LuaBackend Hook

What is this?

This is a fork of TopazTK's LuaBackend which focuses on consistency and reliability for timing-critical scripts.

Why use this over LuaBackend or LuaFrontend?

For most scripts there's no issue using LuaBackend or LuaFrontend but for scripts such as the Garden of Assemblage (GoA) Randomizer, which relies on running once before every frame in-game, it's important this requirement is met. LuaBackend and LuaFrontend currently aren't syncronized with the game's main loop, leading to unintended behavior in scripts like GoA which can range from crashes to warps to incorrect locations. This fork however syncronizes the Lua scripts with the game loop effectively eliminating these issues. However, scripts that rely on new features from LuaFrontend are not supported and it is recommended to use LuaFrontend concurrently with LuaBackend Hook to achieve this.

Support

Supports the PC Global and Japanese versions of:

• Kingdom Hearts Final Mix
• Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories
• Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix
• Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep Final Mix
• Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance HD

Installation instructions are in INSTALL.md.

Why is the dll file named DBGHELP?

This is so that LuaBackend Hook can hook into the game without requiring an EXE patch, but still be able to launch automatically with the game.

To support platforms where hooking as DBGHELP does not work such as Linux using Wine, hooking as DINPUT8 is also supported. To hook as DINPUT8, rename the DBGHELP.dll to DINPUT8.dll.

Building

• Install Visual Studio Community 2022 (or just the build tools) and ensure the Desktop development with C++ workflow is installed.
• Install CMake: winget install Kitware.CMake
• Install vcpkg by following steps 1 and 2.1 from here.
• Install the required vcpkg dependencies by running the following in PowerShell.

$env:VCPKG_DEFAULT_TRIPLET="x64-windows-static"
vcpkg install pkgconf ztd-text wil tomlplusplus sol2 lua discord-rpc

• Inside the repository run cmake --preset=default to configure the project.
• Run cmake --build build to build the project. To build for release mode add --config Release.
• The artifacts can now be found somewhere in the build directory. If building for MSVC in debug mode this will be build/Debug.