PenguinPlug 0.3.96 for Starcraft 1.13

You can find the most updated version with some additional cool screenshots here:
http://ste.gnux.info/pp/readme.php

Veteran PenguinPlug users ? you can just read the changelog at the end
New PenguinPlug users ? read everything :)

Introduction

PenguinPlug is a multifunction plug-in for Starcraft. It's goal is to provide additional functions while keeping the game fair. The following options are currently available:

RWT: Replay With Text

When you save a replay, all the messages you received from players (and your own messages) will be recorded in the replay. When you view the replay, the messages will appear. It works more or less like RWA (replay with audio by JCA), except you don't need a microphone: the poor man's version :) and you can record humorous comments by your opponents, it should give a new life to some replays.

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Saving some rants from an enemy who see a dropship for his first time : priceless


Note : the player that is saving the replay must have it running during the entire game, and each player that is watching it must have it running if they want to view the comments. If they don't have PenguinPlug, it will still be played like a normal replay for them. Of course it doesn't record the enemy privates messages.

Version 0.2.9 and higher have an integrity check that ensure that the text cant be modified easly modified. If you see the message "Integrity ok" it means it has been saved with this feature.

Unshifted Hotkey

If you have a French azerty keyboard, then you must use the "shift key" to type numbers, and it's VERY annoying for hotkeys. this plug-in allow you to use hotkey without using shift or caps lock.

unshift hotkey is off by default: type "\unshift on" to activate it and to save it in the config file automatically.

Replay Anti-corruption

Sometime (mostly in games with many players), Starcraft can crash when saving a replay. Penguinplug will it will warn you durring the game if it happen, and will prevent the crash and try to fix the replay while it's saved. in this case you will need penguinplug to watch the corrupted replay or it will crash / disconnect / act strangely after the time the corruption happened. Of course if the replay is not corrupted, you should still be able to watch it without PenguinPlug.

When the replay get corrupted, it's because of a player, but it doesnt mean he is hacking, most of the time it happen by accident at the start of the game. It will write the responsability amount of the possible replay crasher, in the form of 2 numbers : (x, y)... here is the math : if you divide x by y, and it's less than 80%, it's probably an accident and the guy should not be accused of cheating. If it happen in the middle of the game, repetedly, and with more than this 80% number, then it's probably a hack. I'm not the only one who made a similar replay fix, but i did mine alone.

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An accidental replay corruption

Automatic Replay Saver

For every game you play, the replay will be saved automatically in the subdirectory "maps\replays\autoreplay" of starcraft. The name will be the number of the game (4 digits) + the 6 first characters of every player name, separated by underscores "_", limited to 31 to keep the file openable by sc. You can still save it at an other place by clicking the save button normaly

Now you dont need to remeber to save the replay, but dont forget to clean the directory before you reach the replay 9999 :) This feature come from Lasgo, he wrote the code for 1.11b, the source code was public, i just converted it to 1.12b & 1.13 and integrated to penguinplug.

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Replay folder


Since PenguinPlug 0.3.96, replays of less than 2 minutes are not auto-saved (was considered as an annoyance to have many useless replays like this).

Download visibility

Allow you to see the download progress even at 0% or 100%. This way you can see who has the map and who hasnt. This patch come from Ashur, i only rewrote it to grey out the 100% values.
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A few players at 0% or 100%

Others

Hide rally animation : if you are annoyed by it and you like too much the old < 1.12 behavior, theres an option in PenguinPlug to disable it.

command line editing & history : you can move back and forward in the line of the in-game text, and you can scroll up / down through the replay with text.

Anticheat

With the new patchs 1.12 and 1.13, the remote "self-unally" anti-cheat functions of PenguinPlug doesnt works on any other existing maphacks, they are impossible to remake so dont ask.

Requirements

Install

Extract PenguinPlug-...zip in your starcraft directory (the directory that contain starcraft.exe).
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extract your zip file here

You can drag and drop PenguinLauncher.exe while keeping the CTRL and SHIFT key pressed to make a shortcut on your desktop.
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make a shortcut to run PenguinPlug instead of Starcraft

Then double clic penguinlauncher.exe It will add a penguin trayicon in the taskbar, and you will see a message everytime you start a game. (you can also try to run starcraft.exe first and then run PenguinLauncher for WinNT/XP).
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It prints a message everytime the game start and add a penguin icon in your system tray

Classic disclaimers

This program is a 3rd party program, that is not endorsed by Blizzard. Be aware that by running it you may break the ELUA. However, it is NOT a cheat program, and it doesn't give any unfair gameplay advantage over a legitly playing opponent, I will never add any features that could be considered "cheating". It would be very ironic if Blizzard, after leting cheaters unpunished for months, would punish users of tools like bwscanner or PenguinPlug.

