Cheat Engine

[Snooman]

Hi Darkbyte

For the next version of Cheatengine I'd really appreciate two minor improvements to narrow Pointer Scanning:

1.
Initial Pointer Scan: Base pointer must be in range: from [00000000] to [FFFFFFFF]
If you already know the exact base pointer or in what region the base pointer must be this will be very helpful. At the moment I find this option only when re-scanning a pointerlist. I don't see a point why that is so. This wastes unneeded scanning time and disk space for false pointer paths.

2.
Ability to specify known / unknown offsets.
Or to put it simple: allow "?" as wildcard for an offset.

example:
Pointer must end with specific offsets:
[14C]
[ 20]
[ ?]
[ 16]

What do you think about that?

[Chris12]

I think its an awesome idea.
If used, it would narrow down the paths to check a lot.
In my opinion at least something like "base module must be xyz" is really neaded.

Because most of the time, you know exactly what module is using the structure.
For example: If you look for the ammo of a weapon you can be 100% sure the basepointer WILL start in the executable of the game (or one of its related dlls like game.dll / engine.dll etc...) and you know for a fact that something like Direct3D9.dll will never contain a reliable path to the value you are searching for.

I think the features you suggest are really essential to the pointer scanner.
We can only speculate why this hasn't been in it since the very first version of the scanner.

[Dark Byte]

Base module is in the next version. It won't speed up the scan at all(since the base address is the very last thing checked), but it will reduce the number of results

If you wish a faster scan, use the structure spider instead which is the pointer scanner but then reverse

Also, threadstack0 is a very important base address as well

[Snooman]

So we would not gain scanning time - no problem, this is not essential, I just thought it woud. A good i7+16GB+fast SSD made P.Scan way more comfortable now.

But I'd love to filter the results when I already know exactly what the basepointer must be.

[Gniarf]

[Snooman]

[Dark Byte]

Thanks.
If you wish to test it, I have a 64-bit exe build with the latest improvements to the pointerscanner (it's an custom alpha build so it has some garbage in the gui at places, just ignore that)
http://cheatengine.org/temp/cheatengine-x86_64.rar

[mgr.inz.Player]

ok, "compressed pointerscan file" option works great. "spent writing percentage" decreased from 40% to 2%.

I made another benchmark, same method as in this thread: http://forum.cheatengine.org/viewtopic.php?t=564603 - my usual benchmark . Overall "compressed" scan is only 10-20 seconds longer than "NOWRITE" version.


no compression, ptr files size: ~10GB, "spent writing percentage" 35%-40%


with compression, ptr files size: ~3.34GB, "spent writing percentage" 1%-2%

[Snooman]

Perfect !!

Basepointer filtering works like a charm!!