Silent Patch, Controller Support and Widescreen Fix (III)

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 III Steam thread.

For the respective GTA VC and GTA SA Steam guides, please use the following 2 links:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=641848214 - GTA VC
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=641831651 - GTA San Andreas


Credit goes to Silent, because he made Silent Patch

And 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 III 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 "SilentPatchIII.asi file" AND "models" 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. https://cookieplmonster.github.io/mods/gta-iii/#silentpatch

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. https://cookieplmonster.github.io/mods/gta-iii/#ginput

Widescreen Fix

This part of the guide will show you how to install a widescreen fix for GTA III. 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:
  https://github.com/ThirteenAG/WidescreenFixesPack/releases/download/gta3/GTA3.WidescreenFix.zip
  
• After that, unzip your file and drop "d3d8.dll", "global.ini", "GTA3.WidescreenFix.asi" and "GTA3.WidescreenFix.ini" in your game's main folder.
  
• For additional textures download go to this link:
  https://github.com/ThirteenAG/WidescreenFixesPack/releases/tag/gta3

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.

SILENT PATCH CHANGELOG:

•Mouse will not go beyond the game rect now, allowing to play the game on multimonitor setups without problems
•More precise frame limiter, reducing lag spikes a bit when playing with Frame Limiter on
•The game will not ask for a CD when all audio files are copied to the disk anymore
•In 1.0, armour cheat is now TORTOISE - like in 1.1 and Steam versions
•In 1.0, BOOOOORING cheat now works properly - like in 1.1 and Steam versions
•Mouse sensitivity is now properly saved - like in 1.1 and Steam versions
•Headlight coronas now display properly (as they do on PS2, XBOX and PC Steam versions). This headlight fix is probably the best one available, as it duplicates Steam EXE fix so NO bugs are present (like with other fixes, where headlights can be seen through the car etc.)
•Purple Nines Glitch has been fixed
•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
•Rhino spawned via a cheatcode doesn't stay on map forever anymore
•Blista now can be lifted by a car crusher crane - instead, now it cannot lift Coach
•Shooting from M16 in 1st person mode now increments bullets fired stat properly (so you can't score Accuracy to be more than 100%)
•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
•Trace (Destination) blip is now scaling to the resolution properly
•Garages-related and rampages-related texts now scale to the resolution properly
•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
•The game will not create more than 32 blips at once now - while this never happened in an unmodded game, it could have happened due to exploits and potentially corrupted the save
•Car reflections are now displayed correctly on Steam version
•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 (most notably, it may result in 'Bait' being much more playable)
•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
•Keyboard input latency decreased by one frame
•Fixed a crash after playing the game for a short amount of time without a sound card
•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 certain models having a very high draw distance (e.g. cranes and lights on building windows) disappearing when the camera was near
•Enlarged the bounding box of Catalina’s helicopter and the police helicopter to prevent it from being cut off on screen edges
•Fixed corona lines rendering on non-NVIDIA graphics cards

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 http://thirteenag.github.io/wfp .
- The rest of the modding community for keeping GTA III alive all this time.

[Rüdiger Rüssel]

Awesome, worked fine.

[Suspicious Carl]

does this fix all the cars being black

[Megaflare]

I had crashing on exit with both the Silent and Widescreen patch installed. After a bit of experimenting, it seems that it's a conflict with both DDraw.dll (from Silent patch) and d3d8.dll (from Widescreen patch). One option can be to disable the D3D wrapper from the Widescreen patch by editing the global.ini file in a text editor (change UseD3D8to9=1 to UseD3D8to9=0). Or alternatively, delete the DDraw.dll (effectively uninstalling the DDraw component of the Silent patch). From what I could tell, the d3d8.dll file is newer and has active development. I haven't done a lot of in game testing.

[MF JERM]

Does this need to be downgraded to work?

[kriluk12]

I had the same issue where I couldn't exit the game without crashing. I changed the compatibility to Windows XP in the executable properties. That fixed the problem.

[only_shallow]

@Natsuki- This issue isn't happening to me

[only_shallow]

Since I am not the mod developer I might not be able to fix this bug but I will have a look as soon as possible

[somuchfat]

I've installed the silent patch for this game but when I quit the game, the screen turned black and it says "gta3.exe stopped working". I've encountered this issue every time I want to turn off the game. The game or the save files is fine but it's just a bit annoying.

*After I removed the widescreen patch from my game directory, the problem was fixed. So the problem may come from that .asi. Would you mind fixing this issue, please?

[Mashkhith]

Worked perfectly and effectively removed the French censorship

[Dioblackironoyster]

I've installed the game, silent patch, DDraw and Sam Lakes radio downgrader, all before first time launching and got invalid platform error both when launching directly from the .exe and through steam. I did it and this error happened in both III and VC.