Cheat Engine

[Banjo Patterson]

Hi everyone,

I've been having a play around with AoE2 recently, and I've managed to find the base pointer to the player's resources with no trouble. However, trying to locate the pointer to their town center has proved difficult, and I'm wondering if it possible? As I imagine this building doesn't particularly exist until it is created, so maybe a pointer is generated on the fly when that building is initialised?
If anybody could confirm or deny this for me that would be awesome. I've done some extensive pointer scanning (2000 address offset, 10 levels deep, whoops) and each time the pointer paths are all eliminated on reset of the game.
Any insight is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

EDIT: After having a look around, ParkourPenguin mentioned a thread: forum cheatengine org viewtopic php t=572465 regarding injection copies that seems like it should hopefully work in this case, in case anyone else has the same question that I do.

[ParkourPenguin]

Consistent pointers don't have to exist- the game could dynamically calculate a reference to an object (and possibly cache it deep in the stack) if/when needed. A hash map is an obvious example, but this applies to other containers too. If the positions of elements in the container aren't consistent between games, any found pointers with nodes in the container will be invalidated.

Try to select the unit/building in question and then search for a pointer to the unit/building you've selected. Hovering your mouse over the unit/building might also work (set up hotkeys to pause the process if you do this; it helps to have your mouse when generating the pointermap).

Code injection is usually a better option; however, it requires basic knowledge of x86 / x86-64 architecture and CE's AutoAssembler.

[Banjo Patterson]

Thanks for your reply! I'll definitely give that a shot. Sounds good on the code injection side of things too, I'm getting pretty comfortable with ASM/AA so I'm looking forward to giving that a go.