Cheat Engine

Dark Byte · Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2017 5:04 am Post subject: Pointerscan how-to

this is from a reply to someones pm a while ago, but also useful for everyone else
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Here's the recommended way to use pointerscans (which will save your harddisk)
Find the address and add it to the list
Rightclick the addresslist and choose "generate pointermap"

restart your computer, launch the game
Find the address again and add it to a new list
Rightclick the addresslist and choose "generate pointermap" , save it as something else as before

Now you can just close the game if you like, or use the time to generate some more pointerscans for other situations. Up to you

Open the pointerscan window, tick "Use saved pointermap" and give it the smallest of the two pointermaps (scandata)
Use the dropdown menu and select the old address. (or enter it manually if you remember)

Tick "Compare results with other pointermap(s)" and give it the other address

Now you can scan as usual.

Some other tips:
If the scan takes too long, tick "Max different offsets per node" and set it to 2 or 3 and set the offset value as high as you like. (e.g 1048576) The size won't effect the results much then (unless you go really high)
It will reduce the number of results you'll get, but the results you do get are generally speaking quite good (low offset values)

Viloresi · Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2017 11:48 am Post subject:

Could someone explain me how the pointermap works? I don't understand, because I've seen that sometimes if I do single pointerscans instead of multiple pointermaps I get more results....
I don't know how it works btw, I just know how to use the pointerscan lol

Dark Byte · Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2017 12:07 pm Post subject:

when you use pointermaps it will do an instant rescan on every found result with the second pointermap. This is faster than a normal rescan, and decreases disksize requirement from 200GB to only 1GB or less

Viloresi · Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2017 1:08 pm Post subject:

Thanks,
btw I'm in the case that I would like to find a pointer to an address of the ammo... the fact is that I can't debug this game because it's protected... but I can pointerscan to find it.... But it takes too much, atleast more than 5 hours for what I've seen for :
1024 offset size
level 8 pointer
and default pointerscan settings , the scan speed is about 470,500,000 paths/seconds .
I don't know what is the best I could do to avoid all this loss of time (because I can't leave the computer on for more than 5 hours) I've tried to save some pointermaps without result (maybe I'm doing something wrong)...
Are there in cheat engine some other useful tools that I could use like the pointerscan and pointermap to find a pointer just by having an address? (and without using the debugger).

Dark Byte · Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2017 1:27 pm Post subject:

Emorrow · How do I cheat? Reputation: 0 Joined: 17 Mar 2017 Posts: 9

unmog · Cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 25 Sep 2012 Posts: 30

Id be interested in seeing like a video tutorial of this if you dont mind. I'm not sure I followed exactly... but am interested in saving time/diskspace

also as for the tip to tick "Max different offsets per node" being 2 or 3... I tried setting it to 3 and leaving my offset alone, which reduced the starting amount from like 3 billion to a couple hundred thousand which was nice, but after rescanning a couple times it ended up with 0 results... so that didn't work for me. Guess Im going to have to do the insanely long way...

thing is the game is only like 100mb or so, but these pointer scans are like 30+GB, just wow.

Dark Byte · Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2017 12:34 pm Post subject:

if you use the method i described up thete your results will be a lot less.
just make sure you have seperate pointermaps with unique addresses

Dark Byte · Posted: Mon Sep 11, 2017 5:58 pm Post subject:

bump because some people still run out of diskspace

Acidic92 · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 09 Sep 2017 Posts: 22

WOW............. worked like a charm; I don't see any reason for using the pointer-scan without the pointer map method.

Thank you very much for this tutorial. Saved me over 10 hours for one scan.

94d33m

Where is the pointermap data stored? And also, Do I have to everytime generate two pointer maps for every game and for every new variable that I want to find a pointer for ?

Dark Byte · Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2019 1:39 am Post subject:

when you rightclick the addresslist and choose generate pointermsp it lets you pick a location

as for the amount at least one pointermap is recommended but more is better (just eats up more RAM so there is a limit on how many till it slows down due to memory paging to disk)

Note: When using just one pointermap, use it as a compare against pointermap and not a base one, that way CE will generate a new temporary pointermap at the start.

you don't have to generate a new map for each variable, you just need to know the addresses of the variables you're interested in, so if you are looking for 4 addresses you can first find those 4 and then make a pointermap. Followed by doing a pointerscan for each address using the maps. (Just make sure you name the addresses else it'll be tricky picking the matching address from the dropdown list)