Cheat Engine

[ImperiusOfValor]

I've been trying out Cheat Engine for a while now, probly off and on about four years, so I'm not entirely unfamiliar with it. But trying to use it on Bioshock Infinite, it's been kind of tough finding the green pointers (Namely for the salts count)

I got as far as knowing the salts are 4 bytes, and at max value is 100. Using that I can always get the salts address in two/three scans and freeze it/change the values and it works. I'm also always able to get to the second pointer no problem, but then the trail runs dry and I have no idea what to do next. The usual (Find out what accesses this address) method stops working before I can find any static addresses for the salts.

I could probably find exactly the table for everything on Bioshock Infinite, but I don't really like using the pointer scanner/other tables because I like knowing how to find it myself, and I'm really eager to hear what I'm doing wrong.

EDIT:
I should also mention all those things in the debugger don't really behave in the same way in the final pointer as the other pointers. While those values usually only increment by 1 when I use a salt consuming ability, the final values jump up like crazy, and nothing changes when I consume salts, making me think the problem must be with the pointer I'm testing, but I'm not sure.

TL;DR
how u find the static adreses in bioshock infnite

[Deine Mutter]

Why don't you want to use the pointer scanner? The pointer scanner is like a gift from heaven. It makes finding the right pointer as easy as possible. Once you found your address, just do a pointerscan, save your results, play the game a little bit (restart checkpoint, restart the game etc..) and filter out the right pointers in your result list which you saved before. Eventually, the right pointer(s) will filter out just fine. This is how I did it for BioShock Infinite and I did not have any problems with it.

Once you found a pointer, other pointers will be easier to locate, if they belong to the same "object". For example, the pointers for silver, health and salt share the same base address. So, the "filtering out" process can be done much faster with this knowledge.

To be honest, I don't know another way to solve this with CE. You could try to monitor what accesses/writes to the salt address and use the resulting opcode to build your pointer (where you have to repeat this method until you find a static address). However, this method is not a good choice in my opinion. For one thing, you sometimes end up with a huge amount of addresses you would need to check manually (which is just impossible if it is a multilevel pointer). Secondly, most of the time this method just doesn't work as you might have already noticed with BioShock Infinite. The screenshot you posted suggests, that you have used this method. The opcde you highlighted uses the esp register to access the stack. The value of esp is the stack pointer and this will definetly not help you building your "salt" pointer.

I don't know if there is annother way to do this with CE. If somebody knows one, let me know.

TL;DR
Use the pointer scanner

[Rectangle]

I'm seeing floating-point and SSE instructions...
It's possible that the trailing bytes of the value you're searching for aren't consistent (even if the leading bytes are), effectively changing the value ever-so-slightly with each passing microsecond.
It's a strange implementation, and I could be a bit off track here... but try a float or double scan instead of a 4-byte integer scan.

[ImperiusOfValor]

Thank you both so much Sorry for the late reply, but I WILL pointer scan if there's no other method, I'll try float scans, and if I can't figure anything out from there I'll pointer scan everything. No use trying to cut down a tree with a butter knife.