How Do You Enable Cheat Mode?

[Ryan Paul Fialcowitz]

Apparently there's a cheat mode in this game but I'm having difficulty finding information about it. This thread has a screenshot:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/102500/discussions/0/143388511228163210/

Any ideas on how to enable it?

[Ryan Paul Fialcowitz]

Sure, add me as a friend and I'll walk you through the proceess.

[Rune]

I just did!

[Revolucas]

Nguyên văn bởi Aqbayli:

I doubt you can find information on the web to access the cheat mode of this game. It was a self discovery I made few months after I've discovered the game. I did post a thread here at that time to share it, deleted it few days after.

Reason? Other than Cheat Mode obviously completely ruins the game, the main issue is that it allows you to unlock pre-ordered items and other paid content like the House of Valor Questline and Mass Effect armor suit:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=886497083
btw, you can't fix bugs with Cheat Mode alone, its main purpose was for QA testing. You'd also need knowledge in Reverse Engineering and if you have the knowledge, you can find how to access Cheat Mode anyway.
If you happen to succeed, before posting the way to access it (your choice), remember first that it may be assumed as piracy and that you put your personal real-life information on your Steam account

You'd also need knowledge in Reverse Engineering and if you have the knowledge, you can find how to access Cheat Mode anyway.

How? I see the UI bxml for cheat UI, console commands and keybindings but no way to enable it.

Can it be re-enabled through executable or through the unpacked game files, which is it?

Please just tell us how because it would be a similar method to reenable the dev console and allow us to load lua scripts to mod the game since nobody has figured out how to reconstruct the lua scripts from the lua_bxml.

[Rune]

I'm pretty sure he isn't following the thread anymore.. I sent him a friend request months ago and he has never even noticed it long enough to accept it [or not].

[Ryan Paul Fialcowitz]

Nguyên văn bởi Rune:

I'm pretty sure he isn't following the thread anymore.. I sent him a friend request months ago and he has never even noticed it long enough to accept it [or not].

Same here. Makes me wonder if this isn't a hoax of some sort. . .

[DSASMBLR]

Nguyên văn bởi Ryan Paul Fialcowitz:

Same here. Makes me wonder if this isn't a hoax of some sort. . .

That existing in the game isn't a hoax. I've been working on trying to enable it for a couple of weeks now. I've no idea what that person did to enable it, but I've been digging deep. If you do string scans in Cheat Engine for any item in that menu, you'll see it in memory during runtime. Also, you can grep the game's resources and see references to all that stuff within bxml files.

I actually got in contact with one of the developers of the game, who stated they didn't think the function(s) to run the cheats were present in the commercial builds of the game due to a dev cheats #define they left out of the RTM compile. In other words, getting the menu to pop up is one thing, but whether or not you can just click a button and have that cheat be performed, is another.

From everything I've been looking through, if the dev is correct, then getting those cheats to work would require constructing a custom function to pass arguments through to try to get those cheats to work. And the dev's statement seems to conflict with what @Aqbayli claims to have done with that Cheat Mode UI -- namely, used it successfully.

It's very puzzling right now -- especially because it seems like @Aqbayli easily enabled it, but long story short, that Cheat Mode IS present in the game (well, the UI portion of it I know for sure right now, at least).

@Aqbayli: If you happen to see this, I'd love to chat with you privately, and keep the results of said chat private. At this point, I'm just interested in learning what you did to accomplish this. Did you inject a custom Lua console? Did you make use of a Pintool? Startup params? Controller button combo? Custom DLL injection? I'm currently at a loss. =)

[Rune]

It seems likely to me he just dropped all this as a troll now.. his profile is set to private and he won't accept friend requests, so nobody can contact hism. either that or he dropped off the face of the earth, and doesn't use steam anymore.

He sure isn't monitoring this thread.

[Ryan Paul Fialcowitz]

Nguyên văn bởi DSASMBLR:

Nguyên văn bởi Ryan Paul Fialcowitz:

Same here. Makes me wonder if this isn't a hoax of some sort. . .

That existing in the game isn't a hoax. I've been working on trying to enable it for a couple of weeks now. I've no idea what that person did to enable it, but I've been digging deep. If you do string scans in Cheat Engine for any item in that menu, you'll see it in memory during runtime. Also, you can grep the game's resources and see references to all that stuff within bxml files.

I actually got in contact with one of the developers of the game, who stated they didn't think the function(s) to run the cheats were present in the commercial builds of the game due to a dev cheats #define they left out of the RTM compile. In other words, getting the menu to pop up is one thing, but whether or not you can just click a button and have that cheat be performed, is another.

