Staredit Network

OK, while poking around with protection techniques, I found that I could crash both staredit and SCXE with a little creativity and no threat to game play. To do this is simple

Tools:

Hex Editor
WinMPQ



1. First create a new map. It will be much easier to do this in the beginning.

2. Create a trigger with the following format:


null

Trigger

Players:

¤ Player 1

Conditions:

¤ Never();

Actions:

¤ Preserve Trigger(); (63 of these)

¤ Comment("Antihack");

3. Now, finish creating your map.

4. When you are ready to protect, save your map.

5. Extract the CHK contents of your map.

6. Under the CHK section, find the subsection named "TRIG".

7. Directly after TRIG, there should be 324 bytes you can skip. Do not touch these.

8. After those 324 bytes, you will see another 4096. These bytes represent the actions of the very first trigger. in these 4096 bytes, you can fill them in with garbage. I suggest simply filling all of them with "FF" in the hex box for each byte. You do not have to fill every one of the 4096 bytes with garbage, but it can't hurt.

9. Save CHK.

10. Import the new CHK into a brand new SCX file (make it with WinMPQ)

You have successfully protected your map from being edited in SCXE and Staredit. I know not many people use it, but I use it all the time for triggering and this would be most detrimental to me.



Why this works: To tell you truth, you're just f**king up the map in a way that SC can't see. Since the conditions of the trigger remain as "Never", the trigger istn even looked at by Starcraft. However, Staredit and SCXE look through every trigger. Since the trigger is severly deformed on the actions side, it crashes without any good explanation. Technically, It doesnt have to be the first trigger, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier. I personally just mess with the middle few bytes of the actions, not the very beginning (directly after the first 324 bytes). Please test this and tell me if it was useful.

Well, that's definately a first step in order to counter this new unprotector.

Can u give a link to the Hex Editor please? And maybe some basic info about it, if it is complicated to use.

If it can still be opened in SF and Draft, what the point then?

We can hope that really nooby map stealers don't have them, and we can ask the creators, to insert a bug, for protection purposes, SCMDraft does automatically check for updates, so ppl would get it, and SF, well i don't think it's very popular..

It does check, but doesn't DL or anything.

Well i think people would surely dl a newer version.

I'm not sure does it even say that there is a new version.

Well anyway, there should be ways to crash SF and SCMD too, so along with the technique described here, we could protect the map. I say that this topic is a good start.

I agree.

Well, it works on and off with SCMD2, so I wasn't going to make that obvious until I had figured out what causes SCMD2 to crash. Note: this only crashes when the triggers are accessed, not anywhere else in SCMD2.

I have not tried this in Starforge, but Im sure that we can figure out a way. For example, make the begining part of the game rely on a certain doodad, which Starforge would autoremove when opened.

Hmm, so we need a program that creates a never trigger and then screws it up? To not make it manually all the time.

Can someone please tell me where can i get Hex Editor?

Google?

So Hex Editor isn't an utility specifically for starcraft?

No, try this one: http://www.chmaas.handshake.de/delphi/free...xvi32/xvi32.htm

Starforge's trigger editor is also crashed using this.
You can crash Starforge's player settings by setting a useless player's race/controller to something invalid.

If you're hex editing, I wouldn't give out your methods. Its pretty easy to unprotect your maps with this method because we know what it is.

Thanks.



So the only program who is left to crash is SCMDraft?

v1.01
vs
v1.00

Hmmm. Perhaps we should have Private message conversations.

So they fixed the flaws we were talking about? Probably someone in here is reporting to them. Like some unprotection admirer Goldenfist or sm1..

Well, not exactly. I have talked to LW about a specialized version that can and will resist any automatic unprotector. This idea is not dead, but more like private. The method used will most likely be kept private so people dont look for ways to break it, and a good factor of randomization will be used as deterrent for automated deprotection methods. The map will tecnically go through the de protecter, but it will not be editable in map editors. In fact, an incredible amount of time would be required to go through the CHK data to remove problematic bits of data, which would be just as difficult as normal unprotection in the first place. Now we just need to crash SCMD2 and Starforge and were good.

Im glad to hear this. Good luck with it