The GTA Trilogy’s excellent SilentPatch just got a major update and became open source

When you buy from our articles through links, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.

You may know Silent from patches like that Restore product placement and ensures analog controls work correctly in Crazy Taxior the one who recovers Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s piss filter. Perhaps even more important is the SilentPatch for the Grand Theft Auto trilogy, which just received a major update and became open-source to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The GTA SilentPatch fixes numerous issues in the PC ports of GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas, many of which were not present in the original consoles. However, it’s not a patch for the Definitive Edition re-release, which is a whole different story with its own well-documented problems.

One of the fixes that the SilentPatch now adds for all three games is a fix for the issue where cars could explode twice if you escaped during the explosion, fixing the PS2 version’s random chance of some drivers turning their lights off wouldn’t wear out in the rain or fog, metal vehicle extras now look quite shiny instead of weirdly matte, the credits scroll at the right speed (they were slower at high resolutions), and the mission completion text left off as well the screen at the right speed (again, it was tied to resolution).

There are also a significant number of changes specific to individual games. For example, the SilentPatch now gives GTA 3 the correct sitting and driving animations instead of Claude simply falling through the seat, pedestrians ducking away from your vehicle instead of towards it, and severed limbs using the correct model instead of strangely folding in half. become. so that you would see two hands on each severed arm. Oh, and NPC drivers can now turn right on one-way streets, something they couldn’t do before.

Meanwhile, many changes at Vice City involve removing broken backfaces. If you’re not familiar with it, culling is video games’ way of saving memory by not displaying things you can’t see, like the backs of objects. Vice City had all kinds of problems clearing the backface, which resulted in car windows and parts of Tommy’s collar disappearing, among other things. That’s all been fixed, as has the muzzle flashes of assault rifles pointed the wrong way, and a separate patch for pedestrians and Tommy not talking as much as they should on the street has been included in the SilentPatch.

Finally, in sunny San Andreas, CJ’s clothes now move when he rides the quad, just like on regular bikes, and you can hover with the jetpack even when using the keyboard controls (which default to Q+E and makes the jetpack segments are much less annoying). Those weird falling black dots have also been fixed – while conspiracy theorists have long theorized that they would be flying saucers, Silent looked at the code and realized that they were supposed to use the textures of clouds, but had taken the wrong part of it. They now look white as they were originally intended and appear clearly as shooting stars. Mystery solved.

You can download separate versions of the SilentPatch for each of the three Grand Theft Auto games it supports, follow the installation instructions. They differ depending on the store you bought the games from, and whether you have an old retail version on disk, so make sure you follow them closely.