Case study

ZCure: a rewritten Blacklight: Retribution v3.02 master server

ZCure rewrites the master server of Blacklight: Retribution v3.02 in .NET 8, based on the ZCAPI library decompiled from BLRCrashReporter.exe of an older build. It serves authentication, users, funds, friends, mail, inventory, loadouts, store, clans, missions, stats, matchmaking and game-server management over TCP/HTTP, with a UDP presence server. Its documentation describes the message format (begin and end markers, header, optional zlib compression, colon-delimited serialization) and the XXTEA encryption taken from the decompiled ZCAPI.

Targets: Game · Protocol
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-09
Evidence class: C2 code & docs, no demo or download

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Evidence

Observed: Code, documentation and a download method observed; no demo found.
Checked: 2026-11-10

How evidence classes are assigned

Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: Requires the Blacklight: Retribution v3.02 client, launched with -zcureurl, -zcureport, -presenceurl and -presenceport pointing at the server.
Prerequisites: Building needs the .NET 8 SDK; deployment uses Docker with a preconfigured MySQL container or a manually configured database.
License: No licence file in the repository.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{zcure-case,
  title = {{ZCure: a rewritten Blacklight: Retribution v3.02 master server}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://gitlab.com/blrevive/zcure}},
  url = {https://gitlab.com/blrevive/zcure},
  urldate = {2026-11-09},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/zcure-case/}}
}

Plain text

ZCure: a rewritten Blacklight: Retribution v3.02 master server. https://gitlab.com/blrevive/zcure (accessed 2026-11-09). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/zcure-case/

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