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Sorry If this is in the wrong thread, but what exactly IS an EUD. I've heard a lot about how awesome they were, but they don't seem to exist anymore....
anyone care to enlighten me?

They where a means of inserting opcodes into starcraft via triggers,
but blizzard disabled them due to crashes/virus spread through them

is that how people set up the kerrigans to only use ensnare?

No, that can be done with regular mapmaking (but they did use it for other changes, like ghosts using stimpacks)

In three words:

Modding Via triggers

Some aspects were even more powerful than things that could've been done in modding, such as altering terrain in-game. Also, that are completely dead, we just need to refind the offsets.

Dont work now, you can only use conditions, and that doesnt help very much.

Hmmm... See I had no idea what these EUD things were either. As far as I know they weren't around when I was modding for Starcraft way back when. So am I to understand that they're for-sure dead? If they've been entirely disabled then I won't bother reading up on them.

they're almost dead, you may not be able to do things like having a nuking hatchery anymore,
but you still can do minor things like checking what upgrades/what abilities a unit has (with conditions)

I was hoping you'd tell me something like "EUD's are dead and don't get your hopes up at all. Don't go read anything about them." But you see, now that you've shed even that little sliver of hope and implied some usefulness for them, however obscure, I am too intrigued.

Is there somewhere where I could read up on EUDs?

So were these originally part of starcraft that wasn't included in the original game, but someone found them in the exe and enabled them? Or were they an experiment originally included by blizzard that fell through?

Neither, it was a part of the game that neither blizzard nor anyone else knew about, untill last year

at that point everyone started using them, and some people even tried to find ways for starcraft to crash peoples computers and send virus's, so blizzard disabled them to prevent it from getting any worse, but they did leave the briefings part since it was more safe and couldn't be used for maliscious intent (other than dropping macs)

I'm still wondering what program did the guy who discovered the EUDs use to find out the values to use in them? It must've been a custom app, monitoring the memory and the map data at the same time, which do is a great programming challenge, I must say.

The guy used a hex editor, a memory searcher, and knowledge of extended units/players.

The values and everything else were known from modding experience. The production of such an editor was a joint one between mappers, hackers, and modders.

There was no special briefing triggers, it was Conditions.
Some MACs can read them, but the memory is different so it drops on most.

Sorry about that, I meant to say conditions

as for something we forgot to mention, the #'s required for the death conditions constantly change almost every patch,
so don't expect any map you make during one to have the condition effecting the game the same way,
1 patch it could be checking how many upgrades a unit has, next patch it could be whether or not a unit's moving

I think it was less about viruses on less you mean that the map is a virus. Or rather a Trojan Horse. but more to the fact that you could use them to access data outside of Starcraft. Accessing data outside of starcraft would allow you to gain access into other pieces of data. Some data in the Operating System [for XP] always has the same memory address in the ram.

To avoid lawsuits and possible maps that are basically "Trogan Horses" could allow you to do some pretty nasty stuff. Throw an unprotectors and unprotected maps into the mix and you have something really BAD. Since you'd have 100 versions of maps going around...someone could easy throw an EUD that could screw up your system by accessing and screwing up random memory values in the RAM. You would never know what map is bad and what map is good.

anyways, it was serious enough for Blizz to ban the feature.

Would it be possible to cause starcraft to refrence a file contained in the .scx file and then cause that file to execute actions not intended for starcraft to execute? Viruses? Etc?

The way you can screw with someones computers through EUD actions stems from the fact that a programs exectuable code lies in the same address space as the data.

Wait, so EUD Actions could edit hard-coded things? O.o