Vesper – Lust & Hunger [v0.2.21.0] By Starhound Studios

– How does Cheat Engine work?

It’s basically a debugging tool on steroids. There’s a lot to unpack on how it works, but my scripts rely on AOB signatures (be they hardcoded ASM cheats, pointers with offsets, etc) and LUA scripting. The challenge is to create consistent and resilient cheats working between versions, but there’s nothing permanent with compilers and optimizations.

AOB signatures work like this: a byte signature is scanned to find the first match in the .text (code) section, then CE gracefully injects a detour jump to the allocated cheat script (or in a code cave) that tweaks the game behavior and then returns to the next instruction after the injection. Sometimes AOB-based cheat scripts modify a function’s behavior in-place.
Lua scripts that are running in the CE’s lua engine are basically meta-scripts to extend CE’s functionality with a neat API.

– How to use Cheat Engine?

First of all, make sure your Cheat Engine instance is running with administrator rights to make sure it is able to read, write to memory and communicate with kernel properly. To do that, you can grant administrator rights by clicking RMB on Cheat Engine shortcut (to open its context menu), then go to Properties -> Compatibility (tab) and tick ‘Run this program as an administrator’. Likewise, you can go to CE settings (when in the CE GUI, Edit->Settings) you can also find ‘Always attempt to launch as admin’ option. Or if you need it once, just run CE as an administrator (RMB on the CE shortcut, ‘Run as an administrator’

For cases when tables DON’T have an attach script in them:
When Cheat Engine is opened and/if a cheat table for a specific game is loaded into it, the first thing that’s needed is to attach to the specific game executable.

After pressing search button, you will see active processes with their PIDs exposed by Windows. If you struggle to find yours, check other tabs, there are 3 of them: Application, Processes, Windows.
For cases when tables DO have an attach script in them:
You’ll see a script like *this*, just activate the checkbox. Does it fail to attach? Please read ‘Why does the attach script fails when I activate it?’ below

Once you are attached, activate other scripts that you need and have fun. Usually scripts are quite simple to use, but if there are instructions, just follow them to make it work. Sometimes certain actions are required for scripts to work properly, .e.g pressing a button to catch a pointer, loading into the game/level world to ensure a character actor is constructed, etc.

– What’s a Cheat Engine table?

CE cheats are usually distributed as lightweight XML tables and have a .CT extension. You will need Cheat Engine installed on your PC to run CE tables.
NB: Most cheat engine tables are created for Windows (x86-64 architecture), you won’t find many tables for MacOS apps and arm64 architecture.
NB: You can see the layout of any table by opening it with any text editor like NotePad++

– Where do I put a cheat table / .CT file?

Wherever you deem suitable, usually tables are standalone .CT files and making dependencies for them isn’t a good practice. When you run a cheat table, it’s loaded into and interpreted by Cheat Engine.