Cheat Engine

[SIIT]

Sorry for the vague generalisation of what I'm about to post, but I'm wondering if someone could explain the theory behind a couple of scenarios of using Cheat Engine to get information from a game.

I'm not looking to change any values, I'm more interested in getting a list of information.

For example, if a game has a shop, within that shop there are categories of items, and each item contains some information (such as cost, HP increase, speed increase) what would the process be to list all these items, and all these categories, without knowing how many items or how many categories there would be in that shop?

If someone could talk me through the theory of how this sort of thing can be done that would be fantastic.

[pox911]

It could go in many different ways and all depends on how the game is setup. A couple of examples would be that if the shop has limited quanity of items then you could use that to find the basic location of the shops data. After that you would browse the memory region to see how the rest of it is setup, explained a little later. Like you stated before, you could also try to find the basic area based on the items cost.

The item identifier could be either a pointer or a simple ItemID and would usually be close to the quantity, cost, or some other value related to finding the basic shop address. If the game uses a pointer for its items then you could end up searching for stats of an item, get where the itemdata starts, and find all places it's referenced and try to find an item list that way.

Say you found a list of items for your shop, you could then try to pointer scan the first item in the list while the shop is open and then do the scan again after finding the first item of another shop keeper so you could try to find a pointer that goes to the location of the current shop keeper you are talking to.

As for making something read all the data instantly, that would require a lua form. Most games have a value either at the start of a table or right next to a pointer one level up that tells how many entries there are in shop keeper table. You would make a lua take the count of the shop table and times it by the length of each item entry via a For statement. In that for statement you would have the basic reading of the table and telling it to output it in what ever way you setup your form to display it.

In some cases there wont be count value and it will be a simple set chunk of data and if the data isnt empty then the game will read it and display as such. An example of this is the vending machines in borderlands. There is a set number of slots a machine can use and each one is just a 4 byte pointer, no pointer no item shown.


oh, just thought of another way to find shop keep info. If the price is stored inside hte base stats of the item and the shop has infinite then it wont work for finding his inventory. However if you have limited inventory then buy several of things from him, get your inventory via the quantity and figure out how the item modifier works for you. Say you find out that the 6 swords you bought from a guy had the ID 97400 and another item you bought from him had the ID of 100 since it's a common item. Do a search for the sword ID and try to widdle down your results. Try replacing random values of the 97400 with the 100 and see if the shop keep ends up with the basic item twice in his inventory. You will find his inventory memory this wan and then you can poke around for any of the other data.

Hopefully you understood some of the stuff i talked about. Other people could try to exlain better than i can