AutoUpdate

The only way i know is simply not to use any hardcoded struct. But that will force you to address all the struct members with seperate offsets. I do that for crossfires weapon list struct, too, simply because i just need a few attributes and im way too lazy to rebuild the whole struct everytime it got changed.

Im not a big fan of pattern based auto updates in anyways, because they can be very inconsistent and it will be a pain in ur ass to find wrong offsets if your hack just crashes. Better write some kind of pattern based "address logger" that gets you the new offsets after a patch. This way you can always double check them manually before using them in your actual hack.

Thats correct. The difference is, that the address logger ist not included in the hack dll itself. If you distribute a hack with inbuild pattern based auto update, some of the patterns will fail at some point (due to big changes in the game eg). The address logger on the other hand, is just a little help tool for yourself. You can "try" to find the new offsets, but you can always manually correct them, if they turn out wrong while testing. This way the actually distributed hack will 100% work for the game version you are releasing it for.

In my hack i went even further and added a hash check for the crossfire.exe and cshell.dll. If one of the hashs change, i display an error message and tell any user to download the newest version.

i'll make a pattern scan tutorial

It wont, if you do it the right way.

But you won't have to update the hack