GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[Kerr Avon]

Perfect Dark is my still my favourite game ever, even after more than ten years of playing it, but of course it's not perfect (though still closer than any other game, if you ask me). So what features/additions/changes do you think could have made the game better? Some of the things I think are no doubt probably impossible, due to limitations of the N64 and the cartridge storage, some are maybe possible, and some are definately possible, and indeed some of these might have been in the game but for the fact that the game was already very late when it was released, up to eighteen months late, depending on which figures you believe, and so wasn't given an extra month or two for Rare to add anything extra.

Anyway, I know that some of my suggestions are possible using Gameshark cheat codes from this site, but this post is mostly a copy and paste of my post on Gamefaqs where I list the things I wish PD had.


Possible (I think):


- Use the Goldeneye weapons in multiplayer. The only plausible reasons that this is not possible in the released version of PD are (a) Rare wanted you to use PD's weapons (maybe to stop people mainly using GE's weapons in multiplayer in case other people started to think that PD was just GE with better graphics and so didn't buy the game, harming sales), and (b) either Rare forgot to add the ability or the game ws forced to be released before the ability could be added. There's no technical reason why they can't be used, and you can use them by using Gameshark cheat codes, which proves that it is possible. [And yes, I know that there are Gameshark codes for these (thanks to whoever hacked them), but it's amazing that the game didn't allow this as it stood].


- Since the Left Shoulder Button and the D-Pad aren't used for anything useful (they just duplicate other functions, which isn't needed), it would make sense for them to have been used for something else. One thing that annoys me in PD is that if you have Combat boosts, then you have to select the Combat Boost, Use it, then re-select your weapon, whereas it would be much better if, say, if you pressed Up on the D-Pad, then the game would (assuming you had a Combat Boost in your inventory) automatically select the Combat Boost, activate (or deactivate) it, and then return you to your weapon. Down on the D-Pad would (de)activate the Cloaking Device, Left would (de)activate the Infra-red view, and RIght would (de)activate the X-Ray view. And the Left Shoulder Button could be used to quickly toggle the primary/secondary weapon function.


- The ability to choose where to place the bases in Capture the Case. The game chooses for you randomly, and sometimes they are too close together. This would have been an easy option to add - if, say, there ware six possible locations for a base in a map, then you could choose the location number for base one, the number for base two (and for bases three and four, if you chose to have more than two teams).


- The ability to use some of the single player PD levels for multiplayer. This is a common complaint amongst PD fans, and rightly so, as in Goldeneye you could play multiplayer games on some of the (cut down) single player levels, and in fact possibly the most popular multiplayer map of all in Goldeneye is the cut down version of the single player mad Facility. Fair enough, most of PD's multiplayer maps are very good indeed, but some based on the single player levels would have been great.

The Carrington Institute, for example, would be ideal for deathmatch, and of the six game modes PD's multiplayer offers, five are great with the maps, but there is no map ideal for Capture the Case, but parts of the dataDyne Basement or Area 51 would make great Capture the Case maps as they are long and narrow.

Yet in PD none of the single player maps are used for multiplayer. Rare said this was because the game would slow down too much if the single player maps were used in multiplayer, but we know that this isn't the case, as thanks to modding genius Krijy and other hackers, as they've allowed us to play multiplayer games on single player levels and vice versa.


- Fix the bug in multiplayer whereby the sims cannot aim properly with a shotgun in multiplayer, but are deadly with it in single player mode.



- Fix the bug that causes the Case to randomly disappear in the Ravine multiplayer level.



- Stop the guards from randomly saying things like "There SHE is", and "The [female dog]", when you are playing as male character Mr Blonde or a Maian.



- Fix the bug wherby entering Combat Boost within the last few seconds of a multiplayer game can crash the N64.



- Add a sixth weapon slot to the Warehouse.


- Name the sims. We don't know why we aren't allowed to name the sims (the game can - try playing the challenges and you'll see that the sims all have their own names), but it's speculated that Rare were playing it safe, as if some moron shot and killed (in real life) someone he knew and then it turned out that he'd named a sim after that person beforehand then lawyers could claim that he was encouraged by the game to kill the person (which is UTTER UTTER NONSENSE, but lawyers care nothing for the truth) and Rare could be sued. This is the same reason, of course, that the Map-your-own-faces-onto-people-in-PD feature was dropped.


- An an option to the multiplayer configuration menu to turn off the ability to use the threat detector on the proximity and timed mines, as they sort of make the mines too easy to see and avoid.


