This release is mostly about GoldenEye X: its weapons, its sounds and its
menu colours now come through the way the mod made them. Alongside that, the
XBLA release's models finally get hit boxes of their own — a shot hits the
model you are looking at — plus glass, shadows and bruises that behave like the
game's own. Then per-hand weapon menus for Akimbo, crash reports you can send
from the crash dialog, and a handful of fixes.
A fresh pd.ini is still stock Perfect Dark, and is now more so: the text is
drawn the way the ROM draws it until you choose otherwise (see Defaults).
GoldenEye X
GE-X changes a lot of the game's code, and some of it the port was still
running as stock Perfect Dark. One tester's reports turned up six of them. Your
GE-X import redoes itself on first launch to pick these up.
Weapons
- Third person shows the gun you are actually holding. GE-X re-points the
table that picks each gun's model; the port was reading the stock one, so
third person drew a different gun from first person. The same fix covers the
gun dropped on death, simulants' guns and ghosts. - The classic sight is on, as GE-X sets it per weapon.
Sounds
- Guards no longer grunt like Elvis. GE-X gives some of the Maian head
numbers to human characters, and the port was choosing grunts and quips by
the stock numbers. - Female NPCs and Additional Dialogue now work. GE-X reuses two rows of the
options menu for them and its missions check those rows; the port was
skipping the checks.
Menu and HUD colours
- GE-X's green menus. They were not a palette change: GE-X changes the type
of 157 dialogs, and those are now read from the mod. - Its HUD colours: the ammo counter, inventory bars, timers, radar and the
scenario HUDs.
Combat Simulator
- The right characters: simulant profiles, players 2–4's default
characters, heads, and the VR challenges' own setups.
Ghost runs set with a mod loaded stay on your machine. The leaderboards file
a run by stage number, and a mod keeps the stock numbers while changing what is
behind them, so a GE-X time was landing on the Perfect Dark board under the
wrong mission. Upload My Ghosts is greyed while a mod is loaded; racing and your
own saved runs are unchanged.
The XBLA release
- Hit boxes from the model you see. A shot at a character wearing the
release's model was tested against the N64 model's shape. It is now tested
against the release's own triangles, and the body part a hit counts as — a
head shot does four times the damage — comes from where it actually landed,
blended across joints. Single player only; multiplayer and shielded
characters still use the game's hit boxes. - Glass and shadows. The Villa's glass table tops drew as solid purple and
every chair and sofa sat on a black square. A texture in the release is a
sheet of several pictures, and the see-through test is now made per triangle
instead of per sheet, so glass shows what is behind it and shadows are soft. - Bruises. Characters drawn with the release's models now take the game's
blood darkening where they are shot. - Low-resolution pictures are enhanced. 2033 of the release's textures are
still the N64's size, and with Enable Textures on they skipped Enhance
Textures, so they looked blockier with the switch on than off — the file
select's new agent portrait was the one people noticed. They now get the same
enhancement as the game's own.
Akimbo
The left hand of a mixed pair shows its fire mode. It already had its own
gun, ammo gauges and name; it now has the fire mode square and the function
name too, mirrored onto the left side, and each hand's fades on its own.
A weapon menu per hand, under Akimbo Triggers. Hold D-pad up to pick
the right hand's gun and D-pad down to pick the left's. Each menu is
titled Right Hand or Left Hand, marks that hand's gun, and its Function
screen lists and switches that hand's fire modes. Picking for one hand leaves
the other holding what it had.
- On a controller, D-pad down stops walking backwards while Akimbo Triggers is
on, and gets it back when the option is turned off. - On the keyboard, Q opens the left hand's menu and G the right's. G is
only added if you haven't given D-pad up a key already and G isn't bound to
anything else. - Both menus have a row on the Player page of Dab's Mod Options, beside the
other Akimbo Triggers binds, so they can be moved. - A pick that can't make a pair — a second copy of a gun you only have one of,
or a gun that can't be held in one hand — does nothing, rather than lowering
both guns for no change.
Crash reports
A crash used to reach me as a screenshot of the dialog: enough to name the
function, and nothing about which mission, which mod or which settings. The
crash dialog now writes a report before it appears — the error and its stack,
the build, the loaded mod, your [Mod] settings and the last 200 lines of the
log — and has a Send report to Dab button.
Crash Reports, on the Perfect Menu beside Check for Updates, is where you
can add a note and send (or retry) the last one. Both places say what a report
contains before offering to send it, and nothing is sent unless you press the
button. A report is stored on the server as a file for me to read; nothing on
the server lists them or hands one back out.
On Windows the dialog also now says which address a crash touched and whether
it was a read or a write.
Defaults
Smooth Text and Thin Text Outlines are off in a fresh install and in the
Vanilla and Ghost Trials presets, so the text is the ROM's. They change every
line of text in the game, which is not what someone asking for stock Perfect
Dark expects. Dab's Settings still turns both on, and a pd.ini that already
has them keeps its values.
Fixes
- A hat on some heads was placed from random memory. The hat table has no
row for the hat types the game asks for, so a GE-X mission read the bytes
just before it. The hat now stays where the model puts it. - Two reads past the end of a mod's replaced data at startup, both invisible
with the stock ROM. - The weather's room walk on mission start now stops at the rooms that
actually exist, and logs when the two counts disagree. This is aimed at the
v3.4.0 crash starting a GE-X mission on Windows; that crash has not been
reproduced here, so if you still see it, please use the new Send button.