Perfect Dark XBLA Hex Edit?

[evilhotice]

I was trying to hex edit my combat simulator player stats and I did not get any results when searching for the values. Is there a checksum on the save?

[HijoDelSol]

Judging from opening up the unlock all cheevos and unlock all cheats saves shared elsewhere on the forums and comparing them against one another as well as some genuine ones, I thought maybe the devs had done something sneaky to use un-allocated blocks as a sort of way to obfuscate the real values, but I'm not sure if that's the case anymore. I can tell that the Combat Simulator's 30 Challenges' Star flags are stored in the 0x84 - 0x93 Byte range, starting on the rightmost bit of the former and the leftmost bit of the latter- each Bit is an individual flag, which is pretty ingenious storage-wise: 0 in a bit means No Star, 8 means the 1P Star has been earned, C means both the 1P and 2P Stars have been earned, A means both the 1P and 3P Star have been earned... If you're thinking in Binary (or you're seeing the Binary info in your Hex Editor of choice), you might've figured out the pattern Rare decided to use here. In a similar vein, I think the offsets at 0x5 - 0x7 may be related to flags for the Titles you can earn at the end of Combat Simulator matches (i.e.- Most Honorable, Shortest Life, etc.) and whether or not you've seen them at the end of a match, although there's supposed to be only 19 and it looks like there's 20 bits- it's possible one of them is simply a flag for the Ninja award itself? Someone would have to experiment on a clean save to figure out which bit corresponds to what title, though. Offset 0x1F might be holding the flags in its bits for the Carrington Institute's Holo VR Training (there's only 7 missions in it and it's pretty easy to do). I'm not sure on how the rest of the Institute's flags (the Device Training for the 10 devices and each of the 32 Bronze, Silver, and Gold stars for the Firing Range) are split-up, however. It's hard to tell them apart from what may be the flags keeping track of whether or not you've gotten a kill mid-gameplay with each of them. I notice there's some offset ranges pre-allocated with FF bytes that appear to somehow correlate to the amount of campaign missions, and at least one set of them (the 16 bytes at 0x164 - 0x173 and the 4 bytes at 0x18C - 0x18F) go untouched in both of the aforementioned save files shared on the forums; I'm presuming they might be either Single Player or Local campaign related, as there's no achievement or cheat that requires you to play Single Player specifically to unlock them, whereas you do need at least 1 full Co-Op and Counter-Op completion, so why not boost through the whole campaign in the former and do a single of the latter? On the other hand, these might instead be related to the weapons, it's hard to tell at a glance due to how Rare was loving the use of bit flags. Combat simulator statistics and other leaderboard-uploadable values don't seem to actually be stored in the save file; They might be stored in the player's Gamertag Profile, which is why you can't find them, but I'm not familiar with digging through it safely in order to check myself for sure. If anyone does, they should keep in mind that it's possible for some of those values to be at least as large as 3 Bytes, as regardless of the number's Endian-ness, 2 Bytes (Int16) can only reach up to 65,535, whereas the game's ranking system needs to be able to keep track of Damage and Ammunition that goes beyond that number by a fair bit (at least 450,000 ammo in the original version, for example).

[HijoDelSol]

Combat Simulator stats are most likely stored in the 584109C2.gpd file inside a player's GamerTag Profile, as opposed to inside PDSave.bin, which seems to contain mostly bit flags.