[Help~Engine] MOD for [Eraser/Pusher] 100% clean bonus notifier

[h4c0rBG]

Good day everybody, I am glad to join the forums here. And now i have a question for you guys, the people who know how to program or reverse/debug.

A few months ago i've purchased the game and i am really enjoying it from time to time. Played with mono in the begining, and always though that "making a million + score" is only done by a cheating or something ... but i encountered youtube videos where in front of my eyes people DO this score and they don't look like cheating. Then i got inspired playing with puzzle chars to get a higher score (thanks to Lu Tze eraser videos).

Something was wrong again, i was able to score good but nearby the same with mono. The problem was that i had no clue about chaining, and now after i know all those secrets (100% clean bonus to eraser and the chaining) i am able to pull out some nice scores from time to time, but still with lots of mistakes (the so called score killers).


------------------------------

Ontopic:


I have some programming skills and can make a directX hook within my own dll, and draw custom sprites (pictures on HDD)

So my current idea is whenever i am having a clean cluster match to have in the top left corner drawn a "good smylie" and when i hit accidently a "lonely block" and i am about to lose the 100% clean bonus to have a "chocked" smylie and if i lose the cluster without 100% clean bonus to have a "facepalm" smylie.

This way i will know easier when i am doing mistakes and train more to correct them in the future.


An example of scorekiller: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_h-gAvdvIg 0:50, 1:17 (and many more)


------------------------------

Basicly what i want from you is, if you know which .dll manages the "clean bonus" to pusher and eraser to share it here, or what values should i look for in a memory scanner or anything related that would help me finding it.

So far i've been doing memory scans with float value 1 and float value 0.5 (1 for 100% and 0.5 for score killer) but this failed, it doesn't seem just right.


[OFFTOPIC]
Also i've been thinking of making a whole new difficulity, but it will not be anything special or different from Lu-Tze super challenges, like having 1000+ traffic, having speed bursts or more, without the need of modifying .ash files by hand, but instead hook game analysing track shape functions, and of course always auto-tagging the songs so they won't go to the original songs scoreboard. This project will be more time consuming, but still feasible. Anyway...
[/OFFTOPIC]

Thank you for your time, kind regards. 

[blue_h3x]

In short: you'd like a visual indicator if you're about to get a clean match or not?

Sounds a fairly useful feature, though not needed that much in my opinion. A lot of the game is encrypted, so would be pretty hard to actually find out the function or value you're after

So far i've been doing memory scans with float value 1 and float value 0.5 (1 for 100% and 0.5 for score killer) but this failed, it doesn't seem just right.

Steam doesn't like memory scanners, and bans people for it btw

[h4c0rBG]

In short: you'd like a visual indicator if you're about to get a clean match or not?

Yes, I would like to know what exactly happennd a few milliseconds ago, did i screw up or managed a good match. I want this for training, and because i love playing +300 traffic songs (i think the one provided in youtube here is 400~) it's hard to see what's happening sometimes.


As for being "really hard to find it" i am not sure since i was able to easily find the chaining and even do tests. You can have maximum 100 chains and then it get's colored as your music intensity color instead of white (edit: only in mono btw). And it was making 3 blue blocks of 144 score to 576 (tested with eraser).

But still i am not interested in chaining at all, there is a bar which shows up pretty fine, the bigger the better.

Steam doesn't like memory scanners, and bans people for it btw

Lucky me, I am not in a Counter Strike Steam VAC protected server, but instead Audiosurf.

Still thanks.  

[blue_h3x]

Steam doesn't like memory scanners, and bans people for it btw

Lucky me, I am not in a Counter Strike Steam VAC protected server, but instead Audiosurf.

just close it before you play any VAC game

In short: you'd like a visual indicator if you're about to get a clean match or not?

Yes, I would like to know what exactly happennd a few milliseconds ago, did i screw up or managed a good match. I want this for training, and because i love playing +300 traffic songs (i think the one provided in youtube here is 400~) it's hard to see what's happening sometimes.


As for being "really hard to find it" i am not sure since i was able to easily find the chaining and even do tests. You can have maximum 100 chains and then it get's colored as your music intensity color instead of white (edit: only in mono btw). And it was making 3 blue blocks of 144 score to 576 (tested with eraser).

