Save closed realm characters?

[Belix]

I have no doubts this program could be written now, but would have to be re-written with each new patch as offsets would change.

Patches are an unlikely concern at this point. Blizzard hasn't patched any of their old games for some time now, even though some of them have serious issues. StarCraft, for instance, currently has an exploit that allows malicious users to steal your CD-key through Battle.net game lobbies; Blizzard has known about this since 2009 at the latest. If they haven't issued a patch for something as serious as a key theft exploit in 5+ years...

Even more recently, it became possible for viruses to be distributed through StarCraft maps, and Blizzard still remains silent despite receiving e-mails about it through the proper channels they provide for reporting hacks.

It's also very likely this program would be detectable by Blizzard giving the potential to have your account banned, and possibly your cd-key.

I've never actually played Diablo II on Battle.net, so I don't have a personal stake here. In fact, that might make me an ideal person to develop a simple tool to allow local realm character saving. If my key gets banned, no skin off my nose.

My experience suggests Warden's attention is focused on very specific areas of their games that cheaters target. Unless Warden goes so far to actively scan for any process accessing Diablo II whatsoever, I don't anticipate detection. And that seems very unlikely, since I hear of all these Diablo II bots playing the game constantly to farm items - these are most certainly external processes reading memory from Diablo II.

EDIT: I get the impression there is some single function that exists in the game code that reads all of the character information and writes out a save file. Some testing has shown that the mechanism that saves the character file does -not- require a character file to exist first, since renaming the character during a single player game and exiting yields a new file with the appropriate name.

Backing up Realm characters may be as simple as manually invoking this save function while on Battle.net, but after digging around for awhile I have been unable to find it. Perhaps someone with more skill than I could locate the save function and figure out what parameters need to be passed to it to request Diablo II to save the current character at any time? This seems like it would be quite easy.

It would be better still if the dynamic name field read by the save function could be pinpointed, and the condition that prevents it from running on Battle.net disabled. If I had this information I could easily create a little program that makes D2 save a local copy of your Realm character each time you quit playing it (though care would need to be taken to watch out that you don't already have an existing local character with the same character name, or it would be overwritten).

I might investigate further on and off, but since I don't have any characters of my own to back up and I'm still new enough that this kind of thing is unnecessarily difficult for me, I'd rather spend my time elsewhere.

Hopefully I eventually figure it out, or this information leads someone to a solution...