Cheat Engine

[lastthai]

Hello

From what I understand Cheat engine let you modify the value you want right ?
The problem is I no longer can find that value


I do that in Xcom 1
Let say I have 500 credits

I scan for 500
then I buy something and find new value
keep doing until you get exact one value

It work for Xcom 1

but Xcom 2
My supplies is 175
I bought something 35

Then I hit sacn for 140 but it said can't find that value

Did I do something wrong ?

[TheyCallMeTim13]

The value may not be what you think it is. It might not be the value type you used. It might be stored differently, it could be 2X the value you see, or 100X, or +1, or something else. A variety of methods are used to hide the value, it just depends on how the value is stored.

[lastthai]

[oddgamer]

It depends on how it's stored, and what you're using. You mentioned XCom 2, so I'm assuming you're not using some sort of emulator (which can do weird things, depending on the emulator, like CCS, a C64 Emulator, stores values with each 'byte' of a multi-byte value as 4-Bytes, and don't even get me started on how floats work).

The usual method at this point is to pick a data type (other than String or Array of Byte, generally) and select 'Unknown Initial Value', change that value in the game, and repeatedly select 'Changed Value' or 'Unchanged Value' as you cause it to change or not change. It's good to do other things, view other screens, that sort of thing, which don't change the value, click for 'Unchanged', then go back, that sort of thing.

You can try 'Increased Value' and 'Decreased Value' searches, too, which would be faster, but those sorts of searches assume that the values are actually linearly related (meaning that when the value on screen goes up, there is some value in memory that also goes up, and conversely in reverse). This doesn't have to be the case. The value might be some sort of 'encoded' number instead (one version of Civilization did this, can't remember which one). It helps a lot if you can get the value back to the value it was originally (assuming it is, ultimately, an integer and not some sort of floating point value where all you see are the integer portions), since then you can tell CE to 'compare to first scan' and do an 'Unchanged value' scan, but this can be hard to achieve for some sorts of values (and, as mentioned, won't work for things where the value is some sort of float and you just see the whole-number portion). Repeating this 'Changed'/'Unchanged' over and over can narrow things down, but sometimes not be helpful. For instance, take Zoo Tycoon 2, in which how much money you have right now is a calculated value based on things like how much you've recycled so far and so on. At least with ZT2 it tells you what those values are so you have a chance, but perhaps your game has such values but you have no way of knowing what they are, if they've changed, and so on.

And all of that is, I think, the 'basic' sort of cheating that I use (I'm not good at this, either), where those who do things like writing trainers get in much deeper (examining what the code is doing, then injecting their own, and so on... much more advanced than I can do).

So good luck! Hopefully the numbers you're looking for are pretty simply stored instead of some sort of nasty mess.

[STN]