Cheat Engine

CodeReaver · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 19 Apr 2005 Posts: 24

I'm writing a plugin using Visual Studio 2015 and since I want to be thorough, I'm supporting the 32 bit version as well as the 64 bit.

Dark Byte told me that current versions of Cheat Engine use lua 5.3 and gave me an example that included lua53-64, but when I tried to use the 32 bit counterpart from CE's GitHub page, Visual Studio tells me I'm compiling with the 64 bit library with my 32 bit project configuration. I might need to double check that's not just a mistake in my pragma comments, although I'm pretty sure I did that already. I think there was also an error that said the library was built with a different version of VS.

As an attempt at solution, I grabbed the latest binaries from lua's official website and made sure it was a version that best matched my VS version. In order to check it really was correct, I tried using the 64 bit library from the lua site, but when I do that, the plugin stops working and I get an access violation as soon as the plugin tries using lua.

Can anyone tell me what I might be doing wrong?

Dark Byte · Posted: Thu Sep 15, 2016 9:34 am Post subject:

hmm. that lib should have worked

for compiling it yourself, try https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine/tree/master/Cheat%20Engine/lua53/lua53/vs2013/lua53 (just the library)

don't static link, but use the dll

CodeReaver · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 19 Apr 2005 Posts: 24

Dark Byte · Posted: Thu Sep 15, 2016 10:59 am Post subject:

Just make sure you do not rename the .dll files. The dll's initialize some data like critical sections, and renaming them will cause them to be loaded standalone again.
The same reason why you should not embed the lua code inside your plugin, but use a dynamic link approach

(In worst case scenario, you can always look up the address of the used lua library and use getprocaddress to get the exports...)

CodeReaver · Newbie cheater Reputation: 0 Joined: 19 Apr 2005 Posts: 24

Thanks DarkByte, that worked great! I don't think I even need to tell VS where the dlls are as long as the import libs are there. It seems to find them without any problem once I copy the plugin to CE's folder. I'm pretty certain these are just linking information now, as they got much smaller once I downloaded the project.

I got myself a GitHub account in the process, which I'd been meaning to do for a while.

I'll host the project there, since I think it would be a useful example to have for VS 2015.