- An an option to the multiplayer configuration menu to set the blurring-when-hit-or-sedated to ON/OFF/ONLY UNTIL DEATH, so that ON is how it is now in the game, OFF means that there is no blurriness at all, and ONLY UNTIL DEATH means that when you die and respawn you no longer see the blurring.

- An an option to the multiplayer configuration menu to set the multiplayer map to NORMAL/MIRRORED/REVERSED/BOTH. This feature would invert the map along either or both of the X and Z axis, making the maps the mirrored and/or reverse that they are normally. Games like the San Fransisco Rush games do this to make one track have four variations, and whilst it doesn't exactly give you four new tracks, it is a nice option, and would be nice with PD, as it would give you four variations per map.

- An an option to the multiplayer configuration menu to turn off friendly fire. I don't care, as I prefer friendly fire to be on so that you can't just blindly shoot anyone, but some people did complain that you could turn off friendly fire in co-op but not multiplayer.

- Fix the glitch (or annoying but deliberate part) whereby if you have slow motion on, then when you die it takes you ages to die and respawn.

- In co-op give you the option command your sim team-mate(s) with proper commands such as Stay Here, Protect me, and Go on ahead.

- Add more challenges. Theroetically, there could be an almost unlimited number, as they could be generated from a series of algorythms,

- Add a reward for completing all thirty challenges, maybe the Infinite Ammo - No Reloads cheat should have been for that, or maybe a new one, say Infinite Psychosis Gun Ammo,

- An an option to the multiplayer configuration menu to make you always respawn with a weapon (the option could be NONE/1/2/3/4/5/6, and if you chose NONE then you spawn with no weapon, but if you chose a number then all players alwats respawn with the weapon in the slot of that number),

- An an option to the multiplayer configuration menu to disable the disarming ability. I really like the diarming ability, but some people don't, so an option to turn it off would be nice.

- Another game mode, last man standing, where you specify the number of lives each player has, and when they die they lose a life, and then their number of lives equals zero then they are out of the game, and the winner is the last player, or last team, left alive. Sort of like Goldeneye's You Only Live Twice, but you can choose the number of lives.






Maybe Possible:


- Perfect Head - the planned facial mapping feature whereby you could photograph yourself or other people, using a Gameboy camera, and put the faces onto characters in multiplayer. This would have been brilliant, but was stopped either because it just didn't work, or because Rare were worried that if some moron shot and killed (in real life) someone he knew and then it turned out that he'd named a sim after that person beforehand then lawyers could claim that he was encouraged by the game to kill the person, and Rare would blamed and sued for millions and get loads of bad publicity. No one knows which of these reasons (or maybe others) resulted in the feature being dropped, but I don't doubt that Rare were worried about the possibility of being blamed for any (unrelated, to anyone with a brain) murders.


- We never get to see the main areas in sigle player from outside, as we did with, say, Goldeneye's Frigate. We should be shown what the dataDyne builging looks like from the outside, as it would make it seem more "real" to us - in the opening video for the level we should get a good look at the building from the outside. The same with the Carrington Institute, the Pelagic two, the Cetan at the bottom of the ocean, etc. We should see them in their respective opening cutscene, and maybe their end cutscene too.

Of course, the reason we don't see them is probably due to lack of cartridge space, as it would take up space to store their data, which is why I've listed this under the "maybe possible", as otherwise it would certainly be possible.


- Animate the water, as the water in PD is solid and unmoving, which is all the more out of place since most other graphics in the game are fantastic (by N64 standards).

- Add a commentator to the multiplayer match, announcing things like "Headshot!", "You are in the lead", "You've lost the lead", "You're case has been taken", "You've captured the case", etc. This might not have been possible due to lack of cartridge space, but even if it had, I'd have wanted an option to turn the voice off, as they can be annoying.

Actually, this might not be desirable, as I sometimes find these announcers to be more annoying than anything, but some people would no doubt like the option.



Probably impossible, due to lack of space on the cartridge, or would have required too much of the N64, but it's nice to dream!:

- A level editor, so you could make your own multiplayer levels, like in the Timesplitters games (coincidentally, the Timesplitters games were made by many of the people who made Goldeneye and PD)

- The ability to play PD online. This might seem impossible, since the N64 was never online (well it was briefly in Japan, but you needed the expensive 64DD addon which was never released outside of Japan), but it might have been possible if there had been circuity in the PD cartridge allowing it to connect to the phone line. Even if this was possible though, it might have been too expensive (at the time) to be practical.

- Connect more than one N64 together, so you could have different N64s and different TVs. This might have been possible (I suppose, though I'm not sure so I could be wrong), by adding some circuity to the PD cartridges, so that they (the cartridges) could be connected to each other by a lead (wire), allowing several N64s to host a game.

