Cheat Engine

[izytang]

What's the generally best approach to finding addresses, values, and code that deal with and handle a currently loaded map for a player? And further, how would you manipulate the game to send the player to a map of your choice?

For context, I'm dissecting "Metal Gear Solid", emulated with PCSX ReArmed, inside of RetroArch. But this would apply to survival horror games (ie. Resident Evil), RPG's, First Person Shooters with single player campaigns, or any type of game where the player leaves one area to another.

I'm guessing there's some type of pointer that addresses to the map that the player is at, but I don't know how you would memory scan or find it. If I could, there'd probably be an array with all of the game's maps. And from there, I could write a script, or do a simple address/value drop down, to select which map the player gets sent to.

Additionally, even with being able to select which map, how do you set where in the map the player is? Say there's 3 doors that lead to/from a given map. What determines where the player would be in that map, and how can you change it? In my case, I've discovered with MGS, there are separate X Y Z coordinates for each map/area of the game. So I'm guessing it would be two steps:

1. Send the player to map [N]
2. Set X/Y/Z coordinates of that map for the player

If that's the process, is there a way to simplify this? In MGS, there are probably 50 - 70 different areas (maps) in the game, so finding the coordinates for each map manually would be tedious.

Granted, many of the above questions are fairly broad and generalized, but I'm mostly curious if there's a good approach to tackling map handling in these types of games. For massive open world type of games, it's fairly straight forward with a set of XYZ coordinates that act to teleport, but it seems like it'd be more involved for games with different maps, levels, areas, stages, etc.