'Not A Villain' Webcomic - Bandit and Kleya begin their fight!

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 140

At last! Their fight starts!! (yes, I may be a taaaaaad excited about this).

As for the incentive I made fun of the 2nd and 3rd panel, and then did outtakes as well. Enjoy!

EDIT: Having trouble uploading the incentive. 🙁 I'll try again in the morning and update this with the pic.

EDIT#2: I still can't upload it, so I'll probably save it for the next update instead. Thanks, though, to all who vote anyway!

23 Comments

One person? Maybe somebody who’s worked with her before? (page 134).

Also, his special cuts out all his vision…

I admit that I, too, am a bit excited about this.

Man, Bandit is fast, and it looks like Kleya is starting to figure him out, whatever that means.

First time commenting! (I think.)

Kleya, perhaps if your motion wasn’t 10x more work than his, you might win one of these someday? XD

“Override” followed by a question mark in the hacker-vision? Hmm…

That sort of stuff is ever-present for her- taunting her to hack her way to victory. Such things have shown up so many times I’ve started to not read anything into them, beyond the fact that it’s evidence she always has options she could use, but would get her caught.

Nice detailed clothing in panel one. And both their expressions in panels 2 and 3 are very effective.

AHHHHH SNK boss syndrome. Jerk has attack priority and unstoppable animation frames. I guess some things never change.

Woo, someone else knows about SNK boss syndrome! And yes, it is very much a case of The Computer is a Cheating B******, since said SNK boss has the game mechanics heavily slanted in his favor.

Of course, Bandit isn’t a computer-run NPC, but based on the allusions to corruption in the game here it’s not a stretch to think that he has a few advantages that normal players cannot have. Basically, the same mindset applies — it’s a heavily unequal fight due to one character having the system itself cheating in his favor.

“Only one person could…” Seems like Kleya is used to being faster than *almost* everyone else… Does she know something about Bandit that even Dr. Grace might not? (I’m still guessing Bandit is really Saisuke, though maybe he’s just helping him out….)

It’s so intense…

I call Hax

Hm. Is it just me, or is his armband missing in that first frame..?

… does it only show up when he engages his special?

… actually, we haven’t seen his armband since page 133, despite his arm being exposed enough in intervening pages for it to be in-frame. Is this artist error..?

*is ashamed* yes

This page I fixed. The others will take a while, but thanks for pointing it out! It’s actually the one thing I forget the most when I draw the Bandit. lol.

A shorted out system is not a cause for concern? I guess spare parts are plentiful and jury rigged rigs and fixes are commonplace.

man i cant wait to see what the bandit think he will do to win

I wonder if the Bandit has hack-o-vision like Kleya does? Obviously, it wouldn’t be prompting him to alter the world, but I could see him having the same ability to see stats as she does.

Also, something that’s been bothering me. The Bandit is an excellent programmer. Dr Grace says it (pg 69), and he worked closely with Kleya (or “her”, since it’s not confirmed yet). And yet the Bandit’s program “leaks”. So why did a good programmer write a lousy program?

Well, as was stated a few pages ago, now would be a good time to define ‘good programmer’. (Ok, it said nice, but work with me here.) A good programmer could be someone who for instance can make his own specials and still be compliant to the new rules. Or merely someone (to keep it closer to our world) who can quickly write a program fulfilling all of the demands.

In the latter case it could be full of memory leaks (depending on compiler or because of too much recursive instructions), but if someone judged you by your work it would still be a good program.

Not entirely related but I read the Wizardry Consulted-series by Rick Cook, in it there is a world where magic can be performed by programming. The main hero Wiz is a hacker (not the steal data kind), someone who gets his programs to work but not observing common rules of programming. Eg. no documentation, nearly no error trapping and loads and loads of short cuts and spaghetti programming. His peers consider his work somewhere between the work of a genius and a work of a mad man. So depending if you watch the result or the method he could be a great programmer or a really lousy one.

Good point. However, Kleya’s comment about tight programming (pg 53) makes me think that she considers “tight” programs to be superior to “leaking” programs, and she probably held anyone who worked with her to a similar standard.

Also, in this world a “leaking” program is a definite weakness when used against Kleya, so I would think that anybody searching for her would take extra caution with their codes. Even if they don’t know about her hacker-vision, they should still be taking coding precautions.
Unless the Bandit is using his leaking code as a ploy to disguise who he is.

In this case, it looks as though “leak” means that the program is insecure. Whatever is storing his stats is apparently sending them unencrypted to whatever runs LiFE, and the LiFE client he uses treats his commands the same way. Either he’s not bothering to encrypt anything so that he can run a few computational cycles faster than his opponents (a human wouldn’t notice it, but that could be very useful for an AI…), or he’s deliberately leaving his information open to see who can look at it.

Ooh,

that last option would be tricky and it would suit what we know of him so far perfectly.

Could that be how he’s getting his specials out faster than Kleya?

What I assumed, as a programmer trying to reconcile the jargon, was that LiFe/The Game use a managed, garbage collected language for their scripting, but that the automated garbage collector is insecure, so anything that goes through it can be combed by other programs.

This actually makes a lot of sense at an abstract level – users all exist in the same memory space, but aren’t allowed to access memory belonging to another user, but then if the memory is released before being erased, anyone can read its former contents. Kleya then has a utility that monitors the garbage collector and reads everything that gets released. She expects anyone competent to scrub their memory before releasing it.

I’m not sure how the hardware would work out for that sort of memory access restriction, but it makes sense abstractly.

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 140