But still i am not interested in chaining at all, there is a bar which shows up pretty fine, the bigger the better.

You can always tell if it was a clear match by looking if anything is left on the board I guess.

[Passerby]

Steam doesn't like memory scanners, and bans people for it btw

Lucky me, I am not in a Counter Strike Steam VAC protected server, but instead Audiosurf.

just close it before you play any VAC game

In short: you'd like a visual indicator if you're about to get a clean match or not?

Yes, I would like to know what exactly happennd a few milliseconds ago, did i screw up or managed a good match. I want this for training, and because i love playing +300 traffic songs (i think the one provided in youtube here is 400~) it's hard to see what's happening sometimes.


As for being "really hard to find it" i am not sure since i was able to easily find the chaining and even do tests. You can have maximum 100 chains and then it get's colored as your music intensity color instead of white (edit: only in mono btw). And it was making 3 blue blocks of 144 score to 576 (tested with eraser).

But still i am not interested in chaining at all, there is a bar which shows up pretty fine, the bigger the better.

You can always tell if it was a clear match by looking if anything is left on the board I guess.

i think he is going more for the angle that he is force clearing matches and it is hard to tell of the blocks on grid are from before or after the force clear.

[lavacano201014]

You would have to ask Dylan directly. And even then he MIGHT not know.

[h4c0rBG]

I should not bother him with private messages. For sure other people do, i don't want to be one of them.

Also his last activity currently: Last Active:  July 07, 2010, 01:32:50 pm

Also if he has some interrest he will see and post something in this thread. 

[Lavos^]

With the way Quest3D works, doing it through memory is basically the only way. There is a chain indicator though, it's the long white bar at the top. You know it's a clean match because it's a clean match.

[h4c0rBG]

@Lavos^, thanks for reviving my thread, i've already located the chain indicator, it's not that hard as you mentioned, but gave up on "clean matches" because i think the calculation is done inside of a function, which looks for something else, maybe a boolean, if the match is clean or not, so it will multiply it by the bonus if yes.

Finding that boolean made me gave up on the idea for a while. I have no idea when i will have the free time to dig into this again, but if i do i hope something neat will come out. It will be great to use for recording videos and get info about what is currently happening.

[Lavos^]

Get some kind of breakpoint software, OllyDb can do it I'm pretty sure, and set them all around where you think it might be. Put them around where matches are made and step through the code for clean and non-clean matches.

[h4c0rBG]

Get some kind of breakpoint software, OllyDb can do it I'm pretty sure, and set them all around where you think it might be. Put them around where matches are made and step through the code for clean and non-clean matches.

Thanks for the tips, the only problem is if it's a function which doesn't play with booleans floating around in memory. But instead do check if the match was clean and right away add it to your score. So meaning i will have to dig on the score managing function, and maybe hook it somewhere inlinely. But i am speaking about the worst case scenario, let's hope it's better than that.

[lavacano201014]

There is a chain indicator though, it's the long white bar at the top.

Uh, the chain indicator is on the bottom.

The top one is remaining time.

[Ko-Tao]

I check the actual match score (color-coded points number that appears to the left or right of the score just after each match completes) for any large value cluster that was force cleared with eraser, more due to all the force clear bugs than concern that i might have added an unwanted block (since the latter can generally be easily noticed).

This is a bit of a distraction to do during 300+ traffic songs, so i agree that some sort of associated visual or sound would make a good indicator. Come to think of it, realtime indicators for various other achievements (m21, bn, sr, stealth etc) would be useful as well.

[h4c0rBG]

Hey, Ko-Tao. Thank you for the idea about BN/SR progress, so if you lower your % than 95 you will know that it's time to restart and you will know where exactly on-road you made the mistake and try to fix it. As for the M21 is really good too, because on mono sometimes i think that i've "made it" but in the end appears that i did not. Force-clears can be scary.

[Razaeria]

Well, if you want to go into detail a little more, a numerical chain count wouldn't be bad either.

A stat monitoring mod does sound delicious.