Security concerns

As long as you download the program directly from me, it has no trojans or viruses included :) It doesn't manipulate your files, except the replays when you save and open them, the files penguinplug-debug.txt and penguinplug.ini

It doesn't affect any other program except if they are named Starcraft.exe. It stays in memory as long as Starcraft is running, and stops when you stop it. Unfortunately, I cant provide any "bug free warranty", it's still an experimental version and i will probably never pretend to have 0 bugs for sure, so it may possibly crash, corrupt or prevent you from loading the replay, or have other nasty unintended behavior. But I have tested it, and it seems to work quite well for me. If you notice some bugs, please inform me with detailed explanations and I will do my best to fix them in a future version.

Source code

I had planed to release the source code but it would put me in a dangerous situation in case someone reprogram it in a cheating tool. It would not make a big difference for Blizzard if someone modified it, they would still consider me responsible. I dont want to disclose something that could help the evil side to create a cheat program. I dont appreciate security by obscurity but Blizzard decided starcraft will work this way and i cant change that.

Some code come from Lasgo (about 100 lines of bwac informations) and Ilintar is actively developping it and will need to have it safe too. For this reason, i wont give out the source, but if you have some positive reasons and you have already contributed positively in the SC community, you can ask.

Extra credits

Probably half of the code lines come from someone else :

Special thanks

All my friends on battle.net, my cousins, the [ZO] team (http://ste.gnux.info/zo), the scd guys (http://starcraftdream.com), angel.white, and all the peoples who helped to test it.

JCA, Lasgo, TravelToAiur, Entropy for making usefull and fair 3rd party programs. Ilintar and Pat for wgt/tlt and pgt. (and Blizzard for making the game - i was about to forget this one :) did i forgot anyone else ?

If you have some ideas / comments / questions, feel free to ask me by email (ste@ste.gnux.info), or I also spend some time in http://www.starcraftdream.com forums.

Known bugs

I dont have any infos yet on bugs of this new release, but it doesnt mean they are none :)

Webpage:

The webpage http://ste.gnux.info/pp is the only one i control myself. So it's the only safe and most updated page to download PenguinPlug. (note: http://poinsart.gnux.info/pp is the same address and is valid too)

Command Line Reference

Those commands have to by typed durring the game. Most of the value you can change with them are saved automaticaly so no need to type them every game.

To type them press enter and use the "\" character and then the name of your command. for example "\help" will give you a list of those commands. you have to type them in game (not lobby or battle.net chat)
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Type commands like this

help

Show this help message about PenguinPlug

rwtplay (on/off)

Show the game text durring the replay if available (Replay With Text) PenguinPlug will still load the text at the start of the game bt it will not display it until you turn it on.

rwtrecord (on/off)

Save the replay with recorded message (Replay With Text) The replay will be saved like if PenguinPlug was not used, and there will be absolutely no text data in it, even if you only choose this at the last 10 seconds of the game

unshift (on/off) (default=off)

On azerty keyboard (french layout) it allow you to type hotkeys without pressing shift everytime. The default seting is off, so make sure you type "\unshfit on" if you want to enable it.

bwchart

Open bwchart with the replay you are currently watching You must be in a replay to use this. BWChart must be installed and associated with the .rep files.

If it doesnt work you can check this this: in bwchart, clic the "Option" button at the top of the screen and put a mark in the checkbox "File association between .rep extension and bwchart. BWChart is the great tool of JCA, he publish it on http://www.bwchart.com

webpage

Open PenguinPlug webpage with your default webbrowser: http://ste.gnux.info/pp

rwtexport

Save all the comments with times in a .txt file. Then it will open the notepad (or the program associated with .txt files) and load it. The filename and the path is exactly the same as the .rep file, you will get a file ending with ".rep.txt" You must be in a replay with text to use this command.

autoreplay (on/off)

Activate or desactivate the "auto replay save".

bwac (on/off) (default=off)

If you know what bwac is, you can turn it on, theres some comments about it in the other part if this readme

hiderally (on/off) (default=off)

If you dont want the "rally animation" to be showed every time you select a building that has a rally point, you can disable it, it will do as if you were in the patch 1.11b for this.

History

Dates are DD/MM/YYYY format. Versions number are decided stupidly i know :)

v0.3.96 - 06/07/2005

Updated for Starcraft and Broodwar 1.13

v0.3.95 - 05/06/2005

A bugfix version, no new features, but important bugs have been fixed:

v0.3.94 - 05/05/2005

like usual, a test version, many new features :

v0.3.9 - 19/02/2005

Test version for the 1.12b SC patch

v0.3 - 08/12/2004

v0.2.9

v0.2 - 28/11/2004

v0.1 - 20/11/2004

first "usable version", RWT + hotkeyfr


superpenguin
ste@ste.gnux.info