Reputable Grand Theft Auto modder Silent has been patching up the PC ports of the original trilogy of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas for years, and recently earned a tip of the hat from former Rockstar tech lead Obbe Vermeij after open source versions of his corrective mods were released to the public.
"Games have bugs and GTA is no exception," Vermeij said in a November 3 tweet. Earlier this year, Vermeij fielded a response to GTA: San Andreas' infamous plane crash bugs, outlining the "QA nightmare" behind them.
"Over the last decade, a modder going by the name ‘Silent’ has developed patches to the original trilogy on PC," Vermeij continued. "SilentPatch fixes 67 issues with GTA3, 66 for Vice and 165 for SA. If you want to play the original games I would recommend installing SilentPatch." You can download the mods here.
As for how many of those bugs could be traced back to Vermeij's code, he said in one reply: "I'm not going to count but erm... Quite a few." Asked if he could go back and fix one bug in San Andreas, Vermeij singled out "the one with the front-end map that makes random things change when the player goes outside the map" as "probably the worst bug we missed."
"[Silent] has recently made his GTA patches Open Source," Vermeij added. "This means others can add their own fixes. Not for the faint of heart as it involves analyzing the game code in assembler format."
We're talking about the original GTA trilogy here, but Vermeij was also asked for his opinion of the Rockstar-official, downright disastrous GTA Trilogy – The Definitive Edition which was essentially fired out of a cannon in 2021. Rockstar apologized for the state of the trilogy and has updated it repeatedly, but it remains sub-par by the standards of many fans. For his part, Vermeij said: "I haven't actually tried them. I hear most of the bugs are fixed now. Yes, they were rushed."
Silent shared Vermeij's post and responded with a classic modding anecdote: one user pointing out that one in-game weapon sprite is off by a single pixel in GTA 3. "It never ends," Silent wrote.
This caught the attention of Mike Dailly, known as the creator of Lemmings and the core design of the original GTA. "It's an incredible piece of work," Dailly said of Silent's mods. "Fixing bugs at the best of times can be tricky, fixing them on a final optimized binary... wow. Sterling work." In a follow-up comment, Dailly added: "Glad to see you're already a gamedev, as it would be a waste of those skills if you weren't!"
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