Status Update - April 2020

Hey, Silent there! May has begun, and so it's time for the very first monthly status update from me. I initially hadn't planned on writing those but decided to give it a shot since sometimes I get a lot of work done and having an easily accessible summary of it might be a good idea. Since this is the first status update, feedback is very much appreciated!

Here's a list of things I've done during the last month. It might not cover absolutely everything, but I am certain I included anything which might be interesting for an end-user.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut

The highlight of this month. Last week I released DXHRDC-GFX - a modification for DXHR Director's Cut restoring the gold filter (and the rest of the post-processing) from the original Human Revolution. The response was excellent and the mod has gained more traction than I had hoped for, with the blog post detailing the development process viewed over 11.000 times!

Unfortunately, a few bugs sneaked into the initial release, including an accidental incompatibility with Windows 7. I already got to the bottom of most of those, and plan to release an update this weekend.

RPCS3

While I occasionally contribute to numerous emulators, this month's contributions were sparse. The biggest contribution in April was a fix for Tales of Xillia (and Tales of Xillia 2) crashing with too many DLC's installed. I investigated the issue and came up with a fix - while it ended up not being merged, my research was used by elad335 to come up with a better fix. All worked fine in the end!

Dolphin

My April contribution to Dolphin is honestly boring! All I did was fix a single bug in the UI =)

Other

By now it's almost a tradition that I find issues in third-party libraries my projects rely on. First - Windows Implementation Libraries, which did not compile correctly in projects targetting Windows Vista (don't judge me, okay?). Then, with the release of DXHRDC-GFX which uses Dear ImGui (a UI library), I was forced to dive deeper into its code to remove a few DLL dependencies I did not want and found that the initialization flow in Direct3D 10 and 11 implementations could be improved. It's nothing major, but might ever so slightly decrease Dear ImGui's memory usage (by around 1KB).

April Fools

I couldn't help but mention my little April Fools prank - I only posted two screenshots from GTA IV on Twitter and it seems like that was enough. Sorry to disappoint ;)

Plans for May

My ever-growing to-do list (available for $8 Patrons) has plenty of things I want to do, but I think I will spend at least half of May in maintenance mode. Aside from DXHRDC-GFX, there are bugs I need to fix in SilentPatch for Scarface. I also have SilentPatch for Metal Gear Rising which is left in limbo in a nearly finished state - so this might be a very good moment to revisit it and wrap it up.

That's about it! Stay healthy and enjoy!