This release is mostly about reflections. With the Xbox 360 release's
models on, the materials 4J made shiny now shine in game — guns, heads, doors,
cars and consoles — and you can choose how. The levels' own metal and windows
move with you as you walk, not only as you turn. The release's boot logos play
when its switch is on, and the spinning Perfect Dark logo can be drawn in the
Carrington Institute statue's blue and polished metal. After that: third
person fixes, two Randomizer traps, and four crashes found in your crash
reports.
Reflections on the XBLA release's models
Enable Reflections on the Xbox 360 (XBLA) page (on by default, and part of
F6's whole-release switch). 231 of the release's models have materials 4J
marked as reflective, and they now reflect, taking the room's light into
account. Reflection Style picks how:
- Level Metal (the default): the grey environment map the levels' own
metal uses, drawn over the paint. Walking turns it the way turning the
camera does. - K7 Sheen: the stock K7 Avenger's streaks, the way the N64 draws its
shiny guns, scrolling as you move. - Xbox 360: the release's own cube maps, looked up per pixel as the
release does.
Reflection Cutoff (on by default, and in every preset) fades reflections
out on models more than 15 metres away, where they are a few pixels. Without it
an 80-simulant match spent a third of its main thread on them.
Guns in a character's hands shine too. 4J left fourteen of the third-person
gun models with no shiny material at all — the K7, Devastator, CMP150,
Cyclone, Shotgun, RC-P120, Callisto, Phoenix, Crossbow, Tranquilizer, the
rocket launcher and three more — so a gun that shone in your hands went matte
the moment the camera went behind you, or when a guard held it. Those models
now borrow the reflection of the same gun in first person.
The XBLA release
- Its boot logos. With the release on, the intro is the release's: the
orange Rare logo, Microsoft Game Studios, and 4J's marble Perfect Dark cube,
staged from the release's own draw calls. With the release off it is the
N64's. F6 is ignored while the logos play. - Logo Material (on by default): the marble logo's faces in the Carrington
statue's blue and its bevels in polished metal with moving glints, both
reflecting live as it spins, and the Rare logo in polished gold. Xbox 360
keeps the release's cube maps. - Ejected shells spin about their middle. The Falcon 2's shell orbited a
point three units off, and sometimes looked like two. - Destroyed props scorch and squash as the N64's do, instead of being
flattened onto a plane or vanishing. - A mod's repainted props stay the mod's. A mod that keeps one of the
game's models but supplies its own textures for it (GE-X's dataDyne lift,
cars and sofa) no longer draws the release's model with the release's
pictures. - Defection's blue carpet lost its "window shadow" patches: the release had
zeroed the carpet's detail texture. - The Carrington Institute lift's side panels were see-through; they draw
the ROM's chrome strip.
Level Reflections
The levels mark their own shiny surfaces — Defection's metal and windows, the
lifts, Air Force One's and Chicago's windows, the Institute's statue — and on
the N64 those reflections only move when you turn. Level Reflections on the
XBLA page, set to Follow Movement (the default), turns them as you walk as
well: the room surfaces, the glass and lift objects, and the shards of a broken
window. Original is the N64's behaviour. It works with the release's rooms on
or off.
Third person
- Footsteps no longer play in rapid bursts. The body's run animation was
playing its own footsteps on top of yours, a dozen frames in a row. - Glare Clipping (Video page, off by default, on in Dab's Settings): light
halos no longer shine through the walls and models in front of them.
Randomizer
- The Duel no longer traps you running forward. A mission that walks you
somewhere now ends the walk if it stops getting closer. - Completing a run's room objective no longer ends the mission and loads a
stock mission with the run still on.
Crash fixes
From the first 45 reports sent with the new button — thank you:
- Shooting a wall with the XBLA stages on.
- Spawning on a mod's arena with no spawn points.
- Text with accented characters on GE-X maps in the Stage Loader.
- A robot trying to punch in a Randomizer run.
- A headless character from the Mario Characters mod.
- GE-X 5a's Defection door that broke the renderer after a long play.
- Memory: a
pd.inifrom an old build could still sayMemorySize=16, too
small for the XBLA stages, a texture pack's levels or a mod's maps. It is
raised to 64 at startup. - F3 could crash on Chicago; it no longer does.
Setup errors (no ROM, the wrong ROM, no OpenGL 2.1) show their message without
writing a crash report, and a report now includes how much memory was free.
Fixes
- The Mod dropdown lagged for as long as it was open with many mods
installed; it reads the list once when it opens. - The Community Packs page cut off the top of its first line with the XBLA
font on. - The spectator's flickering surfaces where two rooms overlap (worst on the
release's Defection skyline) are gone. - Akimbo Triggers: the D-pad moves menu cursors down again.
Defaults
Level Reflections set to Follow Movement, Reflection Style set to Level Metal
and Logo Material set to Statue & Metal are the defaults. Those three are
applied once to an existing pd.ini on the first launch of this version;
change any of them afterwards and your choice stays.