hellhalt td / unlock protected map

[shiro]

Hi,
i would like to edit Hellhalt Td, unfortunately the map is protected. The creator (hellraiser) has not been seen since COVID-19.

I have searched the forum and am aware that this is not appreciated, but I must assume that he will not be returning. Various people who previously worked with him have been unable to contact him since then.

Can anyone help me, if it is even possible?

Cheers

 

[Ravager16829]

Sorry man, unfortunately you can't request any maps that involves unlocking map protection. It's against site rules.

Thread will be closed.

 

[Retera]

I believe at some point the site rules were amended to allow updating a map if the original author has been offline for a very long time. [citation: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/site-rules.245478/]

Of course, this concept might fly in the face of intellectual property laws in your country or region of residence. It would have been much preferred if the map files included a license file defining what you can and cannot do with them, instead of this stupidity where we have a 20 year old technological arms race where we pretend that corrupting the game file "just so" so that it crashes the map editor but not the game indicated any sort of legal license or management of ownership.

It's not cryptography. Blizzard maps with "BLIZ" on the map icon are locked with cryptographic protection and have been since 2002. The only people who can update these maps are the folks at Blizzard who hold the private key, and judging by the fact that Reforged stopped signing maps cryptographically it's reasonable to assume that the original key was probably lost some time between 2005 and 2019 - which would mean no one can update those maps.

But that doesn't affect "Hellhalt Td" at all since that's a user map, and there is no cryptographic way to sign and protect user maps from outside of Blizzard office.

So if someone just ran the file you're looking at through an optimization tool that changed variable names from Region__001 to aab to make it harder for you to understand the file, and then inserted empty or garbage information in place of the WTG and other World-Editor-only files, then at that point it's just a stupid technological arms race and if you care more than the person who started it, you can always win. Because the file is on your computer, and it is not cryptographically encrypted, so it's literally just a file and you can make or download a program to edit it, like any other computer file.

So you can just rename aab back to Region__001 if that's what you think it should be named. (Maybe you could ask an LLM to rename it, although I would not personally bother.)

 

[khopesh]

I believe at some point the site rules were amended to allow updating a map if the original author has been offline for a very long time. [citation: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/site-rules.245478/]

Of course, this concept might fly in the face of intellectual property laws in your country or region of residence. It would have been much preferred if the map files included a license file defining what you can and cannot do with them, instead of this stupidity where we have a 20 year old technological arms race where we pretend that corrupting the game file "just so" so that it crashes the map editor but not the game indicated any sort of legal license or management of ownership.

It's not cryptography. Blizzard maps with "BLIZ" on the map icon are locked with cryptographic protection and have been since 2002. The only people who can update these maps are the folks at Blizzard who hold the private key, and judging by the fact that Reforged stopped signing maps cryptographically it's reasonable to assume that the original key was probably lost some time between 2005 and 2019 - which would mean no one can update those maps.

But that doesn't affect "Hellhalt Td" at all since that's a user map, and there is no cryptographic way to sign and protect user maps from outside of Blizzard office.

So if someone just ran the file you're looking at through an optimization tool that changed variable names from Region__001 to aab to make it harder for you to understand the file, and then inserted empty or garbage information in place of the WTG and other World-Editor-only files, then at that point it's just a stupid technological arms race and if you care more than the person who started it, you can always win. Because the file is on your computer, and it is not cryptographically encrypted, so it's literally just a file and you can make or download a program to edit it, like any other computer file.

So you can just rename aab back to Region__001 if that's what you think it should be named. (Maybe you could ask an LLM to rename it, although I would not personally bother.)

Spoiler

That's a good point of view; to what extent is something editable, even if it's possible? I think if the author doesn't specify otherwise, it should be considered editable if the map isn't maintained. But assuming he didn't explicitly say so, yet took steps to make editing more difficult, it could well be considered a test to ensure it's not manipulated by just anyone, but by someone who takes the map's continuity seriously. Either way, it's a gray area, and if there are no complaints, I suppose Hive's current rules are fine for this.

But even if it were editable, does the author legally have the rights?

and in the license...

Limited Use License. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. ("Blizzard") hereby grants, and by installing the Program you thereby accept, a limited, non-exclusive license and right to install and use one (1) copy of the Program for your use on a home, business, or portable computer. The Program also contains a 'World Editor' (the "Editor") that allows you to create custom levels or other materials for your personal use in connection with the Program ("New Materials"). All use of the Editor or any New Materials is subject to this License Agreement.

This software program including any and all subsequent patches (the "Program"), any printed materials, any on-line or electronic documentation, and any and all copies and derivative works of such software program and materials are the copyrighted work of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., or its suppliers. All use of the Program is governed by the terms of the End User License Agreement which is provided below ("License Agreement"). The Program is solely for use by end users according to the terms of the License Agreement.

Is Blizzard technically the owner of everything?

