How do you write a program that interacts with others like banlist for warcraft 3?

Question

As in title, what is banlist written in, or can be written in? I have a basic knowledge of Python but I don't see a way to get information from a running program.

Answer 1

I read something about listening to the traffic in ports that the program(wc3) uses. Is that the way it is done? If so, what are the recommended sniffing programs that you guys use?

Answer 2

To my knowledge, banlist uses winpcap, an open source library for packet capture and network analysis for the Win32 platforms and "understands" (at least partially) the network traffic between the game running on your computer and Battle.net servers. Regarding Battle.net protocol, there is unofficial documentation available, e.g. bnetdocs, and maybe at others places (there was even an open source implementation of a bnet server, bnetd). To reverse engineer the protocol, people used things like whireshark (or the command line version tcpdump). The principle is simple: do something (e.g. move a unit) and analyze the transmitted information.