A bit of history

Has it been ten years already? Exactly a decade ago, I opened a new thread on GTAForums about my fix-mod for GTA III and GTA Vice City:

The first releases were relatively small mods – SilentPatch 1.01 for GTA III included 12 fixes, while the one for GTA Vice City – just 6! The first fixes for San Andreas spun off my various experiments in VCS PC Edition; in the end, the patch for SA was released considerably bigger, with just over 30 fixes. Ever since then, these patches tripled in size, which is an achievement considering I initially said I’d not update them with any more fixes 😁

During that time, SilentPatch went through a lot. Some of the moments I remember the best are:

  • The release of Rosenberg’s Audio Fix and Road Reflections Fix on November 10, 2012 and November 24, 2012 respectively. Those two small modifications are essentially “proto-SilentPatches” and have directly influenced the decision to make a bigger “fix compilation” mod a year later.
  • The release of SilentPatch for San Andreas on June 16, 2014, after it had “leaked” a day prior.
  • The release of SilentPatch for Colin McRae Rally 2.0 on August 8, 2015 – the first non-GTA patch.
  • The first SilentPatch update with an update name released on December 28, 2019, turned out to be named rather unfortunately: The Corona Update.
  • The SilentPatch that, to date, went the most viral due to the obscurity of a bug it fixed: SilentPatch for Mass Effect.
  • SilentPatch with the biggest scope of changes to date: SilentPatch for Colin McRae Rally 3. Not only it introduces so many improvements it could be called a “remaster”, but it’s also notable for having been playtested by two ex-Codemasters developers who originally worked on the game in 2003!
  • The first SilentPatch that directly influenced an official fix: SilentPatch for EA Sports WRC.

Nowadays, SilentPatch spans over 25 games of various ages and genres – dating from games released as far back as 1998, to games released just two months ago as of the time of writing this post.

Celebrating 10 years of fixes

  1. As the SilentPatch name lives as its own “brand” now, I’ve created a page specifically dedicated to it:
    About SilentPatch
    On this page, I included a list of all supported games and an explanation of what SilentPatch is – as more often than not, once a patch reaches a community previously unaware of my work, people assume “silent” shall be taken literally, and these patches mute sounds in the game 😅

  2. I have updated the timeline of the SilentPatch history. I highlighted the most important events related to those, mostly focusing on the GTA patches due to their historical significance, but also listing all the other supported games, as well as some other events that directly led to the creation of, or influenced the shape of SilentPatch.
    The legend for colours is as follows:
    • Blue – SilentPatch events.
    • Green – miscellaneous events directly related to SilentPatch.
    • Pink – events related to other modifications, which were relevant for SilentPatch development nonetheless.
    • Orange – ‘community spotlight’ events.
      I recommend viewing the timeline fullscreen!
  3. Last but not least, a formal announcement – The original SilentPatches for GTA games will become open source in January 2024! 🥳 My interest in these games has lowered over the years, but I still want to give these original patches a proper sendoff – therefore, they are going to receive a new update together with a full repository history publishing on GitHub. You’ll not only be able to see the current state of the code but also follow it throughout most of the development cycle!
    To clarify – I don’t intend to say this is going to be a definite final update for those SilentPatches. However, considering that they were last updated in 2020, this is highly likely.

What’s next?

As always – I’m not sure. SilentPatch has been thriving as a “brand” and I’ve expanded into many more games, so I hope it continues. I’ve recently also been taking contracts to help re-release older games on modern digital gaming platforms that I suppose can be called “official SilentPatches”; even though they don’t carry the name, internally they work just like SPs, patching the game’s code at runtime 🙂

That said, I have very high hopes for 2024 – if everything goes well (and it still might not), perhaps next year we will see the first game officially released carrying the SilentPatch name… Fingers crossed!

  1. “Build X” versioning came later, around 2015. ↩