Cheat Engine

[relentlesstech]

To get some practice I have been trying to hack an older game, NFS: Most Wanted (2005), and after finding the addresses to unlock upgrade parts I ran a pointer scan overnight ... Which carried into the next day ... After 30 hours, and almost 4 TB of drive space, then end result was zero pointers - I went as far as 15 levels, and max offset of 999999, and no results. Is it possible that there just AREN'T any valid pointers, and if so, how do I find the base address?

[Dark Byte]

did it find 0 results after the scan or did they disappear after a rescan?

if 0 afrer a scan (and you mention your disk got trashed) then ibthink the results where put in a non ascii folder. (ce 6.8.1?)

move the results to an ascii char only folder and see if that shiws the results

[relentlesstech]

There were 0 results after the initial 30 hour scan. I have 5 1TB HDDs in a RAID, so I still had another TB to play with (this is also where I have the TEMP folder for CE, just labeled as SCANS, so it is ascii compliant) - I went through the usual 'fixes' for 0 results, and in the end the scans take between 28-30 hours, and nothing - I have been trying to figure this out for the past week on my own, but this last day long scan was the last straw for me, time to ask for help LOL

[Dark Byte]

You did mention your harddisk shrunk by 4TB. That means CE did find results and wrote them to disk. (Really, use pointermaps , that way your disk will be spared and no time lost on writing to disk)

What files are in the folder you did the pointerscan in? There should be a pointerfile.ptr and a lot of pointerfile.ptr.# files. Are those all 0 bytes ? Or did you or something else delete them all ?

[relentlesstech]

I deleted them, unfortunately - I am going to try another scan now, but using a pointermap instead, and see what happens


{Update}

Four pointermaps, each one empty - I am so confused right now LOL

[kickclock]

pointer scan ... most game find nothing .i cheat so much game , almost never use it.
99% game , "find what access" get key code , then read disassemble code to understan how game running .this take 99% time.

ce is a good cheat tool, but i think you still need to learn many thing for use it better .

[relentlesstech]

I originally started with 'what access this address', searched for address in hex, but also yielded no results - I managed to create an AoB script that works, but I wanted to have the base addresses for use in a VB.NET trainer ...

On a related note:

[OldCheatEngineUser]

base + (index * scale) + displacement
eax + edi*4 + 118

[relentlesstech]

(Edited to fix EAX)

In my case:

EAX=039C548C ; EDI=00000004

039C548C + 16 = 039C54A2 <-- Correct?

I tried to scan for 039C54A2 (hex box checked), but came up with no match - Did I mess up the math somewhere?

[OldCheatEngineUser]

[relentlesstech]

Oh jeez, I copied the wrong one, but the address is the same for both EDI and EAX, at least I did the math right - I am trying to manually find it now, but searching for '039C54A2' in hex doesn't yield any results (And when doing a 'what accesses' scan the addresses are the same '[eax+edi*4+00000118]' every time)

[Dark Byte]

4*4=10 not 16

[relentlesstech]

[Dark Byte]

hex scan for 039C548C (the value without the offset, else you'd scan for the address you already found which is not what you want)

and check the instructions above to find out how eax gets the value. perhaps there is a calculation done in frontand if that fails, try pointerscan

[relentlesstech]