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On April 16 2012 23:44 one-one-one wrote:Show nested quote +On April 16 2012 22:39 JackDragon wrote:On April 16 2012 21:55 AmericanUmlaut wrote:On April 16 2012 21:45 JackDragon wrote:On April 16 2012 21:38 StarcraftMan wrote:On April 16 2012 21:08 JackDragon wrote:On April 16 2012 20:57 SimDawg wrote:
This is insane, let's be honest even if this is against the law it's going to see wide use, I don't think it will ever go away.
It's also ridiculous how amateur coders are doing these amazing things for esports that Blizzard can't or refuses to implement. I think it is more of "havn't thought of" then anything else. But then again I don't know how hard this hack was to make. I have personaly always wondered why the tournaments didn't just make a custom map identical to the last second of a drop and let them play from there. This is basicly the same thing just way less work. If you mean the custom map has to save the game state every second to disk, that is not good because it would result in massive lag. As for when the "lag" window comes up when a player is lagging, my hunch is that custom maps do not have control at that point. Of course, I'm not a custom map expert so maybe a custom map expert can answer this - why can't a custom map save the game when the "lag" window pops up and the countdown to disconnect progresses. No that was not what I was thinking. I meant that if you drop on say Entombed Valley, you open the mad editor on Entombed Valley and add buildings units and remove minerals and gas as seen at the time of disconnect and then save the map and let the players play from there. It should not take that much time to set up for someone experienced (30min maybe?), since you really only have to add units and change gas and mineral patches. And set every unit's hitpoints and energy, position them correctly, figure out a way to give the players vision under FOW of things they'd seen up to that point, figure out what orders every unit was operating under... I think it would take significantly more than 30 minutes to precisely reproduce a scenario, and it would be incredibly difficult to get it right. Saving game state periodically or the solution in the OP are really the only two plausible ways to go about this. True that if you also need to set the units orders it will be hard. But setting the hp and energy as well as position is not that hard, honestly. The FOW might be a bit harder, but far from impossible. Honestly though, I havn't played around with the editor to much. But since you shouldn't need any complex triggers or anything like that (maybe apart from the FOW and uppgrades), it should be a easy task. Edit: Okay honestly? What is the matter with this map editor. Why is it so hard to just change the HP of a unit? it is way more complicated then it is in the WC3 editor... I guess it could be just me who is really bad, but if you really have to make a trigger for every unit who to set hp and energy, I guess there is a reason to why noone does this. God damn it. Saving game states and being able to play over LAN was a feature in SC1 back in 1998. In fact, most games back then had those features. There is no reason whatsoever why this should not be easy to implement in SC2. Blizzard does not want to implement it for whatever reasons, be it rational reasons or not, and that is it. In my opinion it is as simple as this: both Blizzard and the community wants SC2 to grow as an e-sport with the first goal to overtake the role of SC:BW. The community and the company have different concerns, restrictions and priorities, but the two sides are not independent of each other. SC2 wouldn't be in the state it is in right now if it wasn't for community feedback. But all feedback is not of the good kind. For the sake of getting SC2 to reach its full potential Blizzard owes itself and the community to not make any rushed decisions based on biased feedback (whine) from the community. The community had better make balanced and well grounded demands to the company as the opposite would not help us towards reaching the ultimate goal. This is a case where the community is too nice towards Blizzard, LAN support and being able to restore game states is a very important feature to have in a game with the ambition to become a legitimate "sport", an E-sport. The lack of the features mentioned above has already affected the outcome of a big final. It hurts as a terran player to admit it, but even though MKP was playing an almost completely flawless game vs arguably the best PvT player in the world, he was going to loose the game if the disconnect didn't happened. The terran player doesn't have the luxury of letting off the pressure in that situation. You can think whatever you want about how fair that is, but it is an obvious fact given how strong the protoss army gets if you don't keep decimating it. As it has been stated many times: the terran can't loose a big battle in the lategame because of the instant reinforcement capabilities of the protoss race. MKP would not have won that game if it had continued.
Stopped reading there.
Tbh, I don't think Blizzard will ever allow LAN.
Doing that would take away the ability to shut down any game at any time from Blizzard, which is a leverage against wayward headstrong organizations like KeSPA.
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Probably hit the nail on the head
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It would so awesome for training purposes to redo certain scenarios again and again. This HAS to be implemented in Sc2 just like shared replays with friends...Just imagine you find a spot in a rep whre you want to try something else and you and your friend just jump right into the action.
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Excellent work sir, awesome program!
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On April 14 2012 00:44 Excalibur_Z wrote:
Is this the same SuperCow who created the very first replay analyzer/map extractor from BW? If so then I can't say I'm surprised at the degree of contribution.
