whoever knows all the other members best, maybe skywing or grok?

Its about whether or not it would be possible for vl to host a gamei type server for a small portion of the Starcraft community.

if you don't know what gamei is, it was a free server for competitive starcraft play based in korea, all the best players played it.

I myself am an extremely good starcraft player, I love the game. This is why I am interested. A seperate server could have a ladder system and maphack detection. The point would be for the bestp layers to have a competitive environment to improve in.

I don't know who of you would recognize this name, but my old alias was lil bo shepherd. Skywing might remember me, and Im sure as hell artanis would. Anyways thanks for the time, you guys just seemed like the right people to ask.

My email is relled51 at hotmail.com if you want to email me or add me to msn.

We ran an FSGS about a year or two ago, but then it basically fell through because we realized the limited fun wasn't worth all the hassle and trouble of maintaining it. I just doubt the organization as a whole would be willing to partake in such a project, but perhaps you could get a few members to maybe go with it.

Costs would be taken care of, but I doubt payment(at least anything comparable to the amount the contributors would deserve) would be possible.

There are already such servers out there. We generally refer to them as battle.net.

;D

Did battle.net take away the Asia servers?

Without a patch to the actual game, it would be impossible to detect a maphack with just the server.

Couldn't they pick up packets requesting for the map details going in and out of the server? That's what I've heard happens in diablo 2.

It's not quite that sophisticated in SC/BW however. D2 has to send packets insisting that the character has already explored all areas of the map, or that the character is currently in all places at once, or some other approach depending on the design. It's a bit simpler to get a maphack working in SC/BW. However, in the system we're talking about right now, an approach similar (or identical to) PunkBuster in CS might work fairly nicely. If the server maintains a "small" volume of users, I suspect it wouldn't be too difficult to stamp out cheating.

It's obviously entirely possible, since gamei did it.

I actually know someone who claims he could do it. He obviously knows something about the maphack programs theirselves, and writes a program that acts as the launcher to get onto the bnet-like server, and also disables the maphack program.

Well, if you set it so you can see which units the other players are clicked on (like in team melee games), you can tell if the other players are clicking on units they shouldn't be able to click on.

Who is Artanis?

[quote author=iago link=board=2;threadid=1787;start=0#msg13761 date=1057271855]
Without a patch to the actual game, it would be impossible to detect a maphack with just the server.
[/quote]
[quote author=Liquid.Venice link=board=2;threadid=1787;start=0#msg13802 date=1057295244]
I actually know someone who claims he could do it. He obviously knows something about the maphack programs theirselves, and writes a program that acts as the launcher to get onto the bnet-like server, and also disables the maphack program.
[/quote]
Sounds like it's a patch to the actual game and not just a special server.

No, I believe it was a third party program. Users could still play on battle.net as well.

But not with the loader... Anyway, that's mostly semantics.

A server alone cannot have any anti-hack things in it (for Starcraft and Brood War, at least). You need modifications to the client. A loader provides these modifications in memory.

What we're basically trying to say, LV, is that I don't think anyone here would be interested/would be able to help you, but I wish you luck with this project. :)

[quote author=Yoni link=board=2;threadid=1787;start=0#msg13910 date=1057389480]
But not with the loader... Anyway, that's mostly semantics.

A server alone cannot have any anti-hack things in it (for Starcraft and Brood War, at least). You need modifications to the client. A loader provides these modifications in memory.
[/quote]

The server can have anti-hack things that the user of an unmodified client will automagically download and execute? ;)

I didn't think of that. *toasts Adron*

Has anyone ever tried this?

[quote author=Yoni link=board=2;threadid=1787;start=15#msg13981 date=1057456097]
I didn't think of that. *toasts Adron*

Has anyone ever tried this?
[/quote]Yes.

There are several problems with that line of reasoning: First, all of the code the game client downloads with the purpose of execution is signed. Unless somebody produces Blizzard's private key, that avenue is closed (at least for PC clients -- I've determined that Mac clients don't bother checking the sginature at all, however).

Battle.snp is still full of buffer overflows you could use to run remote code (such as an antihack thing). The problem is this is much trickier to do than just sending a DLL for the game to load and run, and you'll have to do lots of changes for different games and/or game versions. Not to mention the fact that it's possible (however highly unlikely, given their attitude towards "legacy" games) that these holes could be closed by Blizzard.