Status Update & a note about GTA IV - May 2020

Hey there! It's time for a recap of all the things I've done in May. The initial goal outlined in the last status update was to tidy up the remaining issues in recently released SilentPatches, and well... it didn't work out due to unexpected "events" throughout the month =)

This month saw improvements to DXHRDC-GFX as well as two new, totally unplanned SilentPatches.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut

Last month, I promised to hotfix  DXHRDC-GFX  and so we've seen two new releases in May. Currently, all known issues are fixed.

Future updates to the mod might come, especially in regards to SSAO. SilentPatch might or might not happen in the future (ETA unspecified), since I am aware of at least one performance optimization done by Nixxes for the original DXHR which is likely absent from the Director's Cut, and I could apply it from the mod. I also have a few other items noted.

SilentPatch for The Wonderful 101: Remastered

The first weeks of May brought an unexpected, but useful SilentPatch - I've been given access to the game before its official release (Kickstarter backers got access early) and I was able to release a patch for the most annoying frame pacing issues three days before the game's release. You can read about the patch in detail HERE.

There are no known issues with the patch itself, but people have reported more interesting features that could be brought to SP, e.g. a switch between the original and remastered soundtrack. Currently, SPW101 is "frozen" in case an official patch is to be released soon.

For those not interested in Wonderful 101 but following Metal Gear Rising or other titles from PlatinumGames - most of the research I've done for this game applies to the other titles from this studio too! This means that SilentPatch for Metal Gear Rising will benefit from the work I've done here.

SilentPatch for Mafia II: Definitive Edition

Yet another unexpected release - on May 20th, a re-release of Mafia II showed up out of nowhere. This remaster seems to have numerous issues (for now), but overall it's not half bad, especially considering it's free for existing Mafia II owners and includes all DLC's.

The issue which caught my attention was related to improper handling of user paths. Similarly to Yakuza 0, users with non-ASCII characters were unable to save, and on top of that save migration from the original Mafia II randomly breaks (it never works for me, I don't know why it can work for other people). Thankfully, I was able to relay all the relevant technical information upstream, and for the time being, I've released my own fix for that. You can read about it more HERE.

Please note that this patch should be considered temporary, I expect it to be fully deprecated by a future official patch which is in works.

Other

First of all, this month I submitted no contributions to any emulators. Better luck next time.

I submitted a change to Dear ImGui with the changes to XInput loading, like I "promised" once I discovered it was linking against xinput1_4.dll.

On my blog, I added a generic page with Setup Instructions, which seems to be the second most visited page this month! This sadly might mean that my existing installation instructions have been somewhat unclear, and I hope these new instructions are useful for those who struggled with this process.

Plans for June

My to-do list keeps growing, with some very interesting entries added this month - for example, it's been found that the "exposure" effect is broken in the PC ports of Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami when playing at resolutions over 720p! Having finished both games at 1080p, I wasn't even aware such a feature exists.

About GTA IV...

We need to talk about GTA IV. I might turn this into a fully-fledged, non-paywalled post in the future, but this will have to do for now.

As you might or might not know, the pressure for SilentPatchIV is high. Let me make myself clear - I do not want to touch GTA IV for numerous reasons, and in fact, this list of "reasons not to" is only growing lately. In short, I can think of two major reasons right now:

• Patch fragmentation -  unlike GTA San Andreas, GTA IV community is split across "patch4", "patch8" and now also across the Complete Edition of the game, which is currently still receiving (very poor) updates. Those patches are fundamentally different code-wise, so supporting them all would be comparable to working on three separate games at once. Moreover, I can't support only one of those patches without leaving 2/3 of the community unhappy, and then just hinting about supporting all patches raises the voices like "Don't bother with [other patch], it's a waste of time".
  Basically, I lose no matter what I do.
• Recent mistreatment of GTA IV by Rockstar - if you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed my recent remarks about how badly delivered the recent updates are - e.g. HERE and HERE. With this in mind, if I were to support the Complete Edition it would possibly mean literally working against these changes, or playing a game of cat and mouse by fixing whatever gets broken by future updates. With SilentPatches, I never intended to "chase" after the developers or working against them.

To add to that, as you know there have been cases of Take-Two shutting down modifications for GTA IV and (mostly) GTA V. Yes, I do realize that SilentPatchIV would be something entirely different, but why take the risk? All it takes is a single misinformed judgement from the legal department.