Silent is a real cool dude. I’ve interacted with him directly and he’s always been helpful.
I assume the code was closed only because it was a bit of a hodge podge he had to clean up. (Well, that and the GTA modding scene is a bit, uh, toxic, to say the least)
I’m currently in a similar position for Black Box NFS games. It’s taken me over a year so far and I’m still not fully satisfied to release anything because there’s so much code to span over 6 (similar, but different) games.
What does your mod do? I’m a big fan of the Shift titles. Not familiar with Black Box.
Similarly how SilentPatch and the WidescreenFix fixes various bugs and adds improvements, mine does as well.
As a matter of fact, I used to maintain ThirteenAG’s WFP for NFS. Now I’m focused on my own thing mostly. (Forked it off of it but barely any of the code is left lol)
It’s called NFS-MultiFix. (I made one ages ago in 2017 for ProStreet but I’m reviving the project now).
It’s a going to basically be an all-in-one thing. So, from basic things like a widescreen fix, to the added ability to change resolutions of environment maps and shadows, fixing clipped/popin shadows in Undercover, fixing crashes, fixing some crap gameplay features, resizable windowed mode, etc. Basically, making it a version of the game that it deserves to be on PC.
It’s a genuinely pretty massive set of fixes spanning over 80 cpp/hpp files with about 500 lines of code on average. I made sure to optimize every nitty-gritty and I ended up with a smaller DLL size than the average widescreen fix while adding so many more features.
I also have a design rule in place - it must do its best effort to work in every possible version of the game without crashing. This includes demo versions of the same games. (This sadly doesn’t count DRM but nothing I can do about that)
That being said, I am currently focused on ProStreet (as I’m also the main coder in Team Pepega for the Pepega Mod) and I hope to make a release within the next year. It should be available for every Black Box NFS on PC (except The Run and World)
If you wanna check out what I made so far, check out the Reformed mod for Undercover. I made an exclusive release for those guys because frankly, Undercover is the worst one out of the bunch (in terms of code).
Sounds like you’re doing God’s work. Those games always felt a bit short of being great.
Nice.
