A game released in 2002 gets a large-scale patch in 2023, developers are confident with updates comparable to remasters



A large-scale patch ' SilentPatch ' for the racing game '

Colin McRae Rally 3 ' released for Xbox, PlayStation 2 (PS2), and PC in 2002 was released by volunteers in 2023.

Remastering Colin McRae Rally 3 with SilentPatch | Silent's Blog
https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2023/01/15/remastering-colin-mcrae-rally-3-silentpatch/

Colin McRae Rally 3 is a racing game released for PS2 and Xbox on October 25, 2002, and a PC port version was released on June 13, 2003 from the game development studio Six by Nine. The sequel ' Colin McRae Rally 04 ' was released in 2003, and ' Colin McRae Rally 2005 ' was released in 2004. Colin McRae Rally 3 will celebrate its 20th anniversary in October 2022.




Colin McRae Rally 2.0 , the predecessor of Colin McRae Rally 3, was released as a game for PC, but Colin McRae Rally 3 was initially released as a title exclusively for stationary game consoles. Also, the later released PC port version of Colin McRae Rally 3 was also considered a ' substandard port ' when it appeared.

Game footage of Colin McRae Rally 3 at the time of 2002 is as follows.

Colin McRae Rally 3 | All Cars-YouTube


In January 2023, about three months after the 20th anniversary of Colin McRae Rally 3, game developer Adrian released a large-scale patch ``SilentPatch'' for Colin McRae Rally 3. SilentPatch is a self-made patch developed by Adrian in collaboration with game developer Bekoha , not only to fix bugs, but also to support aspect ratios of 16: 9 and adopt a high-definition UI optimized for 4K displays. , and various new features have been added.

SilentPatch is published on GitHub.

GitHub - CookiePLMonster/SilentPatchCMR3: SilentPatch for Colin McRae Rally 3
https://github.com/CookiePLMonster/SilentPatchCMR3



DRM was the first problem Adrian had when creating a patch for Colin McRae Rally 3. There are three main solutions for DRM, two of which have been deliberately disabled by Windows recently. One of these DRMs is so devised that it may render Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines unbootable. Colin McRae Rally 4 uses physical DRM (a ring is attached to the disc surface to reduce the reliability of data copying), and Colin McRae Rally 2005 was released DRM-free on GOG.com . Although I understood, it seems that the details of DRM were unknown only for Colin McRae Rally 3.

However, when Adrian accessed the executable file of the Polish PC version of Colin McRae Rally 3, it turned out to be DRM-free. However, it seems that there were multiple bugs, such as UI problems and crashes on various screens. However, the German DVD version of Colin McRae Rally 3 has fewer bugs and no DRM than the Polish version, so they decided to develop a patch based on it.




It seems that the Xbox / PS2 version of Colin McRae Rally 3 had an option to switch the aspect ratio from 4: 3 to 16: 9, but it seems that this option did not exist in the PC version. However, the function itself remained only that the option was deleted.

Support any aspect ratio by scaling your game to any aspect ratio. UI such as time and speedometer displayed on the game screen are dynamically arranged according to the aspect ratio, so the position is consistent regardless of resolution. The original screen UI was designed for an aspect ratio of 4: 3, so ``a lot of adjustments were needed'' to make it usable on game screens with any aspect ratio, Adrian said. I'm here.



The PC version of Colin McRae Rally 3 had a strange bug where the sun would flash in random colors when the FSAA (anti-aliasing) option was enabled. This is a bug regardless of whether anti-aliasing is enabled in-game or forced externally. This bug was only fixed for the Colin McRae Rally 2005, and it is said that the cause is 'the game is waiting for the result to be returned as soon as the sun block query is finished'. Although the fix is theoretically easy because the cause is known, Adrian said, 'Implementation was a little difficult.'

Colin McRae Rally 3: Technicolor Sunshine-YouTube


Colin McRae Rally 3 also has courses that run next to lakes and across rivers. However, due to the excellent cubemap -based reflection and subtle animation, it seems that the expression of the reflecting and sparkling water surface was subtle. Below is an example of the water surface of the PC version of Colin McRae Rally 3, which seems to have turned white or black due to reflection.



As a result of correcting the water surface so that it is rendered correctly, Adrian confidently says, ``It's not as good as Far Cry, but it's a pretty clean water surface.''



In addition, SilentPatch adds several new options.

Tachometer:
Customizable tachometer similar to Colin McRae Rally 2.0.



Field of view control:
By default, the viewing angle of the in-game camera is 75 degrees, but you can set it to your preferred value in the range of 30 to 150 degrees.

30 degree viewing angle



120 degree viewing angle



It also supports support for high refresh rates and the addition of anisotropic filtering options. In addition, the original PC version of Colin McRae Rally 3 was developed based on a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, but by increasing the UI resolution, it has succeeded in upscaling to 4K resolution.



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in Video,   Game, Posted by logu_ii