Cheat Engine

[firefly7k]

Hello there !

I'm working on a game with online leaderboard, and would like to know if there was some easy way to detect CE, i'm not for blocking it or banning cheaters, but just avoiding Player using it to be in the leaderboard ( and they could restart the game without CE and score on the leaderboard )

the easy way would be go with EasyAntiCheat directly, but there might be an other solution that would allow player to cheat in single player.

Any advices ?

[Dark Byte]

look for a process called "cheatengine*.exe" and silently not record it. (Or record it only for the person that made the score, and publicly never mention anything about shadow scores)

But honestly, as long as you don't stream your whole game, your leaderboards are going to get messed up eventually, no matter what protection you're going to use. (Not even EAC is going to prevent that)

[Csimbi]

I'm not so sure that will help.
I think a lot of people rename the EXE and customize it further to trick basic anti-cheat.
Or, they just use trainers, which can be anything, really, even command line, lol.

I assume you are a game maker.
You should know Cheat Engine is not the only tool available - there are a lot of choices available for a cheater.
Rather than trying to detect Cheat Engine, similar tools and custom trainers, try a) protecting the data and b) detect cheating with sensible checkpoints.

You can protect data with dynamic encryption and allocation. This will deter all wannabe players (but not pros). Protect only the variables worth protecting because encryption requires a lot of resources. Pros will get around this eventually (all it takes is time, really) and they'll build trainers, so detecting cheating is a better way.
Another way to protect data is keeping it on the server side and treating all clients 'untrusted' and the data they send 'unreliable' at all times.

Detecting cheating should be fairly simple using common sense.
For example, if someone has 100 gold, earned/received 50 gold recently but spent 1000, you will know that player is cheating.
Simple checkpoints like that work surprisingly well and they are not demanding much performance, either.
Define your measurements well and you can catch any cheater.
You can detect movement through walls and teleportation with calculating the shortest legal route between two points and checking the time required to get there.
Aimbots can also be caught fairly easily with checking mouse movement.
Etc. etc.
When you do your design, forget single player sessions - let cheat people there. Focus on protecting multiplayer/online play.
Lastly, do a bunch of test sessions to identify false positives and refine your metrics.
Speedrunners are not necessarily cheating, they are exploiting issues left in the game (software and design issues, typically). Be aware that these might also be picked up as cheaters, too. Fix the bugs and you won't have to deal with these.

You could try code integrity checks, but they could cause jitter (due to performance demand) and they are fairly easy to trick. Plus, you would notice changes to the code, but not the changes to the data. So, again, not recommended.

Anyhow, my 2 cents: trying to detect CE is waste of time, by doing so you enter into a cat-mouse game you can't win.
Beginners and lazy people (like me) use Cheat Engine because it's very convenient.
Pros use more sophisticated tools (like ollydbg, x64dbg, ghidra, Cerbero Suite, IDA free, IDA pro, etc.) anyhow and often times they don't even need to have the process running to understand and change your code(!).