CoSMOS Gamehacking Tool

If you look through the (game) hacking scene you'll very quickly notice that the advance tutorials are very rare.

When I started game hacking I always asked myself why therea are so many basic and so much less advance tutorials and thought people don't like to share information. But now I can tell that it's mostly because the more complex things you cannot put into an tutorial because every game is different. And even experts like me or Caliber or other trainer makers out there have to admit that even for us... it's sometimes just trial and error. Digging around. Spending 30 hours to figure something out. Sometimes we find cheats by accident, while we looked for something we found something very different. Sometimes we just change values and see what it does.

And on every game we have no idea what we can expect and how to get what we are looking for. The only thing that helps us A LOT is experience. Experience, experience, experience. Just because we tried things ourselves we get a feeling of what we do. This isn't something you can put into a tutorial that someone reads and then he knows what to do on every game.

If I tell you that for example the ID is at offset 0x30 and it's 6431 for player and 7622 for the enemy... I don't show or tell you that it took me 2 hours to figure it out and how many times I failed by finding it. But especially that is the most important part at all.

Thanks for the suggestions though, I might to an AOB scan tutorial in the future. I'll have to see if I can find the time for a more advanced but very game specific tutorial.

I find it kind of ironic that the beginner toots tell the beginner to take cosmos out of beginner mode. Why even have beginner mode? Even beginner mode rags on itself by saying the other modes are faster.

I don't think the beginner tutorials really teach anything more than how to do one specific cheat and that they do not appropriately convey things in a way which would be transferable to other games.

$.02

Please, old sage, divine us with your knowledge on how to improve our tutorials and documentation so that they are more appropriate for the beginners.

I am still not really clear what the purpose of beginner mode is, the only things I have found so far is that you can not search for specific types of values.

The current in-app tutorial experience is thus: You start a tutorial, it highlights 3 things, you push next to cycle endlessly through those 3 things. You get annoyed with that so you hit skip to close the tutorial and (assuming you don't give up and go to the forums) you open a game and direct cosmos to the game. At this point if already know what you are doing then you'll open a new memory scanner. Beginners will just be confused by why they are still at the welcome screen and why the tutorial has abandoned them.

On the other hand if you already opened a new memory scanner, SURPRISE, the tutorial comes back to identify more items of interest and the tutorial stops there. If you're super clever at this point or are at least familiar with memory scanners the you're good to go, if you're actually a beginner you're off to the video tutorials that show you how to get a few end results but don't really explain any of the reasoning behind getting those results.
No explanation provided for why item I want to edit MIGHT BE this kind of value, just get out of beginner mode and select this type for this one item in this one game. It could have been done in beginner mode, it would just take longer because you wouldn't be able to narrow down the search parameters so far as I can tell.

Do not get me wrong, I know this stuff can get pretty arduous but if we're calling something a beginner tutorial and providing absolutely zero in the way of explanation then what is a beginner learning other than how to get more hints in Doodle Kingdom? When try to hack more hints in Sage's Wild Adventure Deluxe and it's not a string how will they know that? Sure they could search for All but that's scrub stuff from beginner mode that they will never ever need to use.

As for 0x90's concerns about voicing over the videos, text to speech!??

I hope that gives you some ideas to work with.

[Edited by moderator Taurusplopp, 6/1/2017 4:56:25 AM]

I plan on researching how to use CoSMOS myself, so I don't always have to bother you guys with a request. Usually, I'm looking for some type of cheat that has to do with health and it's related values in the code. Right now, I'm looking to play the original Tomb Raider with such a cheat, so I have a question regarding the Beginner Mode tutorial video on health hacking in Dues Ex. Is that video pretty indicative of changing health values in all games, even with the age and complexity difference, or are there other aspects of CoSMOS and overall coding that I'll probably need to look into?

While we try t cover most games with our tutorials its of course, heavily depends on the game itself. Each game is different and for each game the values you are scanning for are stored differently. If one of our shown ways aren't succesful, you will need to ry a different way. Its the same we do when we create trainers. We start with common things and tif they don't work, we try more advance things.

Theh documentation of CoSMOS has a topic about possible ways of how data is stored in memory and what to search for. For beginners its worth to take a look at. However, experience is the key to success. The more games you work with, the better you get a feeling of how to deal with cheating a game.

Thanks for the quick reply. If trainers act on the same principal, why do they seem to take more resources to develop? Is it because of how they quickly make changes of a running program with a press of a button, or is it because it takes a lot of investment to support a game that is constantly changing via updates?

Finding and changing a value in Cosmos is only temporary, you'll need to find it again each time you start the game or in some cases each new level.

A trainer or script finds the value and changes it for you.

Finding and changing a value in Cosmos doesn't require any knowledge of assembly code but writing a trainer or script does.