Cheat Engine

Xero44 · How do I cheat? Reputation: 0 Joined: 14 Mar 2020 Posts: 2

I've been hacking a game for the past week now. I have found a lot of the addresses I needed to modify to get the effects that I wanted Via cheat engine. I know it is through memory manipulation, but my first question is:

Can you use these memory addresses to find the actual address in the .exe for hex editing? I am looking to make a permanent patch for a game I play, addressing some balance issues, and I have found quite a bit, but when it comes to the stats of the weapons I can't seem to find them, So I looked to cheat engine to find out the value. I.E. one weapon does 7 damage to health. I could modify it via cheat engine, but that would not be actually patching it. Is there a way to find the static addresses that assign these stats to the memory?

My second question is more of a shot in the dark, that I honestly don't think is possible, but I'll ask the experts.

If you have a game that has 6 characters, would it be possible to inject a 7th selectable character via script or some other hack? Seems like a stretch to me, but it would be interesting to learn, although if it manages to work, I imagine it would be quite complex.

DanyDollaro · Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2020 8:31 pm Post subject:

1) If you want the effects of your scripts to be permanent you have to patch the exe code and save it, normally I have never done it with Cheat Engine (I think there is no possibility) but I do it with a debugger called Xdbg (There are many debuggers that implement this option).

2) Of course you can find the damage of a weapon, but you must have basic reverse engineering skills, I will show you the steps:
Considering a player with 100 life points and a weapon that does 5 damage, you must find the player's life and from there you can get the code that decreases life, reading the code you will find a part in which the damage of the weapon is subtracted from the life of the player, so something like:

Xero44 · How do I cheat? Reputation: 0 Joined: 14 Mar 2020 Posts: 2

Thank you very much for your reply. To better describe what I mean by the second one is,

In a singleplayer mode when you go to select a character you only have 6 characters to choose from. Could you add a 7th choice, new character to play as, by injecting that new character in via a script of some sort.

I know you can do similar things with LUA when it comes to different aspects of the games.

ParkourPenguin · Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2020 10:36 pm Post subject:

1: That heavily depends on what language the game was coded in. If it's something statically compiled (e.g. C/C++), it should be easy by looking at the code accessing the value. That code should be part of an exe loaded into memory that is similar to the exe stored on disk. Patching the exe on disk shouldn't be too far different from changing it in memory- e.g. it won't use the same offset.

If it's written in some language using JIT compilation or interpretation, you'd need to find where the original bytecode is stored and change that. The way that requires the least knowledge or experience would be to use a decompiler, if you can find one for that particular language. You'd still need to extract the bytecode in a form readable by the decompiler.

2: Technically yes, that's possible, but it might not be practical, especially for a beginner. That would require reverse engineering that's most often best done by other tools (e.g. IDA) even in the simplest of scenarios.