WC3Fuscator - Map Protector for Warcraft III

[deepstrasz]

Is this essentially a remake of Vexorian's Optimizer?

 

[Wyrelade]

Is this essentially a remake of Vexorian's Optimizer?

This is a .lua obfuscator. Basically what WC3Protect paid plan offers you on web. Just free since I believe tools and protection should be free.

 

[Luashine]

"Made by Wyrelade. Protection & tools should be free."

protector
looks inside
binary, not open-source

Edit: It'll cause a bunch of problems with the map list (like battlenet timeouts) because the decoder is very slow)

 

[Wyrelade]

Fair point about it being free, but free and open source aren't the same thing. A map protector loses a lot of its value if everyone can see exactly how it works. That's why tools like VMProtect, Themida, and Enigma are all closed-source. In this case, being a binary isn't a downside, it's the whole point.

 

[Luashine]

Those are commercial products.

• VMProtect: 400$ / 600$ / 1000$ license +200$ per year of updates
• Themida: 250€ / 500€ license
• Enigma: 250$ / 500$ license

You don't see the irony here. Vexorian's has been subtly breaking Jass maps since 1.29 released. It will continue to break maps, because people keep using it and the source code is not available to fix it.

Your beautifier bloats the code by a factor of 12.75x and the decoding time will cause battlenet timeouts for lobby hosts, who have ever downloaded your map.

That said, it took me 11 minutes including map download (time between posting and adding the edit). The only question remains: how quickly the cheater will realize to use ChatGPT on it and whether spending more of your time on this is worth it.

 

[Wyrelade]

Those are commercial products.

• VMProtect: 400$ / 600$ / 1000$ license +200$ per year of updates
• Themida: 250€ / 500€ license
• Enigma: 250$ / 500$ license

You don't see the irony here. Vexorian's has been subtly breaking Jass maps since 1.29 released. It will continue to break maps, because people keep using it and the source code is not available to fix it.

Your beautifier bloats the code by a factor of 12.75x and the decoding time will cause battlenet timeouts for lobby hosts, who have ever downloaded your map.

That said, it took me 11 minutes including map download (time between posting and adding the edit). The only question remains: how quickly the cheater will realize to use ChatGPT on it and whether spending more of your time on this is worth it.

So is "WC3Protect" a commercial map protector and a .lua obfuscator.

That's a fair point. I only tested it on my own relatively small maps, and those loaded fine on Battle.net, so I didn't run into that issue.

If larger maps are hitting timeout territory because of the decode step, that's something I'll work on. I appreciate you pointing it out, and I'll see if I can reduce the bloat and improve the decoding performance ASAP.

Edit:

Checked it, and you're right about the bloat. I measured about 12.73×. That's caused by using \ddd decimal escapes across two encoding layers. I'm switching it instead, which should bring it down to roughly 1.33× per layer.

Edit2:

Updated the binary. protected script went 7.67MB→1.05MB (12.7×→1.75×)