Cheat Engine

[js541049]

Hello everyone. With the demise of GFWL around the corner, I've been playing some of my older GFWL games trying to get the last ounce of enjoyment out of them before they're gone forever.

I'm currently playing around with Flight and there's some things I'd like to do just to have fun (e.g. change altitude, change speed, plane coords, etc.). I wanted to start off easy to just figure out how to do something in the game (I understand the basics of what's going on/needs to be done, it's the implementation that I'm failing at).

I started by loading up a challenge/mission thing in the game, and completing it. I looked for that score value. I completed it again. Looked for the new value. Completed it a third time, and looked for that value. This ended up giving me two memory addresses.

With those two addresses I decided "Hey it'd be fun to see if I can lock the values so I'd only get a rating of 666". I also picked the score because it doesn't change very often, is something easy to reproduce, and doesn't require a change in the position/operation of the plane (aka I think it's safer to muck with for starters). I proceeded to lock the values and change them to 666. I completed the mission for the fourth time. The values didn't stay locked, they reverted to what my actual score was.

I then decided to do some more research on the subject and look at some tutorials. I found a GFWL "anti-cheat" tutorial on this site (I can't seem to find it again however) as well the general tutorials for the Cheat Engine.

That's about where I got to last night before other issues took me away from it.

My current plan is to inject the "anti-cheat" assembly code into the Flight process and then from there see if I can hold those memory values static. If that works I was going to look at changing the more fun values (altitude, speed). I did look at the option to "see what modifies this memory address" however the game just crashed and it looked like the safer options were greyed out for me.

Am I on the right track for what I'm doing? Am I out to lunch? Any feedback/assistance is appreciated.

Edit: The GFWL tutorial information I found is written by Geri.

[js541049]

Following up on my activities.

From what it looks like the "locking" of the memory address only allows it to stay locked for a short period of time (I didn't bother counting).

When I locked the value at the start of the mission it would stay locked until (what I believe) the game writes to that address. I tried playing around with different timings and if I did it correctly (after the score was given but before the summary page) I was able to change the value of what was displayed on the summary page. I forgot to check to see if the overall XP value changed at all. One thing that it didn't do was award anything for completing the mission. So for example my score was 1500 which would be gold, it registered as nothing.

I guess next step would be to see what writes to that value and try to fiddle with it? My issue there though is that the game crashes whenever I try to add the debugger onto the process.