There's a significant risk of being flagged by Warden for this though, since it involves memory injections. I'm sure Blizzard will look into this one way or the other though. Thanks for the post!
Is it SuperCow ?
Well, Blizzard should implement it, in War3 it worked, why wouldn't work in SC2.
I hope we can use it, would be awesome for massive lans or any live tournament.
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On April 17 2012 03:37 Drakan wrote:Show nested quote +On April 14 2012 00:44 Excalibur_Z wrote:
Is this the same SuperCow who created the very first replay analyzer/map extractor from BW? If so then I can't say I'm surprised at the degree of contribution.
There's a significant risk of being flagged by Warden for this though, since it involves memory injections. I'm sure Blizzard will look into this one way or the other though. Thanks for the post! Is it SuperCow ? Well, Blizzard should implement it, in War3 it worked, why wouldn't work in SC2. I hope we can use it, would be awesome for massive lans or any live tournament.
No, that's not me.
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On April 17 2012 03:15 JiPrime wrote:Show nested quote +On April 16 2012 23:44 one-one-one wrote:On April 16 2012 22:39 JackDragon wrote:On April 16 2012 21:55 AmericanUmlaut wrote:On April 16 2012 21:45 JackDragon wrote:On April 16 2012 21:38 StarcraftMan wrote:On April 16 2012 21:08 JackDragon wrote:On April 16 2012 20:57 SimDawg wrote:
This is insane, let's be honest even if this is against the law it's going to see wide use, I don't think it will ever go away.
It's also ridiculous how amateur coders are doing these amazing things for esports that Blizzard can't or refuses to implement. I think it is more of "havn't thought of" then anything else. But then again I don't know how hard this hack was to make. I have personaly always wondered why the tournaments didn't just make a custom map identical to the last second of a drop and let them play from there. This is basicly the same thing just way less work. If you mean the custom map has to save the game state every second to disk, that is not good because it would result in massive lag. As for when the "lag" window comes up when a player is lagging, my hunch is that custom maps do not have control at that point. Of course, I'm not a custom map expert so maybe a custom map expert can answer this - why can't a custom map save the game when the "lag" window pops up and the countdown to disconnect progresses. No that was not what I was thinking. I meant that if you drop on say Entombed Valley, you open the mad editor on Entombed Valley and add buildings units and remove minerals and gas as seen at the time of disconnect and then save the map and let the players play from there. It should not take that much time to set up for someone experienced (30min maybe?), since you really only have to add units and change gas and mineral patches. And set every unit's hitpoints and energy, position them correctly, figure out a way to give the players vision under FOW of things they'd seen up to that point, figure out what orders every unit was operating under... I think it would take significantly more than 30 minutes to precisely reproduce a scenario, and it would be incredibly difficult to get it right. Saving game state periodically or the solution in the OP are really the only two plausible ways to go about this. True that if you also need to set the units orders it will be hard. But setting the hp and energy as well as position is not that hard, honestly. The FOW might be a bit harder, but far from impossible. Honestly though, I havn't played around with the editor to much. But since you shouldn't need any complex triggers or anything like that (maybe apart from the FOW and uppgrades), it should be a easy task. Edit: Okay honestly? What is the matter with this map editor. Why is it so hard to just change the HP of a unit? it is way more complicated then it is in the WC3 editor... I guess it could be just me who is really bad, but if you really have to make a trigger for every unit who to set hp and energy, I guess there is a reason to why noone does this. God damn it. Saving game states and being able to play over LAN was a feature in SC1 back in 1998. In fact, most games back then had those features. There is no reason whatsoever why this should not be easy to implement in SC2. Blizzard does not want to implement it for whatever reasons, be it rational reasons or not, and that is it. In my opinion it is as simple as this: both Blizzard and the community wants SC2 to grow as an e-sport with the first goal to overtake the role of SC:BW. The community and the company have different concerns, restrictions and priorities, but the two sides are not independent of each other. SC2 wouldn't be in the state it is in right now if it wasn't for community feedback. But all feedback is not of the good kind. For the sake of getting SC2 to reach its full potential Blizzard owes itself and the community to not make any rushed decisions based on biased feedback (whine) from the community. The community had better make balanced and well grounded demands to the company as the opposite would not help us towards reaching the ultimate goal. This is a case where the community is too nice towards Blizzard, LAN support and being able to restore game states is a very important feature to have in a game with the ambition to become a legitimate "sport", an E-sport. The lack of the features mentioned above has already affected the outcome of a big final. It hurts as a terran player to admit it, but even though MKP was playing an almost completely flawless game vs arguably the best PvT player in the world, he was going to loose the game if the disconnect didn't happened. The terran player doesn't have the luxury of letting off the pressure in that situation. You can think whatever you want about how fair that is, but it is an obvious fact given how strong the protoss army gets if you don't keep decimating it. As it has been stated many times: the terran can't loose a big battle in the lategame because of the instant reinforcement capabilities of the protoss race. MKP would not have won that game if it had continued. Stopped reading there.Tbh, I don't think Blizzard will ever allow LAN. Doing that would take away the ability to shut down any game at any time from Blizzard, which is a leverage against wayward headstrong organizations like KeSPA.
