Puzzle Giveaway: SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition [SOLUTION]

Still 8 hours remaining, 7 entries so far. This thread contains several hints; not all of them are mentioned in the top post. If you are still trying, then good luck, and may you find the right direction. :-)

chuckie001, thanks for posting the solution.
The perspective thing was the thing that made me fail on this one.
Other than that - thank you for familiarizing myself with different coding techniques!
Expecting your next puzzle. Could you post a link to some coding competitions website? I would like to get deeper into the subject...

Thamks!

Thanks for the answer, I actually went through the first 6 steps myself and considered braille but even now I still don't know what you mean by step 7.

edit
Okay, only now AFTER writing out all 8 sets do I get it, I only had room to write down 4 sets last night at 2am when I was doing this, proved to be my undoing.

Damnit I was so close... I suspected Braille but got nowhere because of not tilting my head xD
Great puzzle nonetheless, thank you for it and the giveaway :)

I also would like to thank you for posting the solution. :)

And now imagine solving this outdoors, while carrying a backpack and hiking through a karst area. :-) And the solution gives you a location which you must reach to get the next puzzle, so you better solve it correctly. Thirteen such ciphers for a four-member team, starting at 9AM, ending at 10PM. It's quite fun, actually, and having 3 other people to solve the cipher with you is a tremendous boost both to reasoning and morale. ;-)

You always ger 4x4 from this puzzle (but some of the places might be empty). Draw it on a piece of paper, and then do the steps 6) and 7).

When you look at this:

X X X X
X X X O
O X O X
X O X X

you will see that it is actually this:

X O
X O
O O

rotated by 45°. And that's the Braille symbol for "the following symbol represents a number".

I will send you an image... ;)
Wait a moment...
The game is still worth or over?

8 people

(PUZZLE SOLUTION (REDUX) IN THIS POST, for those who are spoiler-wary)

...hope this clarifies, rather than confuses...
Line one (of eight) is...
close dot, closer dot, close dot, far dot
(all of the dots are either close, closer, far, or farther)

so if you bring your view of the close and far dots up to a top-down view (think FPS vs. top-down games) of the dots, you should see a 4x4 grid.
So the first grid is...

 ~~~o (there is one "far" dot in the last position)  
 o~o~ (the two "close" dots are in the first and third positions)  
 ~o~~ (the "closer" dot is in the second position)  

If you rotate that ~45 degrees counter-clockwise, you get...  
~o  
~o  
oo  
...and that orientation of dots in Braille means a number is coming up.  So the next character (line two) will be a number.  In Braille, an single orientation of dots may be either a number or a letter.  With this "number coming up" prefix, line two is "3"... without it, line two would have been "c".  And like the "number coming up" orientation, there's also one for "capital letter coming up".  So that's why there are eight lines instead of just five.  If the code happened to be all lower-case letters, there would be only five lines.  But two of them were numbers and one was a capital letter.  

:P  

Can't wait for the next one! :)

Probably most of us don't know Braille by heart.

Hint #3: Those who know what the puzzle looks like probably don't know the code by heart. Those who know the code by heart probably don't know what the puzzle looks like. (There may be some rare exceptions.)

And if you didn't know about its existence at all, well, a day you didn't learn anything new is a wasted day. :-)