Adding tactical pause through Cheat Engine' Speedhack

[Sloul Des Tucs]

Using Cheat engine (https://www.cheatengine.org) it is possible to slow down a game, in the process emulating either a slow motion or a total pause.
Though even when it works it isn't a perfect solution and cannot fully replace a game developped or modded with Tactical pause.
More often than not it will slower the pace of a game, as a whole, and while it is compatible to some games, to others, the slowing process will reflect on the game's performances (less responsive UI, slower screen scrolling and mouse scrolling).

How to enable Cheat Engine speedhack in your games

Set your Cheat Engine before-hand:
You'll want to set a hotkey bind to one or multiple speedhack. If you want to keep it simple just use Space for Toggle Speed Hack.
Go to Edit > Settings > Hotkeys > Toggle Speedhack
When that's ready then:

1. Launch Cheat engine, then launch your game
2. Once your game is launched alt-tab to Cheat Engine, then select the game process within cheat engine (top left corner)
3. Enable speedhack and edit the desired speed, then disable speedhack before alt-tabing back to your game
4. leave cheat engine open while running the game

Noteworthy mentions:
You might hear a windows sound each time you enable/disable Speedhack. In order to disable it, go to: Control panel -> Hardware and sound -> Sound -> Sounds -> Sound scheme -> No sounds -> Apply -> Ok
Don't forget to disable the hotkey you assigned to speedhack in the game controls scheme. Otherwise, they will conflict (usually game options -> controls -> rebind hotkeys)


*UI tooltips and screen scrolling will always be delayed while using Speedhack

Speedhack friendly games

Battle Realms: Winter of the Wolf
(the one found on GOG.com not steam Zen Edition)
Lowest friendly speed achieved is 0.002
Lowest speed achieved is 0 (tactical pause) but losing left click drag'n'drop for unit selection (not a big deal in that game - between simple click, double click and groups shortcuts)

Dungeon & Dragons: Dragonshard
Lowest friendly speed achieved is 0 (tactical pause)
The game doesn't seem to like alt-tab that much

Speedhack ok games

Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun: Firestorm
Screen scrolling heavily impacted, but otherwise everything working good

Speedhack not working at all - crash or else

C&C Generals & Zero Hour -- Ignoring Speedhack entirely
C&C Red Alert 2 -- Crash
Kingdom Under Fire: War of Heroes -- Speedhack slow down the whole game, mouse speed included.
All Blizzard games (Starcraft, Warcraft) -- They'll simply crash on cheat engine and this is by design.



*These are preliminary tests and I have yet to use speedhack extensively on these games and others to unlock all secret doors. Please, let me know your observations if you too are doing tests.
Thanks to Kcnue for inspiring me making this thread.

[Sloul Des Tucs]

So here is a little video project I have been working on lately to showcase what's possible with Cheat engine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wChDEifuUg4
That's probably a wet dream for any fan of Battle Realms, who also happen to be a tactical pause enjoyer (it is pretty much my case).

And... that's also a good time to introduce Pause Tacticality youtube's channel,
It's nowhere new, but I never introduced it properly around these blocks, so here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/@pausetacticality

It's mostly used to showcase the Tactical Pause feature in various games (that has some great effect on the nay sayers who swear to their gods that there is no such feature in these games - Age of Empire for instance).


And well, if any of you appreciate the work i'm making on these, otherwise, very modest video, please leave a like

[Sloul Des Tucs]

Just found this tool: https://www.wemod.com/
It seems to be able to slow a game to 0.2 of its native speed, that's less than CE's speedhack, but worth a check.