Cheat Engine

[Prehistoricman]

Let's say Player is sharing his games with me, and I'm playing one of his. Player goes to start a game and I get booted off after 5 minutes. I don't want it.

So far I've tired:

Running their game as admin. Therefore Steam isn't elevated enough to close it. This works for about 1 minute, and then the game is closed (presumably by a steam DLL?).

stopping ExitProcess and _doexit from being called with Cheat Engine

Suspending the game's process. The game stays open until I resume it

It appears not only Steam tries to close the process, but something that has admin rights does too.

My issue here is: if steam can't close it, and the loaded DLLs are prevented from closing it, what's going on?? I can't find any other calls in the steam DLLs, using IDA, that would close the game.

So my questions are:
Does anybody have ideas as to what is actually closing the game? Is there a way to find out?
Any other methods of stopping the game termination? I know the offline mode workaround that Player can use but then they can't play online
Can the Steam DLLs be unloaded from the process so they are unable to close it?

[cooleko]

If the game isnt being told to exit, then presume it isnt being told to stay alive. Aka, the game expects some verification to be sent, when it isnt, it terminates. You could run ultimap and simply mark every routine as filtered until the game exits. Then look at those handful of routines to see which one is responsible for closing the game.

Steam may/should ban for something that directly affects their bottom line.

[STN]

^That. You are treating the game as a separate entity than steam, it isn't.

There is a really simple solution to all this or rather two solutions.

Either start your game/steam in offline mode then your friend can play it at the same time.

OR

Start your game then block steam using windows firewall. Your friend can play the game as he pleases.

This will NOT work if you're using the same game to play online for obvious reason. As long you have family share active, steam doesn't give that much of a fuck and ^the above method works. I have been using it for months

[Prehistoricman]

Using the firewall! What a good idea, can't believe it didn't cross my mind.

I'll still investigate the ultimap too though.

Thanks guys

[RandomGuy11]

Did you manage to find out what makes the game exit? And a way to stop it?

I can give you some more insight on -some- of the workings of it maybe. A method I've been using often (as the one using a shared library, not the one sharing) is just start the game. Then as soon as it says "bla bla wants his game back, you have 2 minutes left" I will unplug my ethernet cable (no wi-fi connected on purpose). This will make the timer stop altogether (I will usually just play like this). If I plug my internet cable in again trhough, it will start counting down again from 5. This might possibly provide some further insight on what might kill the process. I really hope there is some more efficient way to just bypass the killing of the process instead of having to be unable to use the internet when playing those games.
So I would think the call calling for my game to quit comes from steam over the internet.

Lastly I would like to ask, how do you block steam in your windows firewall? I've tried doing this, but it seemed to not be working for me? I disabled them, but steam was still able to work properly (and kill my process)


EDIT:
What has worked on some (singleplayer) games for me is simply using task manager to kill steam, that way as long as steam isn't running, it won't close the game. On some other games that can be played either singleplayer or co-op however it just crashes the game if I kill steam.