- Improved frame rate. This would have been possible (I assume, it was certainly possible on the SNES) by adding a maths processor onto the cartridge to help the N64 out with the calculations. The problem is, this would have made the cartridge (and hence the game) more expensive, so maybe this is why it didn't happen.





What would you like to have seen changed or added in PD? Both things that have and have not (maybe yet) been achieved already by hacking the game?

[zoinkity]

Let me just do a few of these lin-by-line.

Kerr Avon wrote:

- Use the Goldeneye weapons in multiplayer.

I had hacked them to be available in the weapon select menu without replacing PD weapons. The issue is that the AI can't use them. At all. They run around with them drawn and don't fire. Best part is that due to the index number they will automatically prefer those over any other item or gizmo. It really was a bug.

I can certainly understand having a gadget button. The little HUD menu was nice, but doesn't help when it fills up and kills your momentum to use it.

The issue with the L and +pad was funny. They honestly thought left-handed people hold the center stick with their right hand. Don't know why.

I'd think that if they chose better base locations it would solve the issue.

Kerr Avon wrote:

- The ability to use some of the single player PD levels for multiplayer.

Krijy was working on this and made a few of them into decent multiplayers. He had to reduce the areas down to certain parts of the stages, and not just for gameplay purposes.
PD doesn't watch its stack as well as GE did. For instance, Silo in multiplayer would usually black rooms out if they couldn't load a copy fully into memory. That's a graceful failure. PD just locks solid.
In PD, certain rooms or sequences of rooms would crash the game if they were processed either with other things or general. So, you'd be walking along in Crash Site and BLORF the game locks. You're at the bottom of Carrington Villa and GLORP the game locks. That's why.
It's different when we can putz around with all this stuff and find combinations that are relatively stable. For a production company though it has to be rock-solid stable and it better work as quickly as possible. If you have problems, you cut it.

Kerr Avon wrote:

- Fix the bug wherby entering Combat Boost within the last few seconds of a multiplayer game can crash the N64.

Have never experienced that one. Is it specific to a certain version of the game?

Kerr Avon wrote:

- Name the sims.

You can do it with a GS. This probably had more to do with saving the data than anything. If you could name the sims it would require using another block of mempak data. not sure how it would fit on-cart.

Kerr Avon wrote:

This is the same reason, of course, that the Map-your-own-faces-onto-people-in-PD feature was dropped.

I'm really starting to believe Rare's "it was bugged" line. After looking at what remains of the code, which is a huge freaking chunk of stuff at the end of the TLB segment, there's an awful lot of error checking and debugging script. Kaboodles worth.
The heads were compressed in-game, tested to see if they fell within certain memory restrictions, then saved to file. There was color, vertex, and st remapping which needed to be saved and editted. For comparison, all this code was smaller than the debugger used to read it. It seems that there was a major attempt to get it working right, but it likely failed often. It also likely screwed over save data when doing it.
Didn't work, had to cut.

Kerr Avon wrote:

- An an option to the multiplayer configuration menu to turn off the ability to use the threat detector on the proximity and timed mines, as they sort of make the mines too easy to see and avoid.

I'd say that them being visable from space in neon colours gives them away. At elast if you have threat detector on with mines you have to switch to throw them. The K7 though? That's OP.

Kerr Avon wrote:

- An an option to the multiplayer configuration menu to set the blurring-when-hit-or-sedated to ON/OFF/ONLY UNTIL DEATH, so that ON is how it is now in the game, OFF means that there is no blurriness at all, and ONLY UNTIL DEATH means that when you die and respawn you no longer see the blurring.

Yes. Maybe clear poison as well.
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[Trevor]

"Connect more than one N64 together, so you could have different N64s and different TVs"

Hahaha... Im sure I read somewhere or maybe more likly I had a very nice dream about this called;
Network64...

Im sure it was just a dream but I imagened it as a local-online play.

Another use for Network64 was as extra resources i.e. one could run the game while the other(s) added their RAM and CPU to the Host (this definatly was a dream )



You could do Standard 4player online though the requirement of a PC/laptop means that you mayas well play on the killara server via emulation.



Also, telephone wire, I think it would be Ethernet cable nowadays, that way you can use your brodband and hub/router. (no extra dial-up costs or phone calls engaging your phone)



"The issue with the L and +pad was funny. They honestly thought left-handed people hold the center stick with their right hand. Don't know why. "

Now, here's something funny. I am probably the only person to do this but I am Right Handed and I use my Right hand to control the stick... i.e. I hold the center with my Right and use my left for strafing. This does mean however I have to cross my left hand over to open doors and change weapons etc.

