A swing and a miss. Here, read this.
Firstly, all you need from a game to make a trainer fun for it is the Game ID, as far as I know, which is findable by opening the xbe in notepad. Newbies have had success with some of the newer games just from the tutorials, so I know that you don't need source code, since it takes a programmer to find or use source code and its only practical use is compiling. Trainers do not require compiling. They're not as hard as programming but they're still high-level.
2 supports what I said. It 'vaguely describes' how to make trainers. The description looks vague to you because it is on a principal level that you struggle with. It's a complete guide. The guy did not leave out some step where you need to find a source code of a game to train it. If he couldn't explain how to do this he wouldn't have even wrote a guide. You do need to be quite smart/talented in that way to understand it though.
3 again stupports what I said. It does not look complex to you because you can't interpret it. The point of view explained is obviously more complex than what you're absorbing since you can't perform this, though. I personally can just by looking at the instructions, so I know it's right. It's not for everyone. What you seem to struggle with is the fact that he didn't write a guide where the information is absorbable for you. You require an anal level of breaking something down in order to absorb it, but to make trainers you need to be able to absorb things based on little or no information. It's the type of thinking/program-understanding that is complex, not the instructions, for the most part.
I read the file, and everything is there. It's actually quite clear if you have the mental resources required to understand trainer making. Bottom line, you are unable to understand this tutorial because you don't have an intellectual 'feel' that this task requires, so the steps look like disconjointed pieces missing information to you. That's the crux of literalism and tutorials. Not everything having to do with games is for everyone or can be laid out so just anyone can do it with the right instructions.
Trainer making is a specialization. It is not for everyone, or a simple side project. There are lots of people who have been able to make simple trainers with 1 or 2 very simple cheats in them, but only a handful of people who have been able to consistantly make the more difficult trainers. It is indeed an intelligent and patient skill which you are trying to understand on a shallow level but the required skill goes much deeper than that.
You don't understand this tutorial. The guy who wrote it does, and put in all the steps.
1) From this person's point of view, they are writing the guide completely, and understand what they're doing. They're obviously smart enough not to leave anything out if they understand it.
2) If you are on the wavelength of talent that is able to understand the task, you will 'get' what he's saying pretty quickly. It's not for you otherwise. They are putting the concept that they absorbed out there for other people in case they have that specific talent to absorb that skill. It's not something you're going to absorb from 'better steps'. It's a set of things that require very specific interpretation and principled thinking skills.
That's why nobody said it was easy or that everyone could do it, though for some reason you assume that based on this guide which shows quite the contrary. It's also why the Evolution-X team has not spent a great deal of time trying to show absoultely everyone how to build trainers. It's not hidden, it's just kind of futile, like this case shows. The information is only out there for people who can absorb it. Quite simply, trainer making is not easy, and not just anyone can do it, and the tutorials are not for every single person to understand, nor do I think that's even very possible when it comes to trainers.
Here are some statements from that guide to focus on.
QUOTE
I looked back through the games that I've wrote trainers for, and most of them weren't what I'd call simple
And that's from someone who understands how to do it. He's trying to tell you here, this is not a simple thing that everyone is going to be able to understand.
QUOTE
CXBX, go to the file menu and say 'export exe' and save it to something like tmnt.exe, now
go to the edit menu, and select the dump xbe info to option, dump it to a file so that you
can cut and paste.
Open the output file up with a text editor (notepad/wordpad) and scroll until you see
something like (from max payne 2):
Dumping XBE Certificate...
Size of Certificate : 0x000001EC
TimeDate Stamp : 0x3FB3F515 (Thu Nov 13 16:18:13 2003)
Title ID : 0x5454000C
Title : L"Max Payne 2"
See, simple beginning. And if you notice, the Title ID is findable in a text editor. The Title ID is the only thing you need in the trainer to identify the game. Easy. This is the only thing I can figure for the 'source code' you were mistakenly assuming is needed but was left out as a step. Why do you assume to teach yourself when you're learning something anyway? What I mean is that nobody said you need source code to make trainers, even though they've written full guides, yet you taught yourself that mistaken idea somehow anyway.
QUOTE
move some address stored at 2AA8E0 into eax
*move the value that is at eax + 24h into edx
move the value (1) that was pushed to this routine into ecx
*move edx back to where it came from (eax + 24h)
If we remove the subtraction part, we end up moving a value from
eax+24h to edx
then from
edx to eax+24h
Good luck trying to interpret that, for instance, even though you get stuck on things like turning on file extensions and figuring out modding morrowind. Nothing is left out. The problem is that this requires a mind oriented with this and understanding of these program dynamics enough to automatically make the leaps required to even absorb the concept in the above quote. There's TONS of stuff like that in there. In a way you were right. What he's saying IS simple, IF you have that complex skill. It's not the most common skill in the world though and it's not a surprise if you don't have it.
If you were wanting to make a trainer for morrowind, anyway, there's a reason why even pro trainer makers have not made one. You need to run the game in debug tsr mode to write a trainer. There's no way around that as far as I know. Morrowind freezes in debug tsr mode when you try to poke values so that you can't find any addresses. You seem to have somehow missed this point that was explained earlier in this thread by kdanarch, as you have countless other explainations on things you've asked or complained about.
Quite simply, the problem has never been people's explainations or guides. You have had this same struggle with understanding morrowind mods where it had to be proved to you that all the information was correct and there and you were failing to see it, except trainers are even more complex to understand, and no one's going to try that hard to explain it. Also, the posts you are talking about that have probably been 'long since removed' were either because those people realised that they are dumbasses, or the evolutionx team got that annoyed by idiots that don't have a niche for it but expect to be able to understand making trainers on a simple level. Probably a combination of the two, but dumbasses are everywhere. People have left the resources for everyone able to understand trainer making. The problem is that not everybody could. Fact of life.