Thread: Grabbing info from Java game

Howdy,

I've been trying to "hack" into a game called Darkfall for quite some time but I always hit a wall.
I'm not trying to do anything illegal within the game itself like speedhacking, wallhacking or anything like that. I just want to be able to retrieve information, not write anything and according to the Devs they don't really care about 3rd party tools as long as they aren't hacks.

I have tried doing it two ways using several methods.
First I tried getting a DirectX api hook because I figured most of the information I wanted was being drawn on screen at some point, therefore reading the parameters for the functions that DirectX uses could work but I couldn't really get this method to work and realised that there's a lot more information hidden so decided to move on to another way.

Second attempt was trying out to get inside the Java, I decompiled the class loader but couldn't really get anything useful out of it. I tried using VisualVM and checking the heap dump and found out most classes are obfuscated with names like Fbd Agv.
I have tried with JVMTI but without any success. I can't seem to get what I want.

So basically what I'm trying to ask is how should I go in order to just hook a dll into the game and grab some info? My objective would be to retrieve the string right after the program decrypts it and then I could do whatever I wanted with it.

Googling around I have found 0 tutorials or helpful links regarding to Java game hooking which is why I'm asking here.

Thanks.

Even if you managed to decom the code, how would you pull data out of it? Can only be done with very sloppy and unencapsulated code, which I must assume pro game programmers do not make.

Afaik the only way to grab/alter unintended data from apps are by going directly in the memory. This cannot be done by java due to the vm isolation. So a memory scanner and one of the c's will do it, but java wont.

Else you are left with what you can get from pixel reading, which is sort of meh...