Overview
This guide will explain what is Silent Patch and how to apply it, how to get controller support, as well as possibly other things in the future. It’s an adaption of -3xA’Lu©κy’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Steam thread.For the respective GTA III and GTA SA Steam guides, please use the following 2 links: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=641839127 – GTA IIIhttp://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=641831651 – GTA San AndreasCredit goes Silent and Jack Thompson, because they made the Silent Patch and Downgraders respectivelyAnd thanks to my friend -3xA’Lu©κy for letting me adapt his thread into a guide
What is Silent Patch?
Silent Patch is an unofficial patch that fixes all the remaining issues with this game whilst bringing back features that were only found in the console releases as well. In my opinion: it’s now a necessity for any player and ultimately gives you the best GTA VC experience possible. A changelog for it can be found in the “SILENT PATCH CHANGELOG:” section of this guide.
How do I install Silent Patch?
To install it: simply go to link 1, expand the box below the “Silent Patch” heading and click the “Download” button, and then in the same section click the “Download DDraw Component” button there as well. After that, unzip the Silent Patch file and then drag and drop its “SilentPatchVC.asi” file AND “data” folder into your game’s main folder. Lastly, unzip the Silent Patch DDraw file this time and then drag and drop its .dll file into your game’s main folder.
1. [link]
Original Soundtrack
These files come directly from my Steam copy of Vice City. Anyone that bought Vice City on Steam prior to 2012 like me has the full soundtrack on Steam. All you need to do is replace your files in C:Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonGrand Theft Auto Vice CityAudio with the files contained in the .zip file that you can download from the link below:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/loxtve11ociovga/Original%20Vice%20City%20soundtrack%20.zip?dl=1
Controller support?
Simply expand the box below the “Ginput” heading from link 1 and click the “Download” button. The contents should go into your game’s main folder.
1. [link]
Widescreen Fix
This part of the guide will show you how to install a widescreen fix for GTA VC. This is needed because normally when widescreen is enabled: your crosshair doesn’t match where your bullets actually land. After you have installed this mod, it will remove the Widescreen On and Off options, setting On as default.
- To install the widescreen fix you will have to download the file from this link:
[link] - After that, unzip your file and drop “d3d8.dll”, “global.ini”, “GTAVC.WidescreenFix.asi” and “GTAVC.WidescreenFix.ini” in your game’s main folder.
- For additional textures download go to this link:
[link]
Some extra information on frame limiter bugs!
• GTA III, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas should all have the in-game frame limiter (Options –> Display Setup –> Advanced) enabled, otherwise you’ll run into odd bugs. In GTA III and GTA: Vice City specifically, you’ll notice physics-related bugs and cars aceelerating/braking incredibly fast. So do yourself a favour and enable the frame limiter which will lock your game to 30 FPS.
Converting 1.0 saves to 1.1
This opitional part of the guide will show how to convert saves made on the retail version of the game to be loaded on the Steam version, it can be used to play your old save files or download save files from the internet, since most of them were made using the retail version.
1. Download the tool from this link: [link]
2. Extract the executable file to any folder on your desktop.
3. Drag and drop the save files on the executable and follow the instructions that will appear in a command window that will pop-up.
GTA Vice City’s saves are located on “DocumentsGTA Vice City User Files” and they should be named “GTAVCsfX .b”
X – being the slot (eg. GTAVCsf3.b), this means it’s located on the 3rd slot.
SILENT PATCH CHANGELOG:
•Fixed an issue where installing the game on A or B drive made the game ask for the CD
•Mouse should not lock up randomly when exiting the menu on newer systems anymore
•Mouse will not go beyond the game rect now, allowing to play the game on multimonitor setups without problems
•Mouse vertical axis sensitivity now matches horizontal axis sensitivity
•Mouse vertical axis does not lock during camera fadeins now
•More precise frame limiter, reducing lag spikes a bit when playing with Frame Limiter on
•Rosenberg’s lines which play when player is Busted work correctly now (just like with Rosie’s Audio Fix)
•Game now performs a bit better on high FPS. It doesn’t freeze on fadeouts anymore, although it still has issues with car physics, gravity and sounds. Therefore it’s still recommended to play with Frame Limiter set to ON
•Wet road reflections render properly again (just like with Road Reflections Fix)
•Reintroduced light glows under weapon/health/armour pickups, bribes, hidden packages and money pickups – they showed only on PS2 due to a bug in all PC versions
•All texts now have proper shadows (depending on chosen resolution, without the fix they’d appear thinner etc.
•Free resprays will not carry on a New Game now
•Fixed ambulance and firetruck dispatch timers – they reset on New Game now
•Corrected crime codes for police dispatch audio – police dispatch now refers to player crimes correctly
•Fixed a bug causing cheat-spawned melee weapons to be forcibly replaced by other melee weapons upon walking into a pickup
•Some props in Malibu Club, Ocean View Hotel and Pole Position Club have been restored; more environment shows outside when player is in interior too (just like on PS2)
•FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING flag has been removed from IMG reading functions – speeding up streaming
•Alt+F4 now works properly
•Some car panels now are detached after car’s explosion (like they were meant to be but the code forcibly fixed them immediately after damaging)
•Metric-to-imperial conversion constants have been replaced with more accurate ones
•Pathfinding for cars chasing the player has been improved
•All censorships from German and French versions of the game have been removed
•Bombs in cars stored in garages now save properly
•Fixed an issue which would cause games to freeze if III/VC/SA were running at the same time
•Car generator counters now work properly for generators with fixed amount of spawns
•Extras on bikes now behave correctly, following bike lean and not floating in air
•Keyboard input latency decreased by one frame
•Made the game select metric/imperial units basing on system locale settings. This can be overridden from the INI file
•Sirens of emergency vehicles have received correct corona placements, so they now actually match models!
•Sirens of FBI vehicles in both GTA III and Vice City have been improved
•A glitch that allowed vehicles without any extras to spawn (i.e. lightless taxis) has now been addressed
•Fix for all submachine guns sounding the same when any of them are used to perform a drive-by
•Fixed corona lines rendering on non-NVIDIA graphics cards
•extra6 can now be picked by the game when a random extra is to be picked
DDRAW CHANGELOG (extra component of Silent Patch):
•If the settings file is absent, the game will now default to your desktop resolution instead of 640x480x16
•DirectPlay dependency has been removed – this should improve compatibility with Windows 8 and newer
•The game will not crash on startup if Data Execution Prevention is enabled for all applications anymore
•Cannot find enough available video memory error showing on some computers has been removed
•Path to the User Files directory is now obtained differently, hopefully increasing compatibility and future-proofing the games more
Thanks
Thanks goes to:
– Silent for his Silent Patch and GInput. He can be found on Steam and the gtaforums.
– ThirteenAG for his Widescreen fix plugin. He can be found on [link] .
– The rest of the modding community for keeping Vice City alive all this time.