From everything I've been looking through, if the dev is correct, then getting those cheats to work would require constructing a custom function to pass arguments through to try to get those cheats to work. And the dev's statement seems to conflict with what @Aqbayli claims to have done with that Cheat Mode UI -- namely, used it successfully.

It's very puzzling right now -- especially because it seems like @Aqbayli easily enabled it, but long story short, that Cheat Mode IS present in the game (well, the UI portion of it I know for sure right now, at least).

@Aqbayli: If you happen to see this, I'd love to chat with you privately, and keep the results of said chat private. At this point, I'm just interested in learning what you did to accomplish this. Did you inject a custom Lua console? Did you make use of a Pintool? Startup params? Controller button combo? Custom DLL injection? I'm currently at a loss. =)

You're doing great work. I very firmly believe that discoveries like this should be shared with the community but not everyone agrees.

Nguyên văn bởi Rune:

It seems likely to me he just dropped all this as a troll now.. his profile is set to private and he won't accept friend requests, so nobody can contact hism. either that or he dropped off the face of the earth, and doesn't use steam anymore.

He sure isn't monitoring this thread.

This was my assesment as well. If you'll notice in every other thread he posted regarding this game he made sure to mention the cheat mode he somehow enabled.

[DSASMBLR]

Well, to be fair, s/he's right about it technically being in the neighborhood of piracy. If it really does allow access to DLC that's still being sold by EA, then s/he's making the right call for himself/herself by not publicly implicating himself/herself through sharing how to essentially enable someone to get something for free that they shouldn't.

Though it is frustrating not being able to figure it out at the moment, I'm thankful s/he even shared what s/he did to any extent at all as it put a visual to things I'd been seeing in code while hacking the game otherwise. The cat is out of the bag now, so it's just a matter of the right person coming along to solve it and it then being up to them as to how/if they want to share.

And, once again, all that I empirically know right now is that the Cheat Mode UI exists. Whether the actual functionality is there or not, is still unknown. There are ways outside of this Cheat Mode to achieve the things @Aqbayli appears to have been doing for people, whether through save editing or modifying memory at runtime which then was written to a save file.

This is pretty much a central focus for me right now, so though I also won't be able to share exactly what to do to enable it, I will at least be more verbose about the functionality of this thing...that is, if I can figure it out, lol.

[Ryan Paul Fialcowitz]

My understanding is that it enabled the pre-order content and such. I can't honestly ascribe something that cannot be bought as piracy- but to each their own. Besides which one doesn't even need this cheat menu to do that. Just saying.

In all honesty if yet another person is going to figure it out, yourself, and again withold if from the community that saddens me. But it is, of course, your prerogative. I'll just restate my opinion that all knowledge should be shared and we have to trust in humanity to use it properly.

[DSASMBLR]

Trust me, I 100% appreciate where you're coming from. I've been in your shoes countless times with other things. I very much do have a "share with everyone" mindset. It's why I even started teaching people how to reverse engineer video games via my YouTube channel in the first place; however, I'm cautious to a fault about not even remotely putting a target on my back for a company like EA to pursue. There's no narrative quite like villifying a hacker after weaving them into a general fabric of malintent. Besides, in the legal world, "intent" loses against "impact" nearly every time.

To note, it's not just the pre-order content the Cheat Mode makes available. It also makes available what's being sold for $4.99 in the "Weapons and Armor Bundle". I can see in the code what all this thing does.

So, it may well be bittersweet if here I've come along to figure this thing out only to just show it more and talk about it, but I'd rather validate what I can and eek right up to the line of what I feel comfortable with sharing, than to stand idly by. Then again, if the general consensus around here ends up being people trying to make me feel like I'm selfish or something in spite of me clearly stating what I feel is a fair case on my behalf, then I will certainly just walk away and leave things be.

(I'm not saying that's what you're doing by any means. I just want to immediately dispel any negatively that anyone might want to project on me from how they feel about @Aqbayli, as well as put the kibosh on any notion that I'm here to perpetuate a hoax, troll people, brag, etc.)

[DSASMBLR]

Nguyên văn bởi Sara Games:

I didn't mention it before because I assume everyone already knows about it and it is probably irrelevant anyways, but there is a .big file unpacker online for several years now.

I guess that enabling this cheat menu is almost certainly related to the .exe and not any other files, but just in case, here is the link to download the unpacker. http://raptor-cestiny.cz/download/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-big-files-extractor.html

I've already combed through all of that stuff. In regards to finding the Cheat Mode, there are 2 primary files that have to do with it:

..\content\assets\uixml\1621411.ui_bxml -- This appears to be the Cheat Mode UI.
..\content\assets\luascript\12842.lua_bxml -- This appears to contain most (all?) actual cheats

While that's well and good, all you see are symbols for cheat names, strings related to buttons/tabs, etc. This .*_bxml format is proprietary, of which there doesn't appear to be any consistent magic data in the SOF (nor anything in the EOF, for that matter). It's almost like these files are part of a large data stream that's parsed when the game loads.

