Cheat Engine

[Anesah]

Hello, everyone. I am a amateur (though not so amateur-ish) modder of games and software developer by education and trade. I've been trying to wrap my head around writing my first .dll for injection, but I've run into a wall at what (I hope) will be the final few steps.

Hopefully more advanced people out there can answer the few questions I have. I've written all the game-modifying code I need, but I'm stuck on the actual injection technique. If I had started in C++, this might be easier, but I can't for the life of me figure out the usage of __declspec(dllexport) in C#. Maybe it's too primitive and there is something different that I'm missing. From the examples I found on the internet, my class declaration looks something like:

[justa_dude]

[atom0s]

C/C++ and C# generate two separate kinds of DLLs. C/C++ generates native, unmanaged DLLs. C# generates managed DLLs. That said, you cannot just inject a C# dll and overwrite functions and create jumps etc. like you can in C/C++.

In C# if you want to inject your DLL there are a handful of extra steps that need to happen before you can even do anything with the DLL. For example you must either:
- A. Manually load the .NET runtime into the process.
- B. Hook onto the existing loaded .NET runtime.

Afterward you then have to load your managed (C#) DLL through the said runtime that you either loaded manually or hooked onto. Then you need to create an instance of a type existing inside of your DLL in order for a function to be called such as a DllMain of your own type.

At that point, your DLL is then loaded and can make modifications.

It is a lot easier to just use a C/C++ DLL instead since the injection is very straight forward and does not need the extra .net framework steps needed.

[justa_dude]