The dark is almost upon us... There will be light soon

I have good news and bad news. Well, two bits of good news. The Velvet Assassin material we showed off at E3 was really well received, people are getting very excited about the game. So that’s great.

And the items that belonged to Violette Summer, that were stolen from the studio back in May? We’ve got some of them back! Unfortunately under the terms of the agreement we have with the collector who supplied them to us we can’t tell you which ones they were, or which ones are still missing, or even what we have. But it’s been a real morale boost for the team, and has reconnected us with the spirit of Violette Summer. And I can confirm they will appear in the game, as high-quality renders based on 3D scans of the items.

The bad news is that with this, and a few other things I can’t go into I wont be able to post on this blog for a while.

I’m really sorry about this, but we are entering a rather chaotic phase of the development cycle, and my time is really required elsewhere...

Dan the Man, and the search for those Stolen Items

We are hoping that the mystery of the break-in will be solved very soon and the saga will be brought to a close. Dan Corrigan has returned to London with a copy of the missing security-video recording. Because he is working for the insurance company (I think—is that right Dan?) and not the police or Replay Studios I haven’t seen the tape.

Dan Corrigan is a man after my own heart. He’s a real WWII fanatic, and knows lots of trivia and details that I’d never heard before. We spent many long evenings talking about the operations of the different espionage units during the war, and particularly (of course) SOE and Nova-5. He admitted that the main reason he took the job with Surer Risk in the first place was because of its roots in the post-war espionage community. He said he’d always hoped he could get into the archives and rummage around to see what he could find about the early days of the company, but he never did because it’s a firing offence. And then he got fired for something else completely. Ironic, isn’t it?

(Have you seen this film Female Agents? I don’t think it’s opened in the US yet but it’s very good—not very realistic but a good story. Of course it’s supposedly based on real characters but there’s not a sniff of Violette Summer or Nova-5 in it. I still don’t understand how SOE became the ‘sexy’ part of WWII spycraft and the rest of it has been banished to a backwater. Maybe I should write a book...)

Dan has also spotted that there was a pattern to the Violette Summer items that were being used in the game, something that connects them all together. He has a theory about the reason behind it that doesn’t explain why they were stolen, but which says a lot about why they’re here in the first place. I hope I can give you more details about that in the next few days, once I’ve had a chance to do some more research.

I do have an inventory of all the items, but I’ve been asked not to post it here until they’ve been safely recovered—a time which we all hope is near. But I think collectors will be interested to see what we’ve been able to play with. And there’s still a chance we might be able to get the objects to appear in the game, if they can be recovered in time.

And of course E3 is on, and I’m told that Velvet Assassin is getting good reactions from the press—I wish I was out there, but we’re nearing crunch-time on the game and it’s all getting a bit frantic here. Heads down, and back to work.

It's been almost two weeks? I've had my head down, things have been busy around here. I've had a visitor from the UK, a Mr Dan Corrigan, who has been looking into the theft of the Velvet Assassin items, and I have been helping him with his researches into German beers. And after I made that post about the scans, I wanted to bring you some good news next. I have been talking to people in the studio about getting the scans released onto the web but there's a lot of "Leave it alone, VJ, we've got a game to release."

Yes! I remember, there's a game! And it's looking really good! In fact it's looking like this:

and like this:

and sometimes like this as well:

(Click on any image to make it bigger.)

Those images should be exciting enough to make anyone forget about a missing collection of WWII relics, correct? And even if not then I'll post some more news here very soon.

Doh!

Ignore that last post. I took the stuff to KZ who was in charge of the physical assets and he shot me down immediately—the scans I found are preliminary scans taken for calibration, and the resolution’s not good enough to use them in the game. Serves me right for shooting my mouth off before I knew what I was talking about.

Still, in my defence NOBODY mentioned that these early scans existed at all. And maybe there’s some way we can release them, to use them as a record of the missing items. I’ll talk to people.

