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Contents:
Map Protection
What is map protecting
Map protecting is damaging a warcraft map in a way that the game still can read it, but the world-editor cannot.
What kinds of map protections exist
There are a lot of different types of protecting a warcraft 3 map.
1: Damaging the MPQ headersize information.
A warcraft3 map is like a zip file. You have first a 512 bytes big map header with some informations. Then you have a MPQ archive attached. The MPQ archive contains all the numerous files needed for a map. The first 4 bytes of the MPQ file are the identifier. It can be read as 'MPQ'. The next four bytes are the header size, which is always hex 0x20 00 00 00. Some map protectors now change the size from 0x20 00 00 00 to a random number which can look like this for example: hex 0xF6 6E BA 76. Most MPQ applications now cannot open the MPQ archive anymore because of that wrong size entry. Warcraft3 seems to ignore false header size entries, so those maps still run in war3.
This protection can be very easily be repaired by just setting the value back to 0x20 00 00 00.
This websize automatically repairs this kind of protection in order to open the map properly and extracting the map informations.
2: Delete the war3map.wgt file inside a map
The war3map.wgt contains all the necessairy information about the variables, triggers and groups your map uses. This file is only used by the World-Editor. A missing or altered war3map.wgt file results the World-Editor to fail loading the map.
This protection can be removed pretty easy as well. With a little application you can rebuild the war3map.wgt file using the informations stores in the war3map.j file (The Map script file)
This website ignores the war3map.wgt file for extracting the informations like number of triggers, number of variables e.t.c. It parses the war3map.j file directly.
You might notice, when a simple PHP script can gather all informations out of a war3map.j a simple other script might rebuild the war3map.wgt file.
2b: Deleting the war3map.w3c, war3map.w3s, war3map.w3r files
war3map.w3c stores the camera settings for the world editor. war3map.w3s stores the sounds used by a map world editor. war3map.w3r defines the regions used in a map for world editor.
All those files are also only used by the world editor and can be easily regenerated by the war3map.j file. See "Delete the war3map.wgt file inside a map" above.
3: Hiding the war3map.j file
Some clever map protecting dudes figured out a way to hide the war3map.j file, so you cannot extract it easily by a web script like this website.
Regular map files contains the war3map.j file directly in the root directory. The map protector dudes figured out that a map still works if the file is moven into a directory called "Scripts\".
This protection can be broken very easily... by just knowing this ;-) A big thx for the help from BahamutZERO and Quantam for helping me figuring out this protection.
4: Scrambling the war3map.j file
Some protecting dudes think they are clever, when they are renaming all variables and function names with random numbers. This renders the war3map.j file very hard to read by normal people. but its useless for parser scripts. The script I wrote for this website does not care for keywords. It only scans for patterns and therefore I can still extract any information out of a map I like. I can even reverse calculate the number of user defined variables your map uses ;-)
This protection can be broken as easily as the other ones with a little script which regenerate the war3map.wgt file. The only thing you cannot change are the renamed functions and variables. But thats not a big problem, since you can still open the map in world editor ;-)
How safe is map protecting
As you've already read above, map protecting might keep some newbies away from opening your maps in world editor.
Fact is as long as warcraft 3 can open your map, theres a way to repair the map, so it can be opened by the World Editor.
Pro and Contra Map protecting
Pro:
- Keeps Newbies from opening and altering your map
- It makes you feel smart
- Due to some deleted files the map is smaller
Contra:
- It's useless
- People cannot learn from your maps
- people lost the original copy of the map and cannot work on the protected ones
- As long as warcraft3 can open your map, anyone can.
- Blizzard encourages people to open other maps to learn (see picture below)
Whats the state of www.wc3sear.ch concerning map protecting
I (Darky27), the owner of this site am highly against map protecting. I think map protecting screws the mapping community.
Protected maps which are submitted to this site are accepted, but will receive a flag that they are damaged.
As you might noticed, my scripts can extract any informations out of your map, no matter how good or bad your protection application is. Fact remains you cannot protect am map from me.
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