Cheat Engine

[h3x1c]

Since my education thus far has come primarily from the angle of reverse-engineering, I'm trying to find some good explanations/analogies/cases to visualize multilevel pointers from a forward-engineering perspective.

For instance, I understand creating a pointer for variables that won't be known until runtime, but why point to a pointer? Also, when pointer-scanning and you find a base address that's, say, 10 levels deep or something crazy like that, what on earth would that look like from the perspective of the source code? A pointer pointing to a pointer pointing to a pointer pointing to a pointer pointing to a pointer, etc. Is this just something the compiler ends up doing with what is actually a much more simplistic bit of high-level source code?

Last of note, when you find your way to multiple base addresses that will all persist in a cheat table across restarts of a game, why are there so many addresses redundantly holding the same data (or references to the same data)? Is there really only one ACTUAL base address where that information is stored? Is it just one location in physical RAM, but there are multiple virtual addresses pointing to it?

I understand physical/virtual/mapped memory, stack/heap/global/data/etc., what allocating memory for a single-level/multilevel pointer in C looks like, and the purpose of single-level pointers, but I'm just having a rough time envisioning multilevel pointers from a forward-engineering perspective.

Thanks for any explanations/videos/links/images/etc. you might have to help clear it up!

[Zanzer]

[Dark Byte]

what Zanzer said

as for redundancy, it's a matter of performance, debugging, and knowledge of the other parts of the engine.

for example:
a game engine may store it's last created object on a static address so that when it crashes, it can query information about it.

But the game developer may only get a pointer to the game object. And for speed reasons he stored it in a static location. This already causes two duplicate pointers

Also, sometimes there are objects that point to eachother or related object. E.g the class Unit might have a pointer to CurrentLevel, and the GUI may have a pointer to the selected Unit, and the Game may have a static address to the GUI

so, by getting the GUI object, you can get to the Unit Object, then go to the Current Level, and then get Unit[0], which is likely the player (and then go to the stats)

[mgr.inz.Player]

In C++, it is common to see something like this (below from Unreal Engine):

[h3x1c]

Awesome stuff, you guys. Thank you so much for the replies; that all really helped things click for me! Seeing that example looks like things I've certainly seen before, but I was missing the ability to visualize the code being chained together via pointers to that extent.

Again, thanks for the answers.