Cheat Engine

[hydropulse17]

Very inexperienced hacker here, If I can't find the address by exact value, or if I do find it and changing it doesn't change anything in game, I give up or download someone elses table. I firmly believe that as long as it's not hurting anyone else, players should have zero resistance cheating to their heart's content and devs that believe otherwise are assholes. It's not a common opinion... So many games go to such great lengths to prevent players from cheating and I just don't understand the mindset behind it, and it really ticks me off.

I am an experienced programmer though. I've allowed cheating in my games through built in codes, and by use of XML docs to store information so that a user may change their information however they please. But I've become curious about hacking, with CE in particular.

Say I have an integer value for magazine bullets. I want to isolate the address and make it active, thus acquiring infinite ammo/no reload. Sounds applicable to thousands of games, but I want to know what makes it simple in one game and difficult in another? How come in "A Random FPS Game 4" I just have to search in CE for the amount of loaded bullets, fire a few, search again, until I find the value and I change it and it works in game, but when I play "Another Random FPS Game" I find the value that corresponds to the magazine ammo, but changing it does nothing? Or I can't find the value at all despite it seeming so simple?

What can I do to make my games simple and straight forward to hack? Is doing nothing to prevent it enough? Do certain engines have built in protection? I use Monogame and Unity mostly.

[Dark Byte]

it depends on how the game is programmed.
let's take ammo for example:
you can store the number of bullets left as a simple int and it's easily found

but it's possible you're one of 'those people' that "REALLY" love object oriented programming, and create a Bullet class and every single bullet is an instance of the Bullet class. Then you put those bullets in a container (e.g a Clip class) inside another container (total ammo)
to display ammo then each time you shoot you count the total number of Bullet objects you have

and trust me, that stuff is hard to find


another thing that makes it more difficult is using a scripting language that creates a new variable and then destroys the old one each time it's changed.