Trev
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[zoinkity]

Trevor wrote:

Im sure it was just a dream but I imagened it as a local-online play.

The 64DD came with a modem, used mostly for the RandNet system but also to do linked gaming. The only one I know for sure used it for multiplayer was the golf game, but at least one other company had the same idea.
When the 64DD died, one company that was making a mahong game installed a small modem onto their cartridge to retain the feature. I believe it was only used for record-taking purposes, but the interesting thing is that it could send the records to several of the official japanese mahong-score-tracking-board-thingies. More interesting is that you could also add phone numbers to call!

Trevor wrote:

Another use for Network64 was as extra resources i.e. one could run the game while the other(s) added their RAM and CPU to the Host (this definatly was a dream )

Yes it is because the N64 doesn't work that way. For instance, if you have 8MB of ram you must program the game to use more than 4MB. You could probably have up to 16MB honestly, but you'd never see a blasted difference without per-game codework.
CPU assist isn't really feasible either. Overhead and latency would condemn the bugger to running a seperate process and sending periodic update.
You could, at least to some degree, use a device to apply per-game hacks to use hardware installed on the device. In this respect it wouldn't differ from the X-Band.
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[TH126]

Some of the stuff you said was implemented in the XBLA version but most is far fetched. Its awesome to think about tho. I would love to see all 11 goldeneye maps instead of the 3. Also all the goldeneye weapons would be awesome (even tho most are already in the xbla version). It would make for a Goldeneye/Perfect Dark Directors Cut or something!
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[zoinkity]

Missed two tiny comments:

Quote:

... adding a maths processor onto the cartridge to help the N64 out with the calculations.

The reason for the FXchip, which I might add was also used on certain computers, is that it does floating-point math. Floating point values are decimal numbers, such as 1.0 and have a special formatting like 3F800000, for the same number. It wasn't a matter of speeding the game up. It was a matter of being able to code a fully 3D game like that with 100% fluid motion on that much RAM. You'd almost have to emulate floating point to do it.

The N64 has this already installed (COP1), as do virtually any computer you may be reading this from. Heck, most calculators do. Installing another really wouldn't have provided much edge and there would have been technical complications with doing it.
There are a few things though that would have sped things up. Simplification of code and resources is primary. Secondary, a more complicated rendering system like that found in Banjo Tooie, accounting for range and visibility beyond a simple portal system.
Also, there is a large degree of inefficiency in all model geometry, so if you did need more cartridge space it could be obtained there. Do you need 36 different vertices to make a simple 8 vertex box, especially when those points are duplicated?

Quote:

animated water

Strangely a feature removed from GE. Likely cause was inefficiency of GE's code. It constructs a 4-sided triangle (0.o) using low-level constructors (CE to be precise). The code is long, convoluted, and for water duplicated at two layers sized to the screen proportions. An utter mess.
Existing water is likely as such just to save memory. Can you imagine the additional drag at Carrington Villa on that shoreline if you had something other than a big blanket span of blue?

Quote:

announcer

You could do that easily. They just never thought of it. That would get terribly annoying though. I made a code specificly to shut the one up in F-Zero X.
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[radorn]

I'll add my 2cents to the special chip on cart issue.

Unlike previous cart consoles where a game was executed directly from the cart as the cart bus was very fast (comparatively), on the N64 carts are little more than a hard drive. While the NES and SNES accessed the cart for code and graphical data in real time, on the N64, during the boot process and all posterior load times, the CPU would order the RCP to DMA transfer a chunk of data from cart into RAM, and then stuff is executed from there.
The CPU can't access the cart fast enough for the needs that parallel processing of stuff would imply.

There are carts with special hardware on the N64 (modem, video capture, smartcard reader), but not the kind that would improve the system's performance because the cart bus just doesn't offer the necessary speed.

[Wreck]

There actually is animated water in the Chicago - Stealth mission. If you head down to the storm drain area, you'll find not only water pouring out through a sewer grate, but also flowing nicely down the trough. I can't recall if the water in the CS level Sewers also moves, but it definitely does in Chicago. (Yes, it does animate in Sewers, too) It's a steady stream, which is different from what GoldenEye used.

The water appears to be secondary geometry, and can not be shot. It may also be possible to adjust the speed in which the water moves, though I can't say for certain at this time. It does appear to move faster as part of the vertical "waterfall", than it does as the horizontal stream. This could just be how it was drawn, however. If the texture is stretched out more, it might look as though it's animating faster.
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