Long ago I noticed that if you saved a game in a mod and then opened it in normal starcraft the units would still retain some of the stats from the mod. It seems the whole unit table is stored in the save file, so anything you can do by modifying the unit table with EUDs you should be able to do by editing a save file.

I'm sure someone must have looked into this in the 19 years of Starcraft but I haven't been able to find anything about it, much less a file spec for save files. So I've played around a bit with saving games from a mods.

Loading hydras and infested Duran into bunker: https://my.mixtape.moe/gojick.png Also showing return of Infested Duran wireframe bug in 1.18
Cloaked Torrasque: https://my.mixtape.moe/idpbtd.png
Uncloaked Dark Templar: https://my.mixtape.moe/iyjhpv.png
"Starport" Command Center and "Marine" SCVs: https://my.mixtape.moe/sawegs.png Notice CC's max hp
CC needs gas to be repaired: https://my.mixtape.moe/fhenxb.png
DL link for my test map and save file: https://my.mixtape.moe/omyygn.zip

Some disadvantages with this method:
*Need to have both save file and map located in their respective folders.
*Single player saves don't work for multiplayer and vice verca
*Multiplayer saves can only be hosted privately/passworded on B.net. (I'm also not sure if they can be downloaded from other players?)
*Map must have the right file name.
*Replays can't be saved from loaded saved games (but they are quite broken for UMS anyway.)

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 15 2017, 9:56 am by ihjel.

Wow, that is actually pretty cool! I wonder what sort of things you could sneak into the map. Make your map, give people the save file download to start from - and then get to have a bunch of custom features.

This is an amazing find!

Yeah save game files are super powerful. You can basically edit the memory of units/sprites/images (but not the graphics themselves). There are likely some buffer overflows that can be abused as well if you were persistent.

I guess the main downside would be no multiplayer, right?

Aren't save files tied directly to the computer on which the game was saved? Whenever I've tried using someone else's save file, it never works.

Basically if we were able to manipulate the saves to make them host-able on multiplayer regardless of which players are in each slots, we could easily do some pretty crazy stuff. Where is the farty at.

This is fascinating, and I need to do some experimentation now. 🤔