Mon, May 28, 2012 | 06:35 BST

Silent Hill HD Collection ported from incomplete code

Konami lost the complete source code for Silent Hill 2 and 3, leaving the team behind the Silent Hill HD Collection to work with unfinished versions of the games.

Senior associate producer Tomm Hulett revealed the unfortunate loss for a 1UP feature on HD remasters.

“We got all the source code that Konami had on file – which it turns out wasn’t the final release version of the games,” he said.

“So during debug we didn’t just have to deal with the expected ‘porting’ bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we’d never seen before.”

Despite the criticisms the remakes have received, things could have been a lot worse.

“A lot of assets such as textures and sound had to be taken out of the compiled game, and that brings with it a host of unique issues, especially taken on top of the tricky coding workarounds at play in the original games. We certainly had our hands full. I think at one point Heather was blue,” the producer added.

Thanks, Gekidami!

9 comments

aseddon130
28/05/12, 8:15 am

why not just get an original copy and reverse engineer the code that’s on the disc then?

This was just lazy from the start.

Takeshi
28/05/12, 9:41 am

@1: maybe it’s like .psd and .jpg files. The retail copies are .jpg files and they need the .psd to actively work on it.

silkvg247
28/05/12, 9:43 am

You do know that compiled code isn’t the same as source, right?

The_Red
28/05/12, 1:20 pm

Nice one Konami.
Really nice. Lose the final code of the 2 best survival horror games ever made (Mainly SH2 though).
While you’re at it, why not lose the original code for MGS1 and CV Symphony of the Night?

Da Man
28/05/12, 2:03 pm

They should lose the script and voiceovers for MGS, definitely,

alexfranco60
28/05/12, 10:47 pm

“Many consumers don’t realize you can’t just buy a copy of SH2 and then open up its code in a usable state.”

There’s your answer

Clupula
28/05/12, 11:21 pm

@6 – Actually, BluePoint games talk about how they started the Ico/Shadow of the Colossus Collections, not with the code for the games, but with the retail copies.

alexfranco60
28/05/12, 11:27 pm

Yeah thats right Clupula!… but i mean Tomm Hulett’s words

Phoenixblight
28/05/12, 11:55 pm

You do that and its more work not only do you not have the source art assets but the heavily compressed versions so that means you have to either use the same assets but modify them which can cause issues like pixelation or distortion or recreate them entirely. Then you don’t get the source file to the engine which means you have to sort through a lot of mess and figure the logic of technical engineers.

Just like @2 and @3 its not like having the source file.