Cheat Engine

[lamarca]

Hey guys, I've finally modded my Samurai Spirits 1 and 2, now I can swap the fighting style of every character, it's possible to even play as boss!
(note, I'm not talking about that old 2d samurai spirits, I'm talking about the 3d series that wasn't released outside of japan and you can play only using Mame).

So now I'm moving on to another game of my childhood, another dream that I want to complete! Swaping the Fighting style and meshs of Godhand (ps2).

Unlike in Samurai Spirits, that's a 1vs1 fighting game, godhand is more of an action adventure rpg, so you end always facing multiple enemies, so the values are not fixed into 1 single enemy...
I really want help in here because I don't really know a method to use to find the stats of a single NPC in the map, to separate the values of their gender, fighting style and mesh.
What I did till now:

1:Kill every enemy on the map, let a different enemy type survive in multiple save states, search for the difference in values between the save states, after 2 days of filtering, I got a few results using this method, but changing values doesn't change anything related to them.

2:Kill every enemy on the map, let a female, a transgender and a male survive in different save states, the transgender has the body of the males, but the actions and reactions of the females, so I used him to increase the filter in gender, after a gooood number of hours filtering differences, 0 results.

I can make myself immortal, having infinite special, infinite money... all the basics are supremely easy to find by decreasing and increasing in the filtering, but the damn NPCs... For the love of God, I can't seem to find the values of their stats (fighting style, gender and mesh).

Playing as an NPC in Godhand is like a dream to me since Godhand is my favorite game ever.

Can you guys give me any tip about a method to find those damn npc's values?

[Rydian]

Try searching for the HP of an enemy. Find and add that address to the list, then right-click it and choose "find what writes to this address" (or "accesses" sometimes is needed instead) and note the offset (the a*x+whatever) that shows up most often.

Then take the offset, and subtract it from the current HP address using a hex calculator (the Windows calculator in Programmer mode has a hex checkbox). That result will be the base address of the enemy's structure. In most games the structure (anything from the base address onwards up to a limit) will include most of the functional data about the enemy, this may very well be where the "enemy type" or "combat style" data is, if there is such a thing.

The structure tool (CTRL+B for the memory browser, then Tools - Dissect Data/Structures) lets you compare multiple copies of the same structure to try to find differences in values, if you can figure out some of the structure then you can see who has which values in which places by finding a few enemy base addresses and adding them for comparison there.

Oh, and once you find code that reads or writes to enemy HP in the logging window, click it and click "Show Disassembler", then right-click that line in the new window and choose "find what addresses this instruction accesses" and you may very well be given a list of all the enemy HP values currently being dealt with for reads (and they'll show up as modified for writes).

If you go with the structure tool, you can actually just type in the HP address minus the offset instead of doing the math over and over. So like "6CD94948-188" is accepted.

[lamarca]

Why didn't I think about finding their health!?
Best tips ever haha, thank you veery much for the explanation!

Time to use it