What?
MKP's face after winning the regame says everything.
Also, the commentators were baffled by the decision to replay the game.
The whole ST team were outraged by the decision.
Everyone knows this ...
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Great work! Hopefully this also pressures Blizzard even more to implement a feature like this one into the game officially.. They do a lot for the game, but honestly, stuff like this should've been in there from the start, or otherwise since the first patch. It's so bad to not have a feature like this one in a game that does not support LAN.
Once more though, great job TheSuperCow!<3
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On April 16 2012 12:25 Ruscour wrote:Show nested quote +On April 16 2012 10:25 [wh]_ForAlways wrote:On April 15 2012 23:50 skeldark wrote:
I get it.
Btw Sc2 lan servers already exist.
Whoa. Apparently I'm late to the party. Where does this exist? ------ if I'm not allowed to post this, someone please PM me or something and I'll edit it out, not sure on etiquette there User was warned for this post
Why is the site not allowed to be posted? It wasn't that long ago when there was an iCCup link on the sidebar of TL.
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On April 17 2012 02:33 vaderseven wrote:Show nested quote +On April 17 2012 02:29 TheSuperCow wrote:
So I fixed the join order thing & updated OP.
I don't know if there should be a pause at the start or something in case players joined in the wrong slots... They might see something they shouldn't :o
I guess I could also make it so AI players could take over for players, as this will not work right now.
You should add that pause thing if your goal is to provide a usable program for fixing tournament issues. Thank you btw, good thing you are doing here.
The contingency usecase for a tournament using this tool in the event of a disconnect would be the following:
- Upon disconnect, record the game time of the disconnect, agree on a resume time, and inform the involved players/teams and third parties.
- Take the game off the stream and have casters keep the audience entertained or roll some commercials/overlays.
- Check/review the replays on the various client computers for corruption, then pick and salvage the best copy to distribute later.
- Resolve internet and/or computer problems that led to the disconnect.
- Distribute the chosen replay copy to the client computers of the players and casters.
- Start up the SC2 clients and this resume tool on all the involved client computers.
- Have all parties pick the distributed replay copy, set the agreed time to resume from, and press the inject button of this tool.
- Create a new custom game the same way you did the game that the disconnect happened in (same host, players and casters in their previous slots, possibly go by a screenshot made earlier).
- Start the new custom game and let all involved SC2 clients fast forward to the agreed time shortly before the disconnect.
- When all SC2 clients have reached the agreed time, they should be in pause mode.
- Upon countdown, unpause the game and put it back on stream, continue the cast.
- When the game has concluded in an orderly fashion, re-start all SC2 clients and quit the resume tool on all client computers to leave contingency mode and operate normal again.
So a pause at the start before the fast forward isn't necessary I think as this can be done by an admin without the respective player present at that time. AI support would also just be a gimmick, and not used in a tournament setting.
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On April 17 2012 04:55 [wh]_ForAlways wrote:Show nested quote +On April 16 2012 12:25 Ruscour wrote:On April 16 2012 10:25 [wh]_ForAlways wrote:On April 15 2012 23:50 skeldark wrote:
I get it.
Btw Sc2 lan servers already exist.
Whoa. Apparently I'm late to the party. Where does this exist? ------ if I'm not allowed to post this, someone please PM me or something and I'll edit it out, not sure on etiquette there User was warned for this post Why is the site not allowed to be posted? It wasn't that long ago when there was an iCCup link on the sidebar of TL.
times have changed, this website is now a much more serious playing in all the competitive scene, plus blizzard are now attempting to provide services previously only supplied by 'pirate' servers.
sc2 pirate servers are just for people who don't want to pay for the game as far as i know. i can't fathom any other reason people would use them. But then i may be wrong about that.
Most of all, if we want blizzard to take this site seriously (eg this thread!) we can't be undermining them.
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On April 17 2012 05:01 kerpal wrote:
sc2 pirate servers are just for people who don't want to pay for the game as far as i know. i can't fathom any other reason people would use them. But then i may be wrong about that.
Lan.
But I digress, this is pretty impressive that one guy managed to do this on his own, and it's rather clever too. As everyone else has said, hopefully this gets implemented in some way shape or form (or the "hack" is approved by blizzard)
as an aside: would the same method be possible for brood war dropped games?
