Displaying In-Game Messages

This guide shows how to display in-game messages like the ones shown below.

Table of contents

• Displaying In-Game Messages
  • Table of contents
  • Requirements
  • Calling game functions
  • The sChat Singleton
  • Putting Everything Together
  • External

Requirements

To follow this guide you should know/understand

• how to write a plugin
• very basic C/C++

Calling game functions

In this guide you will learn how to call one of the game's functions to display in-game messages. To do so, we will be calling the game's ShowGameMessage function (unofficial name).

The function itself is located at 0x141a671f0, in game version 15.11. The prototype for the function looks something like so:

void ShowGameMessage(sChat* this, const char* msg, float unk0, int unk1, bool unk2);

The last 3 parameters are labelled as unkN because we don't know what they do. However parameters 3 and 4 don't seem to be used at all. However we can simply pass -1, -1, false for those last parameters.

You might have also noticed the first parameter of type sChat*. This is simply the actual type. However we can replace this with any pointer type, even a 64bit integer will do, as long as it points to the sChat singleton instance. (More on that later)

With this we can now declare a function pointer to this function. A function pointer is, as the name implies, a pointer to a function, and as such, acts as an indirect call. We cannot execute direct calls to non-exported functions in another exe. (Not without quite a bit of effort)

However instead of declaring the function pointer as a variable, let's declare a proper type first:

typedef void(*ShowGameMessageFunc)(void*, const char*, float, int, bool);

This will let us cast any address to this type and call that address.

The sChat Singleton

The first parameter this of the function is the instance of the sChat class. Luckily we can always find that instance at 0x14506d340. To get the instance we simply dereference that address like so:

void* instance = *(void**)0x14506d340;

instance will now hold the sChat instance.

Putting Everything Together

Now that we have this information, we can throw together a function that will print game-messages for us.

void ShowGameMessage(const std::string& message)
{
  ((ShowGameMessageFunc)0x141a671f0)(*(void**)0x14506d340, message.c_str(), -1, -1, false);
}

Now if you are not used to function pointer syntax this might look weird. So let me break it down.

void ShowGameMessage(const std::string& message)
{
  // First we declare the function pointer using the type we defined above
  ShowGameMessageFunc displayMessage = (ShowGameMessageFunc)0x141a671f0;

  // Next we get the sChat instance
  void* instance = *(void**)0x14506d340;

  // Finally we get a const char* out of our std::string
  const char* str = message.c_str();

  // Now we call the function
  displayMessage(instance, str, -1, -1, false);
}

Already looks a lot less complicated right? These 2 functions do the exact same thing.

Now all we have to do is call the function:

ShowGameMessage("Hello World!");

All done! You can use this function in any plugin to show messages in-game. However keep in mind that you will crash your game if you call this before entering a session.

External

To call this function externally, we need to start a thread in the game's context and call it from there. To do so we use the function CreateRemoteThread.

To make things a little easier, we can restructure our function like so:

DWORD WINAPI ShowGameMessage(void* message)
{
  ((ShowGameMessageFunc)0x141a671f0)(*(void**)0x14506d340, (const char*)message, -1, -1, false);
}

Doing so will let us do this:

HANDLE hProc = ...; // Get process handle as usual
CreateRemoteThread(hProc, nullptr, 0, ShowGameMessage, "Hello World!", 0, nullptr);

Here we create a thread in the context of the game. This is necessary since we cannot call functions in the address space of another process. Now we can of course create another wrapper around this. However keep in mind that launching a remote thread is quite "slow".