f3ac4cf39bbea08146ae4609b3bb2e61038e
shasum -a 256 GeneralsXZH-macos-arm64-7351b372.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 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. What follows gets your copy onto the Mac.
The engine reads its data from one folder. Put Zero Hour's contents here and it will find them:
~/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH
If you already own it on Steam. Zero Hour is a
Windows title, so the Mac Steam client will not offer it. Copy the folder from a Windows
machine you own it on — it is
steamapps\common\Command & Conquer Generals - Zero Hour —
over the network or a USB drive, into the path above.
If you have no Windows machine. SteamCMD will
download a Windows depot onto macOS if you tell it to. Install it with
brew install --cask steamcmd, then:
steamcmd +@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType windows +login YOUR_ACCOUNT +app_update 2732960 validate +quit
2732960 is Zero Hour's Steam app id. It downloads into
SteamCMD's own steamapps/common; move that folder's contents to
the data folder above. You must own the game — this authenticates as you and downloads
nothing you do not already have a licence to.
Then unzip the build anywhere, and:
./run.sh
Maps built for this engine. Drop the folder into your maps directory —
~/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH/Maps on macOS and Linux,
Documents\Command and Conquer Generals Zero Hour Data\Maps
on Windows. Every player in a match needs the same file.
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.