Introduction

After learning a bit about how Syrian Warfare handles Lua context, I wanted to figure out how I could execute my own scripts from within the game.

Enabling io

The game does not use the Lua io library, so I modified my injected DLL to have the capability to execute luaopen_io() when F5 key is pressed. I tested the newly enabled io library by executing the following from console:

dump = io.open("testing_io_lua.txt","w")
dump:write("Wrote from lua")
dump:flush()
dump:close()

The file appeared in the game directory with the correct text.

Adding new scripts

I tried to execute dofile() and loadfile() from the command console, but I kept on getting file not found errors. To debug this, I put a breakpoint on lua_load. This led me to the discovery that Galileo loads up scripts from scripts/ and scripts/lua. Looking at strings in SyrianWarefare.exe, I noticed references to "scripts/triggers.lua" and "scripts/global_map.lua."

global_map.lua uses dofile() to read and execute other lua files:

--************************************************************************
--* Вспомогательные функции и константы                                  *
--************************************************************************
-- utility variables
-- constants
SCRIPTS_PATH = "scripts/lua/"
dofile(SCRIPTS_PATH.."constants.lua")
-- соответствие объекта спауну
dofile(SCRIPTS_PATH.."spawns.lua")
-- соответстиве объекта резервам
dofile(SCRIPTS_PATH.."reserves.lua")
-- вспомогательные функции
dofile(SCRIPTS_PATH.."tools.lua")

I put test.lua into the main.pak zip file and ran the game from Steam. The game started up normally. When I executed the following on console:

dofile(SCRIPTS_PATH.."test.lua")

the following error printed in DebugView:

[11060] mll::debug::exception: [ml_encrypted_zip: unknown zlib error while inflating]

It appears that the game expects all the files in the zip to be encrypted. Since I know the password used to encrypt the game files, I used 7zip to append the file to main.pak:

7z.exe a main.pak test.lua -pm,nw0rdk1s;ldscj

Executed the following in the console:

dofile(”test.lua”)

Conclusion

By appending a Lua script to the game zip files and forcing the game to load Lua io library, I was able to successfully execute test.lua from inside the game. The approach could be used to add and execute custom scripts. The source code for the injected DLL can be found here: https://github.com/sbobovyc/SyrianWarfare_lua_hacks