Dead Island: Riptide has not enjoyed the most glowing of receptions. On top of the issues critics have raised, players were unable to play co-operatively online at launch thanks to a bug that was only recently fixed. Then there are all the quirks the original game suffered from — keyboard-related stuttering, a fixed field of view and poor performance — that Riptide has inherited. Fortunately, there is a solution for the latter gripes.
Back when Dead Island was released, I decided to bundle a bunch of user-created tweaks that required hacking around the game’s internal scripts into an easy-to-use program: Dead Island Helper. This week, I updated the tool to work with Riptide, a task that was a easier than I thought it would be.
The internals of the game haven’t changed — which isn’t surprising — so updating the original Helper to work with Riptide didn’t take long. A couple of tweaks no longer do anything, such as overcast weather, but otherwise all the options converted across painlessly.
I also took the opportunity to add some extra options, which you can find below:
- Fixes keyboard-related micro-stuttering.
- Unbind / rebind hard-coded controls (Use, firearm melee, mousewheel, throw special, etc).
- Change the field-of-view (FOV).
- Disable various visual effects including motion blur, bloom, SSAO, weapon refraction and more.
- Launch Dead Island: Riptide with intro movies disabled.
- Disable event logging, which can improve load times and reduce stuttering.
- Enable SMAA (Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing). Uses Andrej Dudenhefner’s injectSMAA.
- Change audio APIs, which can help with crackling audio.
- Auto-terminate the “Berkelium” background process, which can improve performance.
- Various other shortcuts, tweaks and improvements.
I spent some time yesterday digging around for options that might let one control the camera movement when moving around or swinging weapons, also called camera “bobbing”. This is by far the tweak I get the most requests for. Unfortunately, I failed to find any variables related to this functionality and my guess is it’s tied to the motion of the model itself, upon which the player’s camera is attached.
While I don’t plan to spend much time playing the game myself, I’m more than happy to implement new features as they come up. Since the first release, I’ve added SMAA anti-aliasing, extra keybinding options and the ability to change the audio API.
Tweak visual settings, controls and performance with Dead Island: Riptide Helper [Playwrite]
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