3.1.2 is the dev channel since 3.1.1 made stable: console mods play as missions, guards keep coming, two guns in any pair of hands, a picture pass, and the fixes from the last week of testing GE-X.
Added
Mods
- Console mods play their own missions. Drop a ROM patch (
.xdelta,.bps,.ips), the archive it came in, or a whole collection intomods/, and the game converts it on the next start. A mod's stages, missions, hero, AI, weapons, heads and bodies, environments, star field, weather, stage music and Combat Simulator tracks all come across. GE-X 6a is the reference: its missions run from Runway on. - RAR archives unpack, and emulator texture packs are read straight out of a mod's download, Glide64 caches included.
Combat
- Guards Alerted! The alarm never stops and reinforcements keep arriving, in any mission or match, with a count, a speed and a weapon choice (the stage's, the match's, or Random). Guards and simulants fight each other. A match counts the guards each player killed.
- Akimbo. Whoever spawns armed spawns with two - a rifle or a rocket launcher in each hand as readily as a pistol - for players, simulants, guards, or everyone. Under Random each hand rolls its own gun, so mixed pairs: each hand fires, reloads and shows its own.
- Akimbo Triggers. On a controller the left trigger fires the left hand, aim moves to the left bumper, and a fire mode button per hand sits on the D-pad.
- COD Style Aiming. Aiming brings the gun to the sights with a little zoom and lets you keep walking; a scoped gun keeps its stock pose. Aim Lock is an option.
- Camera Tilt. The view leans into a sidestep and into a look, and the eye bobs with the steps, Quake's way; the gun's sway can follow. Explosion Shake is a choice.
- Mission Respawn with a lives count, and Start Armed in solo missions.
Picture
- Increase Poly Models, Enhance Textures, Smooth Text, Vivid Colours, Black Level and Model LOD, all built in with no pack needed. See the README for what each does.
- Anti-aliasing is capped at what the GPU offers instead of drawing black.
Updated
- The renderer's hot paths and the game's own hot files are built for speed; a crowded 80-simulant match costs noticeably less per frame.
- Menus hold a thousand words of item data, for the longer mod lists.
Fixed
- A crash on GE-X's Runway with Guards Alerted! and Random weapons. A guard could be handed a weapon number that stock treats as a launcher but the mod fills with something else (GE-X's timed mine in the Crossbow's slot), and firing it read a model number out of the wrong kind of function. Launchers are now recognised by what the weapon's function is, not its number, and the guard roll only hands out guns that shoot.
- GE-X's Gold PP7 spun in the hand with green smoke. It sits in the Reaper's number; the Reaper's mechanics now live on a weapon flag, so GE-X's own Reaper spins instead.
- A black line along the horizon near the top of the screen on GE-X's Surface from the air: the port's sky plane was lifted by a pitch where the original drew a row shift, and the two met a row apart at the screen edges.