Adventures in Dead by Daylight (July 17th, 2016) - Part 2: Kernel-mode Cheat Engine (DBVM)

CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT BSOD

According to Dark Byte: There is about a 1:5 chance for each core that when it is offloaded to the VM it will cause a CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT bluescreen of death. This means with 1 core you have an 80% chance of being ok, with 2 a 64% chance, with 8 you only have a 16% chance of not crashing. I believe this core count includes virtual cores for hyperthreading. If you wish to decrease your chances of crashing when starting DBVM you can run 'msconfig', click on "Advanced options" in the boot tab and lower the number of processors to use, then reboot:

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So what do I chalk this up to? It being not my tool. How could I be expected to know that this tool wigs out when trying to use multiple processors? Maybe I'll find out more if / when I build my own tool, but until that time I don't see how anyone could know.

NEXT, I start up Dead by Daylight and I'm greeted with:

! (Solid Snake sound) I've seen this before with World of Warcraft. It notices Cheat Engine is loaded upon start up and won't allow you to continue. A workaround for WoW was to start WoW first and then to start Cheat Engine. Now this is a workaround and they are probably still detecting it in some fashion when the game is loaded. They might even be sending callbacks to the server saying, "This account opened Cheat Engine at {timestamp}"... Scary stuff to think about if you value your account.

So let's try the ole open the game first and Cheat Engine second potential workaround.

The same error?! I'm showing my running apps on the left and you can see Cheat Engine is no longer running... HOWEVER, we gave it kernel mode privileges this time. My guess is that this driver is still loaded at the system level and still visible by Dead by Daylight on startup. Even though there isn't a user mode app connected to the Cheat Engine kernel mode driver (god I hope not i.e. rootkits) the Dead by Daylight app just won't have it. Let me reboot and try this again.

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Rebooted. Now I'm seeing this:

Nothing but crashes. 

• Does setting my OS to using 1 processor cause this? (What we needed to do to get CE to work)
• Did my loading the game up with Cheat Engine somehow flag my system as a cheater and is now showing these crashes to prevent me from playing?

My conclusion:

The game won't run on a single core? I'm testing this on my desktop computer who also has the issue of not being to load the CE kernel driver. I tried 2 processor start up and the game ran but CE's driver didn't load. Let's try 1 processor and see what happens.

^ well... fuck. Game loaded on 1 processor on my desktop computer. However, Cheat Engine's kernel driver didn't load at all. Can't infer shit about these situations.