Cheat Engine

[MrBigGuy]

I'm currently playing a game that lowers a player's crosshair a bit below the centre, and I'm trying to find the exact pixel position in memory that it draws it to. But so far, I've had no luck, even in cases where I know what the value should be.

The crosshair's Y position is (I'm playing on a 1920x1080 monitor), according to my best guess from zooming in on a screencap with paint.net, ~663-664 pixels under normal circumstances, as opposed to the centred 539-540. Luckily, you can shift this position by editing a value in memory, so what I do is search for float values between 660-666 (giving a bit of wiggle room), switch the crosshair to being centred, then search again for values between 537-545 (again, providing a bit of wiggle room). I'll keep repeating back and forth until I narrow it down to the position of the crosshair.

And then here's the problem - I get literally nothing, in the end. The value that matches the crosshair's pixel position is nowhere to be found anywhere, even though I know for a fact it exists *somewhere* in memory. I'll try making the scan not care whether it's checking copy-on-write memory, writable memory, executable memory, etc., and I still get nothing. Not even searching for short ints that are more sensible for positioning HUD elements (even though a check of the game's internals showed me that they use floats for doing so, and alias screen elements to account for being placed between pixel positions like 220.85 or such) yielded me any results.

At first I figured that this game might just use a different positioning system for its HUD elements - after all, the "top of screen = 0 y position" convention isn't universal to my knowledge. I also found out through some painstaking disassembly that the game seems to round your screen height to a nearest preset default (in my case it used 1280x720) when positiong the HUD, but even more disassembly also showed that they seem to convert these values back to your real resolution, so that's probably not a path that will lead anywhere.

With all of this learned, I did extra searches, took into account the various other positioning systems it could use (i.e. perhaps a fraction of the screen, like 0.5 if the crosshair is at the centre, along with the aforementioned others), and... still found nothing. At this point I was pretty much sure that the value in memory was probably part of some function's return value (like the devs just call a GetCrosshairPosition(); function or something), and I have no idea how to track values like that, unfortunately.

Where should I start and how should I solve this? I can provide more context if need be; any extra information I'll gladly provide.

(P.S., I'm using the most recent version of Cheat Engine)

[ParkourPenguin]

You're making a lot of assumptions about how the game works.
The "correct" way of going about this would be to look at the code that accesses the value you edit to shift the crosshair. Figure out why changes in that value affect the crosshair's position.