Cheat Engine

[haunted5]

Hi everyone,

I have been making cheats for a while. My cheating knowledge is quite basic and extends to finding right values for health, ammo etc,
pointerscan usage and basic AA scripts: I have a few questions, If someone could be so kind as to guide me, it would be much appreciated.

1. I would like some insight on how to improve my skills by going to the next level and what I should try next in making better cheats etc.

2. I am making cheats for Farcry 4 these days. Since updating to a new version (1.04 & cracked by ALI), my game seems to be crashing.
I have updated my cheats to the new code. The game allows me to play for a while, but if my cheats are activated and there is a cutscene,
the game crashes afterwards. I even made a script that did nothing, but the game still crashed at the end of a cutscene. So Im assuming there
is some check for the injection somewhere. Question is, how I go about finding this code that crashes my game on detection of Injection.
And are there anyways that pros use to avoid such situations all together.

3. For the life of me I have never been able to find a pointer manually.

Question:Is it even worth finding the pointer manually? Does it guarantee a working pointer?

Below is what I normally do to try and find the pointer manually. Hopefully someone can see where Im going wrong:

a) "what writes to this address"
b) Then if code is ecx+10 (note offset)
c) Copy value of ecx, searchfor it in hex
d) Then take first value from results, then do "what writes to this address", which normally end with finding nothing, so I do "what accesses this address" which does get me some code.
e) Then I repeat from step c again.
f) This eventually gets me to a green address. So i think great, its static.
g) So I create pointer using offsets
h) Reatart game and pointer is no longer valid.

Question: Shouldnt this have worked if I had finally reached a green address?

Question: Sometimes at step d, I cannot find any code writing or accessing any value. so its a dead end, does that happen sometimes or is it something I have done wrong in the process.

Help is greatly appreciated. Thanks

[zm0d]

To 1) Try to do some skill unlocker or "add item xyz to inventory" cheats. It gets you closer to handle data structures. Also, breaking some simpler anti-memory-editing mechanisms will teach you more.

2) Hm could be protection or some missleading code. You can check this when you attach the cheat engine debugger to the game. Use "Find out what accesses this address" on the health address and look for the access after the cut scene.

3) Just use the pointer scanner. It makes it job pretty good and there iis really no way I would recommend someone to do a manually pointer trace.

Question1: I dont know.

Question2: Pointer in a pointerchain are most likely static. They dont change their address where they are pointing at. Find out what writes to this address wont work here.

[aikoncwd]

I don't like pointers because reason. To avoid pointers I do this:

- Search an address, for example health
- Select the address, press F6 (find out what writes...)
- Play the game and get dmg from enemy
- I get the instructión that modify my healt (ex: sub [ebx+10],eax)
- Autoassemble:

globalalloc(pBase,4) will hold the player base-address, then add this:

sub [ebx+10],eax
mov [pBase],ebx

At the table y add manually address (pointer) with the name pBase, now every time I get hit, CE fill pBase and show the correct HP address. You can take a look at this table, I learned a lot with this:

http://forum.cheatengine.org/viewtopic.php?t=577393&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=375 (the last comment have the table)

[haunted5]

Thanks for your suggestions:

zm0d:

I have dont some inventory adding once or twice before, that is something i'll start doing more often. For your other suggestions,
Unlocking a skill: I dont really understand how I can even find something that changes only once per game session.
Perhaps I would have to look in the player struct but how do you go about identifying it?

AikonCWD:

Many thanks for this. I have been wondering how other people do this for a while. And its great that I wouldnt have to bother finding pointers this way.
Ill definitely start doing this in my scripts.
A question tho: If the code writes to multiple addresses, I normally do "Dissect data structure" to somehow seperate the value I want from the others.
Is this how you would go about it or is there any other ways to easily get the right value.

Many thanks

[aikoncwd]

[haunted5]

Thanks for your explanation.

This is how I do it as well. I was wondering if there was any other ways that
I dont know about.

Thanks