Cheat Engine

[Larezh]

I am looking for a reliable and stable way to add an overlay on any direct X fullscreen game/application.

In my case this is not for cheating but I think the programmers in here are among the most experienced developers for such a task.

I think of something that is as easy and portable as Fraps.
Fraps works without issues with almost any program or game.
I need the same (just overlaying a much larger image).


Does anyone know of something, if possible sample code (favored in C# or also C++) available ?
I'd also be up to compensate the work if someone can write me a realiable demonstration from where I can continue if there is nothing open source available.

[SteveAndrew]

Well, you're going to have to get working and perfect a hook for directx 9, 10, and 11. And also support both 32-bit and 64-bit for all three. You could support older versions as well, but I think those three are good enough right? because that's already 6 when you take into account x86/x64...

DirectX 9 is pretty easily done. DX10 & DX11 is where it gets a little tricky, and along with a completely changed way things work internally, there also isn't a built into draw text api like in DX9! But there are free draw text libraries for dx10 and 11 available so thats not too much of an issue. Or you could always use a bitmap containing your font as an image like a lot of games do anyway.

After hearing this you're not ready to give up yet right?

Good. lol!

So I'd recommend finding a directx hooking example online and getting that to work and tweaking it to your needs. Pick a few games you like which use the directx versions you want to support, as your testing environments.

You can find out what version of DX a particular DX application is using by enumerating DLLs & Symbols (under the View menu in the Memory Viewer)



If I remember correctly some applications might have multiple DX dlls loaded for whatever reason, and in that case you assume the highest one is the one being used. Your application will have to in some way detect the DX version automatically.

The common way / one of the main ways to do this is to create a DLL which does the hooking and inject that. If you can combine all three versions of hooks into a single DLL you could have 2 DLLs one for 32-bit and the other for 64-bit... Or maybe just make it 6 seperate dlls if that's easier, 3 for 32-bit, 3 for 64-bit...

Or follow CE's lead and forget all the DLLs lol and just directly inject your DX hook as assembler. That would be the cleanest way I think, if you can get your ASM code all well and good!

Then after all that, you can decide whether you want to support OpenGL as well, although not many games use it (it seems like anyway).

Good luck! You can pull it off, if you stay dedicated and work through any issues you come across until you get it right!

[zm0d]

[Larezh]

Thanks for the responses.
I spent the whole night (until 6 AM) researching.

I'll try to first limit myself to DX 11 and then go on from there, I can see it's a LOT of work and almost any example I found was not working properly.

Sadly I can not rely on non fullscreen solutions, I have to target true fullscreen apps/games with vsync on.

[Dark Byte]

one tip: get an dx11 tutorial with source and experiment with it. e. g place a function call right before or after the present call and see if you can make your drawing happen there

then when it's time to do the hooking you'll know what the hook needs to do

[Larezh]

Yea that was a good hint, I use the simple sprite demo from m$ that just draws a triangle.
However, every hook DLL code I found so far causes a crash (will have to dig into that)

Is there any well working source around that hooks DX11 ?

Right now I tried the "best" one I could find (wwwDOTunknowncheatsDOTme/forum/d3d-tutorials-and-source/88369-universal-d3d11-hookDOThtml)
(easy to compile just the beaengine include had to be commented)

Btw, the hook works when I launch the demo exe from my IDE in debugging mode.
It crashes when I have no debugger connected.

Update:
It now works (without modification on my end).
So fo rnow I am quite happy, first success