[At Your Own Risk] How to play Dead Trigger with ALL Tegra 3 graphics on your Galaxy SII, Note, Nexus, or SIII (Bonus Dead Trigger Sixaxis profile!)

Screenshot from Dead Trigger taken from my SIII, but where did those 'Tegra 3 exclusive'
water effects come from? Read on, you know you want to know how...

We're always up for providing a quick how-to here at AndroidNZ, particularly when it lets us work around artificial restrictions placed on our devices. Naturally in this instance I'm talking about those Tegra-3 'exclusive' graphical extras that we're meant to miss out on in Madfingergames latest zombie frag-fest Dead Trigger, despite having perfectly capable hardware.

If you read part two of our Galaxy SIII review you'll know exactly how I feel about Tegra-exclusivity, and you'll also be aware that even with Root and Chainfire 3D, Tegra-3 versions of titles aren't working with our Galaxy SIIIs (and if you haven't read the review piece you'd better make a start, part two is nearly 9,000 words long and you want to finish it before the next part goes live, right?!).

Or at least, that's how things were when I wrote that part of the review.

You see, as of now we can avail ourselves of those lovely Tegra-3 graphics in Dead Trigger. I wish I could report that this was via an update to Chainfire 3D, as that might give hope of unlocking those other Tegra-3 exclusives for us, but sadly the news isn't quite that good. Nevertheless, it is still quite good news, since apart from actually working, the method for enabling the extra graphical touches in Dead Trigger is, well, dead-simple (many thanks to SnakeHaveYou at XDA for bringing this to light for us).

In fact, it's so simple that there isn't really much to the guide that follows at all. That being the case I thought I had better add a sweetener, and this time it's a Sixaxis Controller Touch Emulation profile for you to download...

Oh, and if you saw the [At Your Risk] moniker and wondered what risks might be involved here, you can exhale now - the worst you can do is wipe your present game progress (and even then only if you're a muppet).

Read on!

So, here it is, arbitrarily written into ten easy steps because that sounds like a good number:

1. Install Dead Trigger to your Rooted handset
2. Play the first level of the game and quit out of it
3. In Root Explorer (or similar Root-required file manager) mount as R/W, and then navigate to the following directory: /data/data/com.madfingergames.deadtrigger/shared_prefs
4. Long press the following file "com.madfingergames.deadtrigger.xml" and select the option "Open in Text Editor"
5. Find the following entry, and change the "1" to "2"

6. Scroll down to around the middle of the file and find the following entry, and change the "2" to a "3"



7. Save and exit, then move the automatically generated backup of the original file  "com.madfingergames.deadtrigger.xml.bak" to somewhere else on either the external or internal SD cards (if anything were to go wrong here you can just remove the .bak part of the backups file name and copy it over the modified one in the /shared_prefs folder to restore things to how they were before)
8. At this point SnakeHaveYou says you should remove the write permissions from the modified file, however I cannot make it work doing that (Dead Trigger changes the permissions back and modifies the file if I do). If the method here doesn't work for you first time around, try changing the permissions and see if his original method works for you.
9. Now when you open the game and go into settings you should see it saying "UltraHigh" in the graphics options, where previously it maxed out at "High" or "Very High". Make sure you do not change this setting in-game, if you do UltraHigh is removed from the options again and you'll have to start over.
10. So, with that little verification out of the way you're done! Now go and enjoy those 'exclusive' graphics!

Since we were basically only altering two digits in the .xml file in order to achieve the desired result here, I thought I should probably go that little step further for AndroidNZ readers and share my own little Dead Trigger Touch Emulation profile for Sixaxis Controller with you all. Right-click the link here and select "Save link as..." to grab the .map file, and then save it in the Profiles folder at /mnt/sdcard/data/com.dancingpixelstudios.sixaxiscontroller

I've mapped the controls like so:

• L analog stick - move
• R analog stick aim/turn (note that if you want to make your own profile, this stick needs to be set to "relative touch" mode in it's buttons properties in order to work properly)
• R1 - fire
• Triangle - reload
• Circle - use secondary item 
• Select - bring up the pause menu

...and that's a wrap! And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to disintegrate a few zombies on my HDTV with the help of my PS3 controller before bed...