Cheat Engine

[thefreestyle]

Hi all,
I am a new user of CE. After a bit of trial and error i got the basics, but still need some help, so any help would be appreciated a lot !

General question :
1. After finding some (dynamic) address with some real value, im trying to find the base address, so i was checking whats writes to it and got the "value of the pointer needed to find this address is probably XXX", now when i scan for that address (4 bytes, exact value, hex ticked) there are no results... (happens once in a while). My question is , what does it mean and what could be done to get the base address in that case ?

Game specific question (CnC : Red Alert) :
1. My goal to freeze money at certain amount, say 100,000. What i found is the game has two money values : 1 for off game money (ie initial amount when you start map) and 2. the money you gather while playing (ie with harvester). When you spend money (building something) or earn money (with harvester) the second value used. When you return money (cancel building) it goes to first case, to off game money. I can work with all 3 of them separately in auto assembler, but is there any way to achieve this goal in one script instead of 3 ?

2. I want to make only user units invincible, so i found the opcode that reduces health of unit and NOP'ed it, but now all units are invincible (including computer units), so my question is how can it be done right (only player's units and buildings and not the computer opponent) ?

Thanks in advance and have a great day ...

[Rydian]

1 - The old pointer method is generally not done much nowadays for various reasons.
http://forum.cheatengine.org/viewtopic.php?t=572465
Some of which would prevent you from finding pointers through that method.


2 - Does different code affect the different values? Functionally you could just make the second one maxed out and it'd work for any mission right?


3 - http://forum.cheatengine.org/viewtopic.php?t=583376
Usually a more complex task for an RTS.

[thefreestyle]

Hey Rydian, thank you very much for your reply.

1 - what do you mean by old pointer method ? by searching with HEX ticked ? and pointer scan is the more preferred way ? why is that ?

After reading your answer (and links) and making more research i found that the reason i cant find the pointer is because its not a pointer :
from what i found so far it seams that CnC Red Alert has some "main" player address and some offset from it are the values, ie money. So when i get the easy guess pointer is actually is the "player" address. Of course scanning for it as pointer wont yield any results. Now what i need is how i can find this player address as base address, ie when game is restated ? (and since offsets are always the same i will be able to get value i need every time) But how to always get that player address? my guess is gonna be like "ra95.exe" + XXXXXXXX = player address, but how find the XXXXXXXX ?

2. What do you mean different code ? And yes, altering second one would work.

3. Well here the player address would help a lot, since it probably will hold vales for players units and their health and to whom it belongs, i'm still learning the structure to find other useful offsets, but for now my main concern is to be always able find "player" address, from there its just time and trial and error ...

Thanks