I have seen some players complain about the drawing of cloaked units. While the Starcraft default effect is nice, it's not very noticeable at first sight.

Some believe this is unfair because it relies on visual acuity and memorizing the outlines of every unit when cloaked, and even the terrain features and doodads to spot any possible distortion.

I think this can be fixed in a mod in a theoretically easy way

Enemy unit cloak is function 2 (starting from zero), some say 3 as well but it doesn't matter



I'd like to change cloaked units to display as "EMP" effect (not the EMP hit mind you, that one is different; this one looks like a very noticeable mirror distortion).

Yes, I can set it in the image entries and it works, BUT, this only means they always display like this to everyone. Only normal function changes.

So it need to be set in the .exe cloaking code

Or I will take any ideas

Maybe someone versed in Cheat Engine and similar programs can find the location of the .exe where the cloaking draw function is enumerated


It would just be changing that number from 02 to 08 (EMP) for example then

The modding possibilities are many from then on, because you can choose anything (for example, display enemy discovered cloaked units as Hallucinations or something, or your own cloaked units in full team color if you have a hard time spotting them as semi-transparent)

The sky is the limit... or more like *would* be if we knew where this is stored

It would not. There is logic that depends on the drawing function indexes being in the range of 2/3/4 for undetected cloak, and 5/6/7 for detected cloak. It would not be extremely difficult to achieve with GPTP, but hex-editing StarCraft.exe will require a non-trivial amount of work, as it won't be as simple as changing a few bytes around in this case.

2 and 4 are for the fade animations when going from uncloaked to undetected cloaked and vice versa. 5 and 7 is the same for detected cloak. 3 and 6 are when the unit is fully cloaked (no longer fading).

If you still want to try your hand at changing the cloak appearance, here are the StarCraft.exe file offsets of the relevant functions:
0x97E80
0x97ED0
0x97FD0
0x98A10
0x98A90
0xD5D70
0xD5E40

I offer no guarantees that it's an exhaustive list.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 27 2026, 2:38 am by DarkenedFantasies. Reason: lol

My project involved only changing the fully undetected version, not the cloak/uncloak animation. That can stay as is, as there is no relevant equivalent for an EMP/unEMP animation

Yeah my bad, I mixed them up.