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.
Finally, the mod team have built a new streaming audio engine from scratch in order to fix an
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