Silent Hill 2’s Enhanced Edition mod has fixed a 21-year-old bug in its latest update

Silent Hill 2's Enhanced Edition mod has fixed a 21-year-old bug in its latest update

Silent Hill 2 fans have been slowly working away at an Enhanced Edition PC mod for years now, and its latest update introduces some substantial new features. Those additions include an installer and launcher which make it easier to get started, better AI-upscaled full-motion videos, and a fix for a crash and stutter bug that has plagued the horror classic since it first released on PC in 2001.

Here’s Update Video #8, which introduces each of those new features and more.


Previously if you wanted to play the Enhanced Edition mod, you had to download individual enhancement packs one by one from the mod team’s website. Some were executables, some were zip files, and you had to follow lengthy instructions on the mod’s website to piece them together. Now a new setup tool makes that process easier by letting you download and install whichever enhancements you want in just a few clicks. The same tool can also be used to apply future updates.

The Enhanced Edition also now has a launcher, which lets you tweak the game’s many new graphics settings, control options and so on before you launch the game.

One of the things the launcher lets you tweak are the Enhanced Edition’s FMVs. A previous update ran Silent Hill 2’s cutscenes through an AI upscaler, but the mod developers have re-run that process with newer, better AI, and it’s produced smoother, higher resolution results with almost no increase in file size. The Enhanced Edition can also cut those FMVs to whatever aspect ratio you’re running the game at. It looks substantially better in the clips above than, for example, Nightdive’s professional attempt at upscaling Blade Runner.

See also  Gucci makes gaming: luxury brand wants to conquer e-sports

Finally, the mod team have built a new streaming audio engine from scratch in order to fix an issue with stuttering and crashing that Silent Hill 2 has had since it first launched on PC. That issue turns out to be the result of the default audio engine working incorrectly with multi-core processors. It could cause game audio to skip, stop playing, and then crash the game entirely, as well as causing visual stuttering when a new audio file was loaded into a scene. Now, there are no more crashes, and far fewer stutters.

All of which sounds great, although there is a catch: Silent Hill 2 remains unavailable to buy digitally on PC, and you’ll need a copy of the original game in order to play the mod. It looks like it’s still going for close to £100 on eBaymuch as it was when Alice0 last wrote about the Enhanced Edition mod early last year.

At this point it seems like the best hope for a readily available Silent Hill 2 on PC might be Bloober Team’s rumored remake.

If you do have Silent Hill 2 however, you can head here to grab the setup tool for the Enhanced Edition.



Reference-www.rockpapershotgun.com