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So it would defiantly be against Blizzards terms of use to use the program. But if tournaments would use and they did not show the 3rd party program at work... Let's say someone disconnects, stream director switches the stream video to the casters, casters don't mention anything about the 3rd party program in use. Then when the game resumes from the point of disconnect stream director switches to the ingame footage 3-5 sec after the disconnect point. Well basically however the stream director seems it fit... bla bla.
My point is, if the 3rd party program is not shown on stream "at work" nor being talked about, how much would it hurt Blizzard???
Edit** Ofc major tournaments would never use it without Blizzards permission, that's a given. **Edit
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The thing is that it will be pretty obvious to anyone watching the stream that a disconnect occured and a player was dropped from the game. It also takes a certain amount of time to set up the resume scenario on all client machines.
The fact that news travels fast on the interwebs notwithstanding, Blizzard people watching the stream aren't dumb. 
And by the way, if you haven't studied the source code yet you might not realize this:
This tool in its present form will only work with the current build version of the game. There are quite a number of hardcoded memory addresses/offsets in the source code to interact with the SC2 client in-memory. So as soon as a patch or hotfix comes out, all of these need to be redone and the tool be recompiled and tested. That's quite some overhead and the question is whether the author (who currently seems to be the only one with the necessary reverse engineered knowledge) will put in the time to do this ongoing task.
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On April 17 2012 05:08 Shinobi1982 wrote:
So it would defiantly be against Blizzards terms of use to use the program. But if tournaments would use and they did not show the 3rd party program at work... Let's say someone disconnects, stream director switches the stream video to the casters, casters don't mention anything about the 3rd party program in use. Then when the game resumes from the point of disconnect stream director switches to the ingame footage 3-5 sec after the disconnect point. Well basically however the stream director seems it fit... bla bla.
My point is, if the 3rd party program is not shown on stream "at work" nor being talked about, how much would it hurt Blizzard???
in no way does it hurt blizzard, but the danger is that accounts will be banned for hacking and tournaments will lose licences.. i think that the most likely scenario is a quiet few emails are exchanged and the tournaments quietly start using it and blizzard turns a blind eye.
What ever happened with the 'stronger colours' mod? They claimed that blizzard supported that.
oh found it:
http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/lsupz/finally_uploaded_rstarcraft_interviews_dustin/
half-way down someone has summarized. It could be that they'll support this too, although it might be hard for them to set it as an exemption from the warden thing.
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I definitely didn't read through this entire thread, but I just wanted to say that this doesn't seem to cause the same problems LAN would, when it comes to Blizzard controlling their product. It would be great if this was allowed for tournaments, because we could really use a feature like this. Not only does this protect from internet disconnections, but it also protects against computer crashes. On top of that, Blizzard would still have control of the game, as people would be rejoining on battle.net.
Such a shame we don't have this already. I would have loved to see what would have happened in the ST vs Prime finals. 
Great work though TheSuperCow.
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Blizzard not having this doesn't mean they don't want it. I don't know how people are getting the idea that anything not in SC2 right now is something that Blizzard is against. Any engineer of any sort, especially software, know that features and functionality are always done in terms of priority. Some stuff might get left out because you can only work on so many things at once and you have to release the product at some point. Do you guys think Blizzard would be opposed to something that turns replays into .mkv files? Is it something they are morally against creating? Probably not. But it doesn't mean they are going to put it in the game. Its not a top priority. There have been a lot of cases where Blizzard isn't quite in the loop and they probably didn't think replay resuming was gonna be a big deal.
After this program getting so much attention, I do certainly believe something of this nature will be used in the case of a disconnect in a big match.
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You shouldn't be allowed to post here if you don't have a Bachelor's in CS. Normally I'd say common sense would work but it seems "reading the source code or don't post idiotic comments like: 'hur hur hur first post this is spam/fishy hur hur hur' " is too difficult to some people.
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Remember Blizzard needs us, we don't need them. Is it me or are most people completely oblivious to the leverage at hand? Blizzard risks alienating a large percentage of their clientale if they went and banned tournaments and large swaths of their playerbase. They still have two more expansions they want to sell, and they still have a reputation to uphold. Sure, they can make the suicidal decision, and if they are that dumb then they get their just deserts and we have the truth about the quality of the company. Win/win in either case.
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On April 17 2012 07:48 Wegandi wrote:
Remember Blizzard needs us, we don't need them. Is it me or are most people completely oblivious to the leverage at hand? Blizzard risks alienating a large percentage of their clientale if they went and banned tournaments and large swaths of their playerbase. They still have two more expansions they want to sell, and they still have a reputation to uphold. Sure, they can make the suicidal decision, and if they are that dumb then they get their just deserts and we have the truth about the quality of the company. Win/win in either case.
I hope you don't provide your poor threatening reasoning with your future kids. I would feel very bad if someone had the misfortune of being your child.
Pull your head out of your ass.
User was warned for this post
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EPT
