Need an unprotected Dota Map

[Jah'rakal]

Good Morning,

I would like to make my own Dota Map and get myself abit into modding.

The maps i downloaded and opend seem to be proteced and i cannot use them in the world editor.

Is there any recent Dota Map i can use and open, so i dont have to start from 0?

 

[Ravager16829]

DOTA (or such a high-profile maps) have some kind of map protection that rendered them uneditable. That requires you by deleting parts of the map file that the World Editor needs to be able to open the map. However, it's very difficult to explain which correct file you need to remove.

Dracol1ch's DOTA maps also have strong protection with memhack exploits that rendered them unplayable on the WC3 patches other than 1.26.

However, you can still edit the map file components directly using MPQ Editor, especially when you want to edit JASS file (war3map.j).

 

[Retera]

I am a Warcraft 3 modding guy who has enjoyed time on Warcraft 3 map editor going as far back as 2002 when I was very young, as a lifetime creative habit that I maintained. So I have tons of modding knowledge, but I almost never played the DotA map. I have probably played it 5 or 10 times in all my 22 years enjoying this game.

But at one point I searched up a copy of this map and downloaded it to look inside, and I can honestly say the data in there was just really crazy and silly. The organization of the files was most likely intentionally crafted to be difficult to understand, and it had the appearance of passing through multiple authors who did things to make what they created even more difficult to understand in each their own new and different ways.

If I go onto the Google Play Store, and I download a silly cartoon character battle arena game, and I decide that I want to hack this game and add my own characters, the way that I am prevented from doing that is by using legitimate cryptography. In the same way that "cryptocurrency" uses mathematics to prove that only one computer/person on Earth is the verified holder of a large unique secret key, similarly the Google Play Store uses a large unique secret key to prove that only the one true author of the silly cartoon character battle arena game can publish a new upgrade. This is a cryptographic protection, and so because of the laws of mathematics it is impossible to defeat.

However, on Warcraft III, the same system is only available for maps published by Blizzard Entertainment. For each map, there is a secret key that might be used to sign the map, or might not. Maps signed by the secret key of blizzard have a "BLIZ" tag in blue on their status logo in the game. If you edit these maps in the World Editor, the status logo will disappear and can never be added back again.

On a fan map like "Defense of the Ancients," this kind of secret key is presumably not available, so as far as I know, this map is not "protected." Also, it is against the Hive site rules to discuss the circumvention of "protected" maps, maybe, except for maybe more recently where a lot of the fans of this game began to grow old and the Activision employees who make patches at Reforged began to break the game itself so that maps needed to retrofit to the new game version, at which point people who still wanted to play their maps needed a way to discuss how to retrofit the maps to the new game version if the original map authors are long gone.

So I don't know if it's okay for me to say what I'm going to say, but you can consider it to only be my opinion and not be something approved by the Hive.

In my opinion, when you say:

get myself abit into modding.

... any map that you can find called "DotA," as far as I know, is a terrible place to "get a bit into" the enjoyable activity of Warcraft III modding.

Are you familiar with writing software? Suppose that I have the following code function:

function DistanceBetweenPoints takes location locA, location locB returns real
    local real dx = GetLocationX(locB) - GetLocationX(locA)
    local real dy = GetLocationY(locB) - GetLocationY(locA)
    return SquareRoot(dx * dx + dy * dy)
endfunction

When we look at this function, it is really clearly the math for computing the distance between points. That is nifty and useful! And, when we read it, we can get some interpretation of what it is doing.

Now, suppose you open up the DotA map and see this inside:

function z_q takes location n, location m returns real
    local real g = GetLocationY(n)
    return GetLocationY(m) - g
endfunction

function z_r takes location p, location q returns real
    local real g2 = GetLocationX(q)
    return g2 - GetLocationX(p)
endfunction

function z_s takes location r, location s returns real
    local location f = s
    local real a1 = z_q(r, f)
    local real a2 = z_r(r, s)
    local real a3 = a1 * a1
    return a3 + a2 * a2
endfunction

function z_t takes location t, location u returns real
    return SquareRoot(z_s(t, u))
endfunction

If you spend the time to parse it out, you might discover that this junk I wrote above is doing the same thing as DistanceBetweenPoints. But, as we can see, the original readability of the code is obscured so that the amount of time that you would waste trying to read it has increased.

Editing the map called "DotA" is this same type of time waste, but expanded to a larger scale across all of the information inside the entire map. If I wanted to edit it, I would think that surely I could. Because given enough time, I know enough about the Warcraft III file formats to work out what everything did, and what everything does, even if it was intentionally written to redirect the user focus and waste their time - or to crash their editing software, on certain versions, if those versions of the editing software were known to have bugs and crash cases that could be exploited for that purpose.

I know how to write my own editing software, and so I could work around any bug being exploited in that way. But I did not get there by trying to edit someone's work who already existed. To be honest, I got there by being creative and making my own stuff from the ground up, and eventually have such horrible management practices for how my own work was structured that it forced me to learn how to work through basically anything that could possible be shoved into the Warcraft III game.

So what I am trying to say is this: if the problem that you are trying to solve is a game of knowledge, where the winner is the one who memorizes the most insane and useless facts, then looking at someone who is at the end of a long road of playing that game and asking how to get there is not very useful. The time it would take them to tell you the insane and useless facts would most likely exceed the depths of your attention span and possibly the depths of their attention span.

But what if the problem you are trying to solve actually is not the insane game of knowledge? What if it turns out, the DotA map was almost not special in hardly any way, and most of the charm was Warcraft III engine itself? If this is true, it should theoretically be possible for you to doodle another DotA map in a couple of minutes or hours. As an example a few years ago, I made a video making fun of someone on a Warcraft 3 forum where I tried to explain how to "draw a MOBA in 40 minutes." If you can pardon my sarcasm at the start of the video, as I said then five years ago, "You don't need a PHD in Linear Algebra to draw three roads!"

Here is my (albeit somewhat silly) tutorial:

 

[Tasyen]

There are dota template maps on hiveworkshop, no idea if it helps you.
A simple search found these

DotA Allstars Template v2.8

So, here you have it! A unprotected version of DotA 6.49c. Original credit goes to the creator of DotA-Icefrog and Moonlight for the unprotected version. Enjoy! Keywords: DotA, Icefrog, Arena, Hero, Template, Terrain, version, 2.8, 6.49c

www.hiveworkshop.com

Dota Template Advanced v 2.0

by Mr-President A fully functional template of DotA v 6.72f. Has the same terrain. all the gameplay mechanics, 10 heroes, all of the basic items and some recipe items.

www.hiveworkshop.com

there are also other aos map templates with only terrain.