Cache Bandicoot

Well, here’s a turn-up. We’ve not recovered the WWII items that were stolen, but I have found the next best thing. I was checking some server back-ups and came across a directory of 3D scans of the missing items. Looks like someone goofed and forgot to log things properly. So we do have virtual versions of all Violette's equipment that was taken, and we can put them in the game after all.

I can’t wait to tell everyone and see their faces.

Break-in Point

Still no news from the police regarding the break-in, and no sign of the CCTV footage either. Things are getting a bit tense here: some of the guys on the creative side are muttering that it was an inside job and others headed up by KZ the research manager saying that’s crazy talk, crunch-time must be beginning to get to them, and so on. And it does seem pretty far-fetched. I know that the insurance company has agreed to cover the cost of the items, but really how do you put a value on items like that? Violette Summer items come up for auction once in a blue moon.

Morse and re-Morse

While we're waiting for the police to let us know if there's any news of the missing items, I thought I'd tell you about codes.

The codes that British Intelligence used during the Second World War were pretty close to the codes they used in the First World War, and nowhere near as sophisticated as the output of the Enigma machines that the Axis was using. The Enigma codes needed the first programmable computer to crack them; the British ones could be brute-forced if you had a clue as to their content, enough people working at them, and a lucky break. Leo Marks at SOE had a team of four hundred female operatives from the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, known as FANYs (I am not making this up), whose job was to brute-force messages from their own agents that had got scrambled in transmission. They were remarkably successful.

The reason that these codes could be broken was because of the way they were encoded, a system known as poem-codes. Each agent was issued with a piece of poetry or text that they'd use to encode messages sent from the field: for each message they'd pick a few words from the poem at random, use numbers at the start of the message to indicate the words (the transposition key), and encode the message in the usual way, omitting word-breaks and punctuation, and breaking the resulting letter-wall into five-character bricks, which were then transmitted by Morse Code. Some agents, mostly the SOE ones, had radio operators sent in with them; others like the Nova-5 ones went in alone and had to do their own transmitting.

This means two important things. Firstly, poem-codes are transposition cyphers—double-transposition in the case of the SOE ones--not a subsitution one. The encoded message is nothing more than a giant anagram of the original message. So short messages can be broken quite easily, particularly if the agent's code-techniques are slack and they re-use keys. SOE agents were told to make their messages at least 200 characters long. Many didn't bother.

(200 characters. Think of it: you’re intelligence-gathering in occupied territory, knowing that discovery is a death-sentence, and you’re supposed to send back your findings and requests in something only slightly longer than a text message.)

Secondly, once you've cracked one message you're on your way to knowing what the agent's code-poem is. In the early days SOE advised its agents to choose a poem that'd be easy to remember, even under stress, so messages were being encoded with Jerusalem, Land of Hope and Glory, or the National Anthem. None of which are exactly hard to guess.

Here's what happens when an espionage network is using inadequate cryptography and lax protocols: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Englandspiel.

And thirdly, because it's all being done by hand, there are many steps where errors can creep in. You’ve got three elements: the message, the poem, and the transposition-key. Spell a word in the poem wrong, or add an extra letter where there shouldn’t be one and the whole thing becomes a jumble of letters.

So all in all, it's not a very satisfactory way of doing things. And then in June 1943 Leo Marks persuaded his bosses at SOE that this whole system was completely insecure and they should use worked-out codes and one-time keys instead, and all the fun came to an end.

But Violette had been parachuted into Europe in the early summer of 1943, before Leo Marks' system was in play. And yet nobody has ever been able to decode it.

Violette Summer's code-technique was, as far as we know, exemplary. I've mentioned before that most of the Nova-5 records were destroyed when a flying bomb hit their headquarters in Portman Square in 1945, and most of the rest has never been published, but the code-training was done at RAF Tempsford where separate records were kept. So we know Violette was not the sort to make careless errors. And the nature of double-transposition means that even badly encoded messages can eventually be cracked. So what happened to Violette's last message to render it undecipherable?

That, my friends, is the $64,000 question.