Cheat Engine

gecko · How do I cheat? Reputation: 0 Joined: 02 May 2016 Posts: 6

Hi all,

I am looking into using cheat engine to help me add a new feature to a flight simulator. I would like to have a way to find a certain value (engine coolant temperature) and have it be gradually reduced once a certain temperature is reached until it reaches a specified lower value at which point cheat engine will not interfere until the upper limit temperature is reached again. It would also need to run an exe file at both temperatures. Alternatively - and possibly more helpful, can cheat engine force the game to reload information from a file each time a value reaches a certain number? All of this needs to be running in the background as the game is running.

I am a beginner in every sense of the word, but I'm up to learning what I need to. But before I start I'd like to know if cheat engine has the capability to do what I'm trying to do. Thanks for any help.

ParkourPenguin · Posted: Tue May 03, 2016 12:10 pm Post subject:

Yes, CE can easily do that.

I'm not sure what you mean by "force the game to reload information from a file". If you just mean reading from a file and writing some value to an address, you can use Lua to do that pretty easily. If you mean something analogous to loading an encrypted/compressed save file, then you'd have to find the subroutine which does that. This would require knowledge of assembly which is difficult for beginners to learn.

While you can do all this in asm, it would be beneficial to learn Lua since you can do more complicated things faster with it. The first thing you should do, however, is the CE tutorial in its entirety.

++METHOS

gecko · How do I cheat? Reputation: 0 Joined: 02 May 2016 Posts: 6

Thanks for the replies. Sounds like good news for me. I'll start reading the tutorials.

This will not primarily be for online use, would be nice, but it's not the main objective. By reloading a file, I mean that the sim has a couple files for each individual aircraft that contain all the information for its flight characteristics, including the engine temperature information. The info is loaded from the files when the sim starts, and replacing the files with modified ones when the sim is running produces no change until the next time the sim is run. One way of getting the results I want could be to have a script swap files while the sim is running, and then force the sim to reload or refresh the file.

Also, can Lua scripts be compiled into an exe?

++METHOS · Posted: Wed May 04, 2016 11:57 am Post subject:

You don't really need to do anything with external files since you can write all of the parameters inside of your script to perform any tasks based on whatever conditions that you have outlined. In other words, you can consolidate everything to a single script if you wanted to, without relying on any other files or programs.

LUA scripts can be included to run automatically or as you see fit inside of your table or trainer. You can compile your trainer as an exe using CE, or write it yourself if you have any programming knowledge.

gecko · How do I cheat? Reputation: 0 Joined: 02 May 2016 Posts: 6

Does this apply even when things I want to modify back and forth are constants - for example, the location of a fixed contact point or the cooling factor of a fluid?

Will the compiled exe be independent of CE, or will other users need to install CE to use it?

++METHOS · Posted: Thu May 05, 2016 11:30 am Post subject:

Static values can be changed, yes.

Independent of CE as long as you select the box for the gigantic trainer.

gecko · How do I cheat? Reputation: 0 Joined: 02 May 2016 Posts: 6

Great! I think this will work well for me if I can figure it out. Thanks.

gecko · How do I cheat? Reputation: 0 Joined: 02 May 2016 Posts: 6

Alright, so I've installed cheat engine and have been working through the tutorial (slowly, not much free time). I've tried applying the steps to the simulator, and have been able to find a few values interested in. However, when I try to change them, nothing happens. When I pull up the sim again the values are the same as they were before. When I look back at cheat engine, I see that the value has changed back there as well. I'm doing exactly what I did to change values in the tutorial, so what gives?

++METHOS · Posted: Thu May 12, 2016 10:28 pm Post subject:

If the game is an offline game, then you probably haven't found the correct addresses. Some of the addresses that you found may be visual-only addresses. Also, the real values may or may not be equal to what you see in the game.

gecko · How do I cheat? Reputation: 0 Joined: 02 May 2016 Posts: 6

Hmm, I see how that could be the case with one of them. The coolant temperature displays on screen in degrees Celsius, but in the flight dynamics file, the value is in degrees Rankine. The address I found is the one for the displayed value, as it always matches what I see in cheat engine as it goes up and down.

The other value I tried is ammo count, but I don't see how that could be what's happening here as it is simply giving the number of rounds you have left.