[Request] "Developer" cheat/trainer [PAL] (Endless ocean 1+2, Twilight princess)

[Funkdude]

"Developer" cheat/trainer.

Hi everyone! I'm new to this forum, so this might be in the wrong place, but here goes:

I'm a gamedevelopment student, I also make games commercially, and a great source of inspiration is other games, to see how the big players approach things. For my modded xbox I have some developer trainers (similar to ocarina cheats and the other app) to pause gameplay, detach camera from the player and fly the camera through walls. That way you can take your time to see how the levels are constructed and the scale of the game. If someone is familiar with making wii cheats for homebrew, are there cheat files like this? The games I'm most interested in on wii are: endless ocean 1 and 2, twilight princess, and some others. (I have to admit I still buy games, Im a sucker for booklets and limited editions, so I don't have games mounted on sd or anything).

    In short, can someone point me in the right direction or care to make a file that enables this? I would be very grateful and happy. Other games that have cheats like this are: halo 1 and 2. Starwars republic commando, and halo reach has the theatre mode. Something like that would be awesome.

    Cheers!

(I know, i look like a xbox fanboy, but those are but examples of the kind of cheat im searching for. Also a way to get even more mileage out of your games)

[biolizard89]

Camera hacks are certainly doable, although the difficulty involved varies a lot depending on the game.  Once you find the address where the camera location is stored, creating a "free look" code shouldn't be hard.

[dcx2]

Yeah, if you find the camera object in memory you can manipulate it.  But you'd need to write your own hack for manipulating the camera (moving it around and aiming, preventing the camera from returning to normal, etc).

Also, I don't know if you could do free look with the game paused (at least a debugger pause; maybe an actual in-game pause would work, or you could hack one).  And a lot of games require you to move to a certain area in order to load that part of the map.

EDIT:

If you want to explore around just Twilight Princess, "Super Spinner" code that lets you float around the level.

[Nuke]

You probably need the Matrix Lookat function which makes use of Broadway SIMD type registers for fast normalize and cross product, it is very likely that devs would use this for camera, I think the camera pointer should be passed to this function.

You would need to get the footprint of this function and work from there.

Or you could just stab in the dark and move camera, search, move camera search.

Pretty tricky hack to make, it might be worth just making a walk through wall type cheat and traverse through the level that way.

Reference for the SIMD instructions:

http://hitmen.c02.at/files/yagcd/yagcd/chap3.html#sec3.4

It could also be worth checking the libogc source code as shagkur has probably reversed these functions.

[biolizard89]

Something that I observed in one game, but never fully investigated, is that the camera data appears to contain a 4x4 transformation matrix.  These matrices are an array of floats, in the sequence x x x 0.0 x x x 0.0 x x x 0.0 y y y 1.0, where x is between -1.0 and 1.0, and y is any real number.  Most likely, you could dump RAM and use a hex editor to search for such a sequence... then just set a Write BP on the sequence, nop the offending instructions, and see if the camera stops moving.  If that works, you've found the camera.

[GMO]

if your looking for those type of xbox cheats/trainers, you may want to find a hacker call szalay lajos.

[Funkdude]

Thanks guys, thats mighty interesting stufff. Im unfortunately not a hacker. On xbox i had a dev/debug trainer for halo II, which was really neat (detach camera during curscenes, pause curscenes and gameplay. Kinda like the theater mode, but without collisions. That allowed me to see how the levels were built and from which assets. It also lets you go to areas normally unavailable, like cutscene areas).

Something simmilar for wii games would be really neat. I like how Endless ocean 1 and 2 are made, the game looks really solid and optimised. It would be neat to be able to check out all areas without restrictions. Perhaps an emulator might make this easier?