PDPCP Launcher

This little tool is meant to make keeping your Perfect Dark PC Port up-to-date more convenient.

What does PDPCPL mean?

PDPCPL is an acronym of "Perfect Dark PC Port Launcher".

Why does PDPCPL exist?

PDPCPL was born out of my own laziness. I enjoy playing the Perfect Dark PC port, but updating it to the most recent auto-built version is too many clicks for me, so instead I built a little GUI application with PowerShell and its integration with WinForms to do the work for me. I simply chose PowerShell because it's what I had immediate access to, not because it does anything particularly special.

What does PDPCPL do?

Everything under the hood is exposed in the update.ps1 file. You can open it in any text editor and see exactly what calls it's making and what information it stores. PDPCPL is primarily designed to:

Download the most recent version of the auto-built Perfect Dark PC port from GitHub.
- If the application detects a new version, it will replace the old build with the most recent version.
Launch the game

Okay, but what exactly is it doing?

When the Update button is clicked, PDPCPL will query the Perfect Dark PC port Commits Atom feed. It parses the feed as an XML document, reads the most recent Commit ID, then checks against the ID stored in current-commit.txt file to see if the Commit IDs match.
- If there isn't a current-commit.txt, PDPCPL will create one.
Since the Perfect Dark PC port has builds auto-generated when there's a new push, checking the Commits Atom feed seemed like as good a place as any to see if there's a new build available.
- I'm using the Atom feed specifically so the end-user doesn't need to have anything extra installed.
The console is always available to monitor what the application is doing.

How to use PDPCPL

Run launcher.exe and the application will open
Select a branch using the drop-down menu. The default branch is port.
- If you want netplay to be available, be sure to select port-net.
Click Update to download the most recent update
- If you have a current-commit.txt file that is preventing an update, you can delete it and click 'Update' again to force the application to redownload the latest auto-build.
Once the application has finished downloading the game files, put your pd.ntsc-final.z64 rom in the data folder that was created.
You can start the game by running pd.exe or by pressing the "Play" button in the launcher.

Netplay?

NetPlay instructions and known issues can be found here.

sabre230 / PDPCPL