Map Protection: Setting It So Triggers Won't Load

I've been trying to find a good map protector because recently I have seen a lot of knock-offs of my Hero Maze. I'm just about to release the final version now, and after this a brand new Hero Maze map called the Titan Maze and I don't want anyone stealing my hard work and making it their own.

Now, I know there are maps that have it so when you try to open them in WE it gives you a message that there is a trigger missing or something, but I can't figure out how to do that and still have it run in the game. Can anyone help me with that?

You can alwasy make every trigger in custom text, and move them to the root of the triggers

I would convert all my triggers to custom, but I've got over two hundred triggers making it really annoying to sit there, click, and change each one at a time.

I know there's a way to block the map from opening, when you try to open it a message pops up saying:

"Trigger data missing"

But I can't figure out how.

are u seeking for this?

Warcraft 3 Map Protector:
The nifty utility protects the maps you make so they can be modified by someone else.

Download here

i use this little program in my maps, never failed

I tried that program but it only works on .w3m and my maps are .w3x for the Frozen Throne.

If you want to do it manually which isn't too difficult, just replace the war3map.wct and war3map.wtg with empty files, and delete the (listfile). WinMPQ should do the trick.

I still say that the best protection you can give your map is to make sure that everyone knows you made it...

I'm somewhat against most other forms of map protection, except locking some of your map's fields (like the 'creator' field).

The reason for this is simple: not a single person of the current generation of WC3 map makers can honestly say he/she has never opened another person's map to analyse it's triggers and stuff... In fact picking apart the work of others is pretty much essential for making a good map (I learned this first hand in Neverwinter Nights, I only got so far with tutorials and whatnot and it wasn't untill I started looking at scripts by such great people as Stefan Gagne, Lord Niah and Adam Miller that I started to understand the full extent of what you can do with triggers. Heck if it wasn't for the fact that I need the D20 Modern Mod for my module I'd have already created a whole series of modules.)

Any way if it wasn't for people looking at and copying other people's 'stuff', some of the really popular maps like Tides of Blood, Legacies and Enfo's Team Survival would never have existed. (I say 'stuff', because it's pretty bloody obvious that Tides of Blood's concept is based off of Aeon of Strife and I'm pretty sure that the spawning triggers in ToB are based off of it, so it's not just triggers). And no one in his right mind will copy Tides of Blood and claim he made it.

Seriously though, getting your triggers copied/stolen/picked apart is (or should be) a price you pay for making maps publically available, especially since, at the end of the day, Blizzard owns anything you make with the WE, not you.

Locking the creator field would be nice, but I doubt anything like that will ever exist for WE. If you don't want to lock your map just post a crc hash file of each version of your map so people can tell if its legit or not.

In Pitzermike's WE Unlimited is a function that protects the Author-, Description- and Namefield. If anyone changes this fields, the map won't work anymore.

And there is a way with custom text, Just change neutral hostile's name with "Trigstr3" (The number where the author string is in the string file) and then use an if comparision to compare Neutral hostile name with your name, if they don't match use the trigger action Run (this trigger)


You can also use BlackDick's Heavy locker, I love cause it also reduces your map's size.

http://www.wc3campaigns.com/forums/s...threadid=17580

Legacies: TOS borrows no triggers or work from any other map, it's a completely original work.

Yeah, just because a concept is copied doesn't mean that people are snooping around everyone else's maps. In most cases, concepts aren't difficult to recreate.

Btw, Mort, I use ExtProtect. It seems to work well enough for both .w3m and .w3x maps, and it also reduces the map's filesize. :ggani:

Shvegait is right, that map protector works for .w3x as well, but it protects the map and gives you a .w3m, changing the filetype manually to .w3x causes it to work again. Runs fine and won't load, however I believe even map protectors can be cracked...None the less it's the one I use.

mostly locking map is for map that have password

if u dont lock the map newbies will be *u8ing arround with it in BNet.

i kno that cus there *u*8* wif my map and change to there name:nono:

No it's not and you know it.
For one the concept of the map (an RPG in WC3) is similar to the Orc campaign... I'm not saying that you stole the concept from the Orc campaign, merely that the orc campaign
And the camera perspective is seen very often in 'paintball' maps,
meaning that you're not the first one to use this perspective either.

You may not use directly borrowed triggers in Legacies but you can't claim that none of the triggers you use aren't the same as the triggers of other maps, the only difference is that you have the skill to make them yourself (despite the fact that if someone were to compare them they'd be almost exactly the same) while others don't know the code well enough to know how to do something and must therefore look at how other maps do it.

TOS may not have borrowed triggers from other maps, but it uses triggers similar to those used in other maps, meaning that while it may not be a direct copy of other maps it CERTAINLY is not completely original.

Just the same way Warcraft may not borrow directly from LotR, it's still not completely original.