Quote:
Originally Posted by KasperSTM
Let's say your database is stripped, it means you have for example 4 records instead of full 5k+ records in your item_proto.
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That's not the point here.
Several game core revisions have been released as either stripped or unstripped.
Unstripped files are full binaries containing lots of meta information like function names which
- make such files easy to explore with a reverse engineering tool like IDA (because you can roughly say which function does what from its name),
- make the file much bigger than necessary for execution (an unstripped game file is about 40 to 50 MB).
Stripped files are
stripped down to what is necessary to execute it, which means no additional meta information:
- functions lose their names (internally, functions are referenced as addresses in memory so names are unnecesary overhead), so it will be very hard to assume their purpose (IDA will show names like "func_7656" rather than e.g. "CHARACTER::ChatPacket")
- the file will be much smaller (a stripped game file is about 5 MB)
Binary executables can also be
compressed (e.g. with the UPX tool) which works similar to comressing a file archive but is optimized for executables.
When only very few people in this section were
really smart (though this number didn't really noticably increase yet), UPX was used to obfuscate binaries so others were unable to open it with e.g. IDA for reverse engineering.
However, compression can be undone with the UPX tool and makes this aspect void.
