Status Update - November 2022

Hey! In this update, November may look like it wasn't that busy, but in fact, it's the opposite due to work-in-progress projects! Let's get to it.

SilentPatch for Colin McRae Rally 3

That project is still ongoing and the very same Twitter thread is still growing in size. My progress since the last month includes, but is not limited, to:

• Finished widescreen implementation. Everything except for the split-screen has already been confirmed to be "perfect" even in ultrawide.
• Proof-of-concept adjustable FOV, using "real" degrees via a native game's camera FOV functionality. In plain English, this means that the options are going to change FOV "properly" instead of relying on an aspect ratio hack like it was done in SilentPatches for Colin McRae Rally 2 and TOCA2.
• A Czech version of the game, published by CD Projekt, has been discovered - this means the Locale Pack will further grow in size! Thankfully, that release is also DRM-free, making it less annoying to work with, and saving users the step where they delta patch their executable to remove DRM.
• Bekoha has joined the project and is working on faithful HD recreations of the UI (examples HERE and HERE). Most textures in the game assumed a constant size and would break when replaced with a high resolution asset, so SilentPatch is going to be a requirement for this UI pack. Because of this trait, we believe it's the first time an HD UI mod is going to be released for any of the "trilogy" games (CMR3 - CMR2005).
• Expanded Graphics options - Fullscreen/Windowed/Borderless is already in the game, and a few more options are planned.
• More bug fixes!

I still have no ETA on when the mod releases, as I keep finding things to work on - but I would like to see it released this year.

World Racing 2 Champion Edition

Unrelated to hobby work, but we're at a stage where it would be a shame not to mention it - after a long journey, World Racing 2 Champion Edition is finally releasing on Steam on December 8th! It'll cost 9.99EUR/USD and the equivalent in the local currency. I'm excited to see the reception since I handled the production side of this project and did all the coding.

Funny enough, in a true Silent fashion, one of the obscure Direct3D9Ex features I used revealed a bug in several "overlay" apps, like Steam, Discord, and ReShade. Thankfully, a bug report I filled in the latter got resolved very quickly, so people may now freely use ReShade WR2CE without flicker 🙂

Other work:

ghc/filsystem

• Fix a Y2038 bug in timeToFILETIME - a fix submitted as a part of my "Year 2038" project got merged after a slight delay.

Windows docs

• Direct3D9: Clarify that Occlusion Queries return the number of samples, not pixels - normally I don't mention my contributions to docs, as most of the time they are just simple fixes. However, in this case, a discovery of a cause of the flickering sun led to a discovery of a Direct3D9 documentation bug. Colin McRae Rally 3 followed that (wrong) advice, making the sun flicker colors rapidly when FSAA is enabled. Applying my proposed fix in the game resolved the issue, and this empirical proof was accepted as sufficient for accepting my proposal for revised guidelines.

PCSX2

• GameDB & CRC fixes for The Getaway games - a GameDB fix and a custom-made hack for The Getaway to work around long-standing issues with shadows. While it's not a proper fix, it's only enabled for The Getaway and its sequel, so other games are unaffected.

wil

• Attempt to guard zstring_view against reading out of bounds - a fix for a small defect in WIL related to the zstring_view class. Since WIL's repository is being periodically synced with an internal Windows repository, this technically means my fix should eventually make it to the Windows code too 😅