Reading what a unit is doing

To catch “this unit cast Storm” people count the storm sprite, or watch for the energy to drop. Neither is necessary: a unit writes down what it is doing, continuously, in its own struct.

Nearly every spell has the same shape. orderState 1 is moving into range, 2 is the cast itself, and 2 with orderSignal 2 is the cast animation playing.

// 스톰 시전을 정확히 한 번 잡는다
// catches the Storm cast exactly once
if (unit.order == 142 && unit.orderState == 2) {
    // 시전자도 대상 지점도 여기서 읽을 수 있습니다
    // the caster and the target point are both readable here
}

There is a trap on signal 4: a unit that was pre-placed, hallucinated or created by a trigger never clears it back to 0. Treat 4 as an edge you see once, not as a state you can poll.

userActionFlags at 0x93 tells you whether a human asked for this. It is 0 at creation and becomes 2 when a user-issued order is accepted.

A rally-point move never sets 2, and neither does a right-click rally on a building, though R-then-click does. Lift and land are excluded as well. It is a usable “the player is actively driving this unit” signal and a bad “the player gave an order” one.

A computer-owned unit runs an entirely different set of orders: 156 is the AI's “decide what to do next” branch, 160 is “arrived”, 2 is its Stop, and an idle AI Arbiter loops 160→156→130. Classification code tested only on human-owned units misreads every one of them - which is exactly the case on a map whose mobs belong to the computer.

This is a survey of reading those values, not of what happens when you write them - a separate question. It was measured by hand, unit by unit, so confirm whatever you depend on. And the order queue itself (0x74, 0x78) is EUD-unsupported, so nobody has ever looked inside it.

Order 0 is death, but on its own it does not give you either half of the usual job: running something once when a unit dies, and knowing how it died.

Running it once first. A dead unit keeps reading as order 0 until its slot is reused, so a plain test fires every cycle. Keep one group per unit type and remove the unit on death and you need neither a flag nor a type comparison - at the price of keeping the group correct yourself. Nothing adds or removes a unit from a group automatically.

For self-destruct versus being killed there is one well-known wrong answer: “the ground weapon cooldown went up, so it exploded” detects Scourge and fails on an Infested Terran. What works is this - it is dead and its current HP is still at least 1. A unit killed by damage reaches 0; one that removed itself does not.

unit.move_cp(0x8 / 4);
if (DeathsX(CurrentPlayer, AtLeast, 256, 0, 0x7FFFFF00)) {   // hp >= 1
    // 스스로 터졌다 / it blew itself up
}

If you are creating something in the dead unit's place, check whether 0x628438 is 0 first. Zero is the “cannot” case with the unit table full, and CreateUnit then quietly does nothing while your code believes it worked.