Cheat Engine

[mrjunior]

What are general rules of thumb while making an update friendly script? In this context updates can be frequent but it's usually bug fixes and slight additions/changes. I'm mainly concerned about possible future updates just changing the instruction from something like mov [eax+04],edx to mov [edx+04],eax, which would break the script, does this even happen or am I worrying for nothing? Would like to get a general list of things to keep in mind when working on such scripts besides the answer to the question

[Dark Byte]

It happens if a compileroption or whole compiler is changed.

But that doesn't happen too often. And when it does you'll have to make a new script as there's other things that may have broken (structure offsets could even have been changed)

but generally it doesn't happen and an aobscan script is often good enough

[++METHOS]

1. Use AOB signatures in your scripts for locating your injection points (there are built-in templates and custom templates that can do this for you).
2. Use wildcard entries for all potentially-dynamic bytes in your AOB signature (there are tools/plugins and even custom templates that can automatically create large signatures with wildcard entries already included; some work better than others).
3. Use a template that provides a large block of original code (commented-out), or, make a habit of including an extended AOB signature (again, commented-out), so that you have something to work with in case your original signature fails to locate the new injection location.
4. Learn how to manually scan for AOB signatures in the event that your injection fails.
5. If you share your table(s), get into the habit of including instructions, either inside of your script(s), or, within your table extras, so that users can fix their own tables.

[ParkourPenguin]

Use aobscan template.

If aobscan is too slow and the code is in a module, use the full injection template. It asserts the code at the injection point is what you expected it to be.

Both the aobscan and full injection templates have a comment at the end that shows the code around the injection point. Keep that comment there. It's very useful for updating a script if it breaks.

You can try to get fancy with wildcards and offsets, but that's easy to screw up and is likely to be a waste of time anyway.

[mrjunior]

[ParkourPenguin]