Cheat Engine

[Exao]

Hello,

TL;DR at the end

Originally a friend and I played Borderlands 1 co-op, but we found the game was too easy. I came across a tool/hack called Borderlands number of players setter. It claimed that it was made using Cheat Engine (or with the aid of Cheat Engine). Basically after you start the game, the program scanned for the memory address of the # of players, and after it locates it, you are free to change the slider bar to, for example, make the game think there are 4 players when there are only 2 players, thus making the enemies harder.

A couple years later (now), we wanted to play again, and I'm finding that that program can't locate the # of players address anymore. Every time it says something like "Couldn't find number of players location". I eventually just downloaded Cheat Engine and tried to do it myself. I don't know a lot about Cheat Engine, but I figured out enough to search for the value "1", have my friend join, search for "2", have my friend leave, search for "1" again etc, until it narrows down the numbers enough for me to be able to "guess" which one is the right value for the # of players.

There are some problems with the way I'm doing it. It only narrows down to about 20 or more values, even if my friend has joined and left 10 times, it just stops narrowing it down at a certain point, which tells me that BL has multiple variables (maybe temp ones, or ones that are recalculated every frame) - that's fine. Sometimes if I change a value (from 2 to 4), it immediately sets it back to 2. Must be recalculated every frame. Sometimes if I change a value it crashes the game. Oops. All that time wasted just to try it all again. Eventually though we would get it to work.

However, now we're at a point in the game where we have better stuff, and it's hard to determine 100% sure if I've actually changed the right value because of this. This is really frustrating as I just don't know how to know FOR SURE that I did indeed change the num of players value.

So my question is how would I figure out FOR SURE which one is the correct num of players value?

What I assumed the original Num players setter program did was possibly search for some unique value that is perhaps always the same value, and then offset from that location to the player number location - if perhaps that location is always at the same distance away from the first. This would be reliable, unless BL was updated and data got moved around and now that program no longer works right, which is what I suspect.

TL;DR
Any advice on how to manually locate the number of players value in Borderlands 1, in order to increase it so the game becomes more challenging, without guesswork? (i.e. friend leaving/joining, watching any values in CE changing from 1 to 2... narrowing down to ~20 values, changing random values to "4")

Thank you!

[Exao]

Another TLDR

How can I use CheatEngine to properly locate the "number of players" value in Borderlands 1, so I can increase that value to 4, making the game more difficult? In the past, I used a program that someone made using CE (Called Borderlands Number of Players Setter) but it fails to locate the value now, possibly because BL was patched?

[Rydian]

1 - Find a value that does work properly.

2 - Right-click it and choose "find what writes to this address". This will open a new window and it'll start logging any writes to that value.

3 - Have your friend join/leave a few times. Try to figure out which of those lines of code is responsible for changing it and when. If one of them is something like a mov statement that runs constantly, that's good.

4 - Click the result, then choose "show disassembler". This will open another new window.

5 - Scroll up a bit so the highlighted line is in the middle (ans we can see plenty of code before and after it, and then take a screenshot for us.

If all goes well one of us might be able to make a simple AOB script for you from the data in the screenshot.

[Exao]

Hello, thanks for the reply.

I haven't had the chance to try this yet, but reading over your steps, I want to ask:

The way I've previously been doing it is having my friend join/leave over and over while searching for ANY value that is changing back and forth between "1" and "2". Unfortunately, even after narrowing it down by him joining and leaving 5+ times, it only narrows it down to about 20-30 values.

Changing certain values (2 to 4) immediately crashes the game. Changing certain values seemingly does nothing. Changing certain values does nothing, but the value is re-set (back to 2) seemingly recalc'd every frame. And unfortunately, if I do change the correct one, it doesn't really have any verification feedback -- there is no conveniently displayed player count. Changing the correct one makes the enemies somewhat tougher, but even that is hard to determine if it's actually worked. So my question, with your steps, how can I be sure I've marked the correct value?

My other question is what do you mean by find a value that does work properly? Is this basically saying, test until I find the correct player number value with the (less-than-guaranteed) method I've been currently using? Or does it mean find any static value that doesn't ever change to garbage data, etc?

[Rydian]

You'd just try it like usual, see if the enemies feel stronger I guess. You could try setting it to a really high value to make them really strong as a test or something.

Yes, it means use the method you've been using to find the address. Then find the code that writes to it and show us the code.

('Cause I'm too lazy to install BL1 and get other people to do it and join me.)