Cheat Engine

[predprey]

what exactly is the "has shadow" function for?

i was using structure spider for comparing changes in a huge data structure. i was comparing two locked data from "Dissect data/structure", but using the shadow function seems to be comparing the data at the original address instead of where the shadowcopies are respectively.

what made me thought so was because using the shadow function yielded zero differences while setting the shadowcopies' address as the base address yielded results.

[Dark Byte]

it's useful for cases where you have a copy of a memory region but located at a different spot.
with the shadow option you can make it so pointer references inside that block actually point to the copy (structure dissect has this feature too)

this is very useful with stack snapshots, e.g the s button in the more info screen has an option to make a copy. and the you can follow the stack references and build a local pointerpath with it

[predprey]

yea, i read that in the float up dialog when hovering over the shadow option, but i don't think i fully understand its meaning.

is it right to say that the data being compared is still the one at the base region, but if there are pointers in that data, they would be referencing the data in the shadowcopy instead?

so for my case, where i'm just searching for changes in a simple data structure that contains no pointers, specifying the location of the shadowcopy under the shadow option is wrong, because it is comparing data at the base address which is one and the same thus not finding any differences in the data.

but if this is so, why does CE automatically fill in the addresses as such when i open structure spider from the right click menu of a locked data structure in "Dissect data/structure"?

[predprey]

i think this picture can explain better for me lol. so i have two shadowcopies of the structure at 0x016A8424. they have differences at a few locations but the scan doesn't find any.

so i guess i'm using it wrongly and should be using the shadow function for scanning for pointers, not for comparing shadowed structures?

[mgr.inz.Player]

You probably need "dissect data" (aka "structure dissect") for this.

Open "structure dissect", add address, lock it (right click edit box), do something in game, add the same address, lock it, define new structure.

[predprey]

yea i used dissect before this, the locked structures are from "structure dissect". but my structure is quite big, not the 8192 size above, but a entire savefile decrypted in memory, thus searching manually for differences requires a lot of scrolling and takes too much time

[Dark Byte]

easiest is just save both those memory regions to a file and then compare them.