How to protect my map?

As you all know, with xdeprotect, anyone could open your map and steal what they want, is there any way to protect my map from it?

Don't release your map. If you are worried about hackers breaking into your computer, don't make your map.

There is no way to stop someone who wants something from taking it, except for not having something he wants. The same is true for wc3 maps. If someone wants something out of your map, he can get it.

What Ammorth said.

Plus, have you tried to protect your map with WC3 optimizer? I tested the deprotector with my map and it couldn't do anything.

There is no way for Microsoft to stop software pirating, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't implement procedures to avoid as much pirating as possible. In this case, you don't want anybody with half a brain to be able to open the map and change it to his/her liking.

It is very easy to trick automated processes like that, such as importing a listfile with many repeated bytes so that it's really small when compressed, but too large uncompressed that the program can't handle it.

There are also various ways of corrupting the MPQ, that make it impossible for modern MPQ editors to open.

However, like any field there are experts, and these experts know that storm.dll based MPQ editors can open any map, and therefore it is impossible to make a map secure.

The question to ask is, why do you want the map to be protected? And who do you want to protect it from?

Some kids just want to open my map and steal whatever they want, i know there is no way to completely protect my map from experts, but those one normally do not care about it !

Vex's map optimizer. For 95%+ of the cases, it'll protect you. If, for some reason, someone wants it bad enough they'll get it, but your everyday b.net idiot won't have a clue.

That's exactly it, and why map protection still is important to some.

Anyway, you should use Vexorians Map Optimizer. Works very well, and fixes some other stuff as well. Among other the file-size.

Discussion of deprotecting and the stuff that goes with it is against the rules. Really, that's just a convenient rule for me to lock threads about the discussion of protecting maps.

If you want to "make it relatively difficult for the average user to crack open your map", then use Vex's Map Optimizer. If that isn't good enough, then do as the others have suggested - don't release your map.

There's nothing more need be said here. Locked.