Reading from the memory : Developer's Corner - Page 2

If you are wanting to intercept keyboard or mouse commands, I have an interface that does that.

(If you are making a plugin, wont work with scripts yet)

I want to intercept internal game function calls and rip the information straight out of the game rather than rely on capturing screen information. My game of choice uses some blending techniques (or so I've read) so that changes in lighting and background actually affect things like the health bars making screen reading very unreliable. However, the game uses the UT engine of which there's a lot of information on internal game structure out in the open, which I thought would make adding hooks a reasonable thing to attempt.

I've seen a few links on thecodeproject web site with tutorials on hooking in c#.net (yes this would definitely have to be a plugin) and there's obviously the msdn to have a flick through. I think I'm right in saying this is only local hooking (since I know the programs/dlls to hook into), but I'm not sure if I'm going to need any more information other than object/class and function call name - I guess this is the bit I have to learn!

Thanks for the advice above, I'll probably be begging for more though in the near future.

OKay let's try to help you a little more.

You want to hook your client by using SetWindowsHookEx function.

Assuming that your are going to hook client's process you need to crate a dll taht will be content your hook function declare as an export.

Assuming that your dll is called Hook.Dll.

You need to define in this dll an exported function for example a MouseProc function.

In your process, the first thing you need is to get client to hook main thread id (i do this with toolhelp32.dll).
Secondary you need to import Hook.Dll in your process space and retrieve the module handle (GetModuleHandle)
Tertiary Get your MouseProc Addr using GetProcAddress (HMod, lpzFunctionNAme)
Finally you need to call SetWindowsHookEx with all this parameters you retrieve.
At this point you have injected in your client processes your dll Hook.Dll and you intercepting all mouse messages.

More interesting in your dll you can wrote a function for her entry point.

Entry point is a function called with one parameters by the kernel when a process or a thread load or unload (attach or unattach) a dll.

In this entry point you can do a lot of things like :
Creating a shared space between your process and the hooked process (CreateFileMapping).
Create a new thread with messaging queue to manage incoming command from your process to dll in target process.
And finaly memory patching target process exe code.

If you need help on this topic i will answer you but i'am mainly programming in delphi since many years so C++ is difficult for me

What is the game?

Do you have the address of the function you want to hook?

If it will help, I can add a function to the IXUWindow to allow you to hook very easily a function and call your function when it gets called if that would help?

It's Lineage2. It's built on the UT2003 engine and there are 'depackers' around that read the engine files and tell you all of the objects/classes and functions that are in the main dll's. I can find out the offset of the functions within the dll's, but then I would still need to find out where the dll is loaded into the game memory space. I'm not sure if you're able to do that easily, but I'm going to continue reading up and experimenting with C# in any case.