 

[Nichilus]

Is Blizzard technically the owner of everything?

As far as I know, the answer is 'Yes'. If I remember correctly, this was added with Reforged and was the cause of many people leaving the mapping scene. Blizz most likely added that so that gems like Dota do not escape their grasp again.

 

[Retera]

My understanding as someone who is not a lawyer, based on my layman non-lawyer interpretation of skimming the documents which might be totally incorrect, is that the old 2002 game on the CD said that:

• Blizzard can terminate their license agreement with you at any time
• If the agreement ends, you agree to and/or are required to delete all map files and other custom content on your computer

But since circa 2019 or 2020, the new Reforged version of the agreement states that:

• Activision/Blizzard/Microsoft own all moral rights to custom content created. So if you copy arthas and make a hero named C3P0 in your map then Microsoft will own C3P0
• I don't personally know how enforceable that is for Microsoft to blanket take ownership of all works made by other people like that, but that seems to be from a distance what it said when last I skimmed it

Neither of these solve the problem of the author of the work providing any license file of how that author of the map agrees to share the content with you. If you live in a country where Microsoft's blanket ownership of everything you make or do is not enforceable, or if the original author of the map lived in such a country, or if they created the map in an old game version before the newer version of the EULA was published for Reforged, then it might be the case that the original map author would have some standing for the original map to be their intellectual property in some way. I am not entirely certain.

I've often thought about this from the standpoint of custom 3D model downloads on Hive. Those don't have a known reliable way to corrupt the files so that we cannot open them, and yet we still have a community of people who say "don't edit this" while others say "anybody can edit anything I make without asking." This is better than map files, since none of the model files are corrupted/broken by snarkiness as if to stop you from editing them even though it doesn't. And the result, as you would expect, is that we treat this problem of ownership as what it really is -- a social problem about who agrees to permit who else to edit what.

In some ways I find the absence of well-defined license terms for each 3D model available on Hive somewhat childish, perhaps hamstrung by the nature of companies like Blizzard not wanting their users to think about ownership rights. If you're doing some other project, for example if you're building a video game and want to download free 3D models off of the internet, websites such as Sketchfab pretty clearly solve this problem using license files. I haven't used their site in years but I just pulled it up and viewed some 3D model totally at random, and right below the 3D viewer of the model they have this:

(It's a hyperlink. You can click it to view the full license terms, and they have classes of licenses so many files may be under similar licensing if you're downloading 300 models.)

This is sorely missing from Hive for the 3D model files, and it's missing from map files as well. Obviously models might be in an even tougher spot because the model files sometimes contain reused portions of the original Warcraft III graphics. So there might be more of a case to be made that 90% of the custom 3D models uploaded to Hive are derivative works of Blizzard's intellectual property and that the World Editor license kopesh pasted above is moreso the governing terms.

But with custom map files, they are space optimized and essentially only contain the information created by users and not duplicates of the original Warcraft III game inside those map files. It's one reason that a map with no imported custom models can be a very tiny computer file. So, there might be more of a case to be made that those are created solely by the humans using map editor, at least in my personal (non lawyer) opinion. So it's a miss that over the last 20 years we didn't have license files associated with each map upload.

 

[khopesh]

Basically, we all work for Blizzard

Spoiler: Now everything makes sense.

 

[shiro]

Thanks for the replies.

I worked on it, deprotected the map and edited war3map.j several times. After loading the map it just crashes... I think I just have to accept that the map is broken after deprotect and would have to be completely rebuilt, which will probably never happen .

 

[Retera]

Can anyone help me, if it is even possible?

So back to on topic, whether you can edit a corrupted file depends on how good the program that you use to edit that file is.

If you have a program that can load the file anyway, such as Warcraft III, then it should be possible to extract out from the file the understanding of what it is and use that to make a modified one.

 

[Dr Super Good]

The main issue with editing protected maps is often due to data loss. The protectors often work by deleting or corrupting editor only data.

For example they might delete the GUI trigger data file as Warcraft III only uses the JASS/Lua map script to play the map. This means that GUI related structure is all lost. Another example might be to rename all human readable variable and function names in the map script into generic machine generated ones. Warcraft III is a computer program so does not care what the functions and variables are named as long as they obey the scripting language logic, but for humans this makes identifying what code does extremely difficult.

 

[shiro]

how good the program that you use to edit that file is

Well, i used WC3MapDeprotector and LadikMPQEditor.

what it is and use that to make a modified one

Yeah, I have a foundation, the terrain and the unique units are still there.

The protectors often work by deleting or corrupting editor only data

Yes, exactly. After I deprotect the map (which I have to do in order to edit it in the editor), In Triggers i got 15k lines of JASS and most is destroyed and useless.

I tried to produce something useful with AI, but the only thing I achieved was that the map no longer loads .

I'll try to rebuild with the leftovers just because it's fun. If you have any other ideas, let me know pls. TY!