Ya'll got any experience with Cheat Engine for shmupping?

[Eyvah_Ehyeh]

Instead of trying to wrap my head around why Outside didn't just let people choose their starting Rank in the endless mode, I decided to made a post over at the Cheat Engine forums, and here's what I wrote:

"Noob here, only been using CE when other people have made tables, but now I tried to make it so that an Endless mode in a shmup (REDNEG ALLSTARS SWING-BY EDITION) could begin at Rank 100 instead of 0 right from the get-go (rank decides the difficulty of the game and goes up in tandem with Magic Item acquisition).

Thing is, as soon as I change the value to another number than the given one, then the "rank down" message that shows up when dying starts spamming when playing, the rank number starts oscillating between the correct one and the one I put it, but really the gameplay stays the same as if the rank was never tampered to begin with.

Ideas as to what I could try? I tried changing around some other numbers, like score, "magic item", etc, because I thought that maybe rank was somehow tied to those, but that doesn't seem to be the case, and the other numbers can be changed around without much problem."

[Firehawke]

Most likely the rank number is directly affected by other gameplay elements like survival time, number of stages cleared, or the like. What exactly the game uses to calculate it I couldn't tell you; it's the sort of thing you'd need to reverse engineer the game code to track down.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

That's definitely the reason. The game's rank is being recalculated constantly as you play, and what it actually uses to determine rank is likely that dynamically calculated value, rather than what it displays as the rank. The code is likely something like:

calculatedrank = value a + b + c
displayrank = calculatedrank
show the rank# using the value in displayrank

It's likely using the internal value it calculates dynamically to actually do rank-related difficulty and all you've changed in CheatEngine is the displayed value. It might be possible to find the actual value it's using to do gameplay related rank stuff and lock it at a specific value but it's going to be harder to find as it'll be fluctuating constantly ingame. Theoretically it'd be at a fixed value in between stages.

[Eyvah_Ehyeh]

Most likely the rank number is directly affected by other gameplay elements like survival time, number of stages cleared, or the like. What exactly the game uses to calculate it I couldn't tell you; it's the sort of thing you'd need to reverse engineer the game code to track down.

Well, to me it for sure looks like rank is affected ONLY by Magic Item, because the only time when you gain parts of a rank (0-99) that change the rank to one higher when you get 100 of these parts, is when you get magic items, so I don't think anything else actually affects rank. For example if you don't shoot, you don't gain rank or parts of a rank, because you get the magic items when you shoot an enemy (or when having killed an enemy or made them change phase).

I am not at all sure if that helps me at all, though, because it looks like I might have gotten in way over my head with this stuff. I was just hoping that made this wouldn't have to be so hard.

[Eyvah_Ehyeh]

Okay, so I did a thing.

https://i.imgur.com/i0H4uHD.png
https://i.imgur.com/DnJAxNv.png

https://i.imgur.com/AxQTjJE.mp4

And it WORKED! Only, then I can't seem to be able to change the speed again - no matter what I do, the speed is stuck at whatever speed I changed to in the beginning. Like it can only be changed one time.

Any ideas what to try next?