There's a *.bxml unpacker on XeNTaX, but it's a different bxml than the one in KoA, so it doesn't work.

Finally, what you see when browsing those two (and countless other) files in a hex editor, is the same thing you see in memory at runtime.

I may full well be missing something completely, so I don't mean this to sound like I've covered 100% of this scenario. Just sharing some of my notes.

Oh, and in ..\symbol_table_lua_script_path.bin, there's a reference to ..\content\data\scripts\cheats.lua -- of which that file sadly doesn't exist even after unpacking all those *.big files.

[DSASMBLR]

Nguyên văn bởi Sara Games:

PS- I bookmarked your youtube and blog DSASMBLR. You seem like you explain a lot of the things I've always wanted to learn how to do!

Awesome! I hope you find my videos and content useful. =)

[mpnorman10]

A little familiarity with the game lets you avoid inventory-hungry quests (like the one to collect all the dirty books). Until you have all the items and turn it in you cannot get rid of the ones you have, which take up precious inventory slots.

When I say there is no need for cheat codes that is not a moral thing, I am just saying that without such methods, while managing inventory can be tough in many games, including this one, there are certain principles that may be of use to some players:

1) Avoid long, multi-area quests early-on, before you have access to all of the needed areas. Once you have a collection quest, finish it.

2) In general finish areas and all the quests you choose to do within an area (do not even accept, when you have a choice, the ones you do not choose to do).

3) There are several never-ending (or seemingly never ending), collection quests that just keep renewing... I avoid those, preferring quests that can actually finish (keeps quest list cleaner as well). Most of these collection quests are just about getting more of what you already have more than enough of... no upside.

4) Find and take advantage of every opportunity to increase your inventory size.

5) Close counts. You do not need to do this perfectly, just well enough so emptying your inventory at vendors and/or one of your houses is quick and easy without interferring with the flow of your quests. There are a few bugs that cause you to lose inventory slots to items you do not need. I find it easy to avoid all but a small number of these.

6) Keep in mind what you actually use. Do you actually need to keep a pile of every exotic potion? Each different potion takes up another inventory spot, but multiples of one potion only take up one unless you are over a certain number. I get a feel for how many healing potions and repair kits I will need while questing and will take up several inventory slots with that, but while questing and using up those items those spots open up. There is no need to put too fine a point on it. Shards do not use inventory spots but completed gems do, so sell or stash ones you do not immediately use.

Applying those I almost never need to interrupt major quests or area explorations for inventory maintenence. It could be better and I have no problem with those who apply any (legal) cheats. The above are just to help those who cannot or will not use something like that, to help them live with the game inventory system as it is.

Much of the above depends on some familiarity with the game and knowing which quests to avoid. If the developers were around they could fix these problems (like quest items should take up zero space during the quest). That they are not around it an injustice, because this is an excellent game overall, in spite of a few problems.

[Rune]

Nguyên văn bởi DSASMBLR:

Trust me, I 100% appreciate where you're coming from. I've been in your shoes countless times with other things. I very much do have a "share with everyone" mindset. It's why I even started teaching people how to reverse engineer video games via my YouTube channel in the first place; however, I'm cautious to a fault about not even remotely putting a target on my back for a company like EA to pursue. There's no narrative quite like villifying a hacker after weaving them into a general fabric of malintent. Besides, in the legal world, "intent" loses against "impact" nearly every time.

To note, it's not just the pre-order content the Cheat Mode makes available. It also makes available what's being sold for $4.99 in the "Weapons and Armor Bundle". I can see in the code what all this thing does.

So, it may well be bittersweet if here I've come along to figure this thing out only to just show it more and talk about it, but I'd rather validate what I can and eek right up to the line of what I feel comfortable with sharing, than to stand idly by. Then again, if the general consensus around here ends up being people trying to make me feel like I'm selfish or something in spite of me clearly stating what I feel is a fair case on my behalf, then I will certainly just walk away and leave things be.

(I'm not saying that's what you're doing by any means. I just want to immediately dispel any negatively that anyone might want to project on me from how they feel about @Aqbayli, as well as put the kibosh on any notion that I'm here to perpetuate a hoax, troll people, brag, etc.)

How would you feel about privately sharing the cheat console information with someone who verifies to you that they already own all the DLC [in my case, multiple times, twice on PC one for origin and one for Steam, and a third on Playstation 2], would that ease your conscience a bit?