Cheat Engine

[Citium Zeno]

Did I search the forum? Yes.
Did I find another topic with a problem like mine? No.

I'm not quite sure what's going on here. I found the initial address, and went on to find the pointer so that I would not have to find it everytime I get back on the game. The pointer stayed pointing to the address for a while and had the same value, but then it changed to P-> ???????? and the value stayed at the correct value for 5 or so minutes and then it promptly changed to ??. I tried another address, and the same thing happened, but this time I caught what was writing to the pointers and I'm not really sure what to make of it as I'm still pretty new to all of this. Here is a picture for those who quite don't understand what I'm saying still.. hopefully it'll help you help me!

hxxp://img717.imageshack.us/img717/378/halpa.png
(Obviously change the 'xx' to 'tt')

[Dark Byte]

that address was not green so not a static pointer.

this means that the game is using multilevel pointers (like 99.9% of all games)
find out what accesses the pointer you find and then find the pointer to aht pointer
Continue this until you've found a green address

(step 8 of the tutorial explains this)

alternatively you could try to do a pointerscan, or a code injection.
Of course, seeing the address it's most likely a useless instruction. (e.g visual only value or online update command)

also, just one question before you waste your time finding a pointer.
Why do you want to find the pointer to that address?
If it is because when you change the value that it has no effect in the game , then a pointer will not help, a pointer is only useful in finding something back.

[Citium Zeno]

[Dark Byte]

you just freeze the pointer value to 5000

when you click change pointer ce will automatically follow the pointer and keep freezing it to 5000

the 3 seconds is just so if you don't feel like frezing you can still change the value to 5000

and 3 seconds is also chosen because you usually need more time when you are searching the value manually, which would defeat the purpose of this exercise

[Citium Zeno]

Thanks for your help so far, but apparently I'm still not understanding what I'm supposed to be doing. :/ I hope you can stick with me for a bit more and help me out. Below are the steps I followed with pictures showing where it went wrong for me.

Step 1. Find the value.
Step 2. Find the pointer of this value. (Find out what accesses this address)
Step 3. Find the pointer of the pointer. (Find out what accesses this pointer)
Step 4. Find the pointer of the pointer. (Find out what accesses this pointer)
Step 5. Find the pointer of the pointer. (Find out what accesses this pointer)
- Step 5 is the static pointer.

Once I have got the static pointer (the green one) I first selected the value's address and froze it at 5000. This caused me to fail Step 8 again so I started over. This time I repeated the same steps above, but this time I froze the pointer of the value at 5000. This step caused me to fail again.

Here are a couple of pictures:
hxxp://img825.imageshack.us/i/this1.png/
This picture shows that I have frozen the pointer of the value at 5000 and that I have not successfully passed.

hxxp://img560.imageshack.us/i/this2k.png/
This picture shows that all the pointer's values have changed except for Pointer #2 and the static (green) pointer.

[Dark Byte]

make sure it looks like this:

[Citium Zeno]

Ah, that would make sense. I was not doing that. Now that I know how to do that.. I of course ran into another problem. I add the initial pointer and offset, and then hit 'Add Pointer', but then this bumps my first pointer and offset into the second pointer slot, and changes the first pointer slot to something else and makes it so that I cannot edit it. (The first pointer is also pointing at the wrong address after that happens.)

Edit: To attempt to explain it in another way,

When I input the first pointer 001607E8 (+18 ) into the first 'Address of pointer' field, it's pointing at the value 00160840. I click 'Add pointer' and it puts the first pointer 001607E8 (+18 ) into the new 'Address of pointer' field and moves the value 00160840 into the previous 'Address of pointer' field and now 00160840 is pointing to the address 00000188.

[Dark Byte]

that's normal
because you filled in a base address it is assumed that that is a valid base pointer (it's quite useless to make temporary pointers, all you need is the offsetlist and the base address)

anyhow, if you want it in the other way just hold ctrl while clicking add pointer

[Citium Zeno]

Ah, that worked. Thanks a ton, DB! The only problem I run into now is I'm not really sure if I'm searching for the correct pointer of the value, and as to why the pointer changes extremely often (guess it's a security measure). I'll just have to gain some experience and learn more in-depth about some things.

[Dark Byte]

if all else fails, try the pointerscan. Pause the game, initiate the pointerscan and wait. Then reboot your computer and do a pointer rescan for the new value

repeat a few times and you'll end up with a list you know is good.
And if you do manage to get the last offsets in the path manually put them in so the scan will go faster with less wrong results

[Citium Zeno]

Would you say it's worthless to try a pointerscan if you get 18,388,006 as the address specifiers found in the whole process and had evaluated 7,218,753,933 (no idea what that is; just says it's evaluated that many) in 259 seconds at 27,780,465 a second? It says it had also found 4,423,648 pointer paths and CE was using 760,000k and the game was using 740,000k of RAM (I have 3GB). It seems like that would be increasingly hard, but if it's normal then I'll give the pointerscan option a try.

[Dark Byte]

That is completely normal yes
After the scan finishes you have a tremendous amount of pointers which need to be filtered. So reboot afterward and restart the game (so you have the most chance to get rid of the wrong pointers) and do a rescan