John has been involved in the Silent Hill community through sites and forums for as long as I can remember, and he has a special love for the masterpiece that is Silent Hill 2. I have talked to him a bit about the ongoing Enhancement Project for SH2. This is a project involving a number of dedicated and talented people whose goal is to help other fans to experience this 18 year old game in the best possible way. This involves fixes for a variety of issues such as sounds, fonts, camera stutter, flashlight, and many more enhancements.
What are your first memories of the Silent Hill series? What got you into it in the first place?
I can answer this quite specifically. I first heard about the SH series when IGN released a very early article about the then unreleased SH2. Here’s that specific article:
https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/09/14/new-silent-hill-2-images
(The article doesn’t look/function like it used to back in 2000.)
After seeing those very early pre-release images I knew this game was gonna be something special. Never before did I see such stunning graphics for a horror game. I kept up with articles both on IGN/GameSpot and various magazine publications, becoming more and more excited for its release.
What were your original goals with getting involved in SH related websites, etc?
I grew up making MS Paint doodles on my grandma’s old computer. I would constantly re-save those images in JPG format so that its compression would “soften” my work. I knew nothing about compression and lossy vs. lossless back then, haha. Anyway, I’ve always had a penchant for digital art/design. Getting a little older, I always wanted a program like Photoshop but could never afford it (and, at the time, didn’t know “where to look” to get it elsewhere). To compensate for this, I started making websites… through GeoCities. GeoCities was a great gateway into the wild world of early 2000’s web design.
Fast forward some more and I finally “found” Photoshop and advanced the website side of my artistic endeavors to legit web domains/servers (my mom bought the hosting packages under her name and I’d pay her every month for the fees). I still very much loved making websites but wanted to do more than what GeoCities could allow me. So I started making websites by scratch in Notepad. I’d “view source” on sites that did things I liked, steal the relevant parts of the code, and by doing that (and through trial-and-error) I taught myself HTML and CSS.
Feeling like hot shit after learning more about this, I decided to marry my enjoyment in web design with one of my all-time favorite video game series: Silent Hill. SH2 is my favorite of the bunch, so naturally I decided to make a site on that. Long story short: My original goal was just to make a cool SH2 fansite because there wasn’t a dedicated fansite for it back in the day and I wanted to show off Flash effects that no other SH fansite was doing at the time. (Ah… remember how Flash used to be a GOOD thing on websites?)
What’s your favorite thing about the second game?
Man, that’s too hard to pin point down to one thing. I could go on and on and on about my love for SH2, but I’ll try to keep this part short: I love the aesthetics of the game. While the game has aged a bit in terms of shaders/poly count/texture res/animation/etc, the aesthetics–or the “feel”–of the world in this game is second to none. You have that, the sound design, the overarching storylines, the character development. I don’t need to go into why all these things are great as there’s a hundred YouTube videos that explain these things in great detail. Needless to say, I can’t really pick a favorite thing about this game as I love too many things about it equally.
Do you have a favorite area/level?
Apartments. Bar none. It’s the first major interior section of the game which makes it memorable in its own right. It has some of the best audio secrets. It’s where you first meet Pyramid Head. The ambient tracks in the apartments in particular are absolutely phenomenal. I love the layout/design/coloring of all parts of the apartments.
But above all us: The apartments feel the most “real” in the game. These apartments feel like they could exist in real life. There’s something so unsettling, so simplistic-yet-unnerving in their design/layout. I just love it.
Can you tell us about how the enhanced edition came about?
The HD Collection is such a universal disappointment and disservice to the fans that I was desperate to find a way to play SH2 on modern displays/hardware. Playing your PS2 or Xbox console on modern flat panel displays looks pretty bad. The image is typically way too dark, “muddy” looking, and can be stretched if your TV won’t shrink it back down to 4:3.
I was desperate to find a way to play this with proper visuals intact and, after some Google searching, came across the “Widescreen Fix” project for SH2 (thirteenag.github.io/wfp#sh2). I was blown away by the features and enhancements that were put into this package. While much love and work was put into this, there was still a lot of other bugs/issues with the PC version of the game. So, over the years, I would request (read: hound) the developers of the Widescreen Fix to implement additional features/fixes that I’d find through playtesting.
These added fixes/enhancements eventually became too numerous and no longer fit the scope of a “widescreen fix” (many of the newly-added fixes weren’t about just making the game look good in widescreen anymore) so the project branched off to its own thing which eventually became known as Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition.
Over the years, many other talented, wonderful, and passionate fans caught wind of these efforts and have joined the team. These people love SH2 very much and, with their expertise in certain aspects/fields of programming/modding, are able to fix and/or enhance the game in so many great ways. Instead of naming specific people here and possibly leaving out other wonderful team members’ names, I’ll link to the credits page of the project instead: http://enhanced.townofsilenthill.com/SH2/credit.htm
Thank you to all who have and continue work on Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition!
I know this is an ongoing project, can you talk about future plans?
There are a lot of smaller fixes coming out soon. I won’t bore you with the details on that. Instead, I’ll mention some of the bigger fixes we either have planned or hope to do in the future:
We’re currently in the process of restoring all the post-processing effects back to their original intensities as seen on the PS2/Xbox versions. The post-processing effects are things like the depth of field, fake bloom, and motion blur. These effects were dialed back for the PC version to accommodate for the weakest GPUs available in the early 2000’s, at the request of Konami. Obviously computers have become much more capable since then, so we can now restore these effects to have them looking like they should once more.
We also plan to make a “Fullscreen Image Enhancement Pack” in the future. The fullscreen images are the static, still 2D images that take up the whole screen of your game. So think of the main menu, save screen, maps, riddle images, memo images, etc. We will use AI neural networking to upscale these images (and clean them up after-the-face if need be) and/or completely remake certain assets at much high resolutions so the player will see gorgeous, crisp, and detailed fullscreen images. We’re really excited about that!
Next up we hope to restore full specularity in the PC version of the game. For many areas in the PC version, certain objects that should be specular–or “shiny”–are not. Think of things like eyeballs, guns, etc. We haven’t done enough testing with this yet to say anything conclusive but we’re hoping this feature can be restored sometime in the future.
Last but certainly not least: Restoring soft shadows for the game. The PC version uses hard edge volumes to create its shadows. Once again, we imagine this was done to accommodate those terrible, weak GPUs of the early 2000’s. If/when we can restore soft shadows, we can then also restore self shadows (where dynamic objects such as James, NPCs, and enemies can have shadows cast UPON them). We already know how to restore self shadows, but have left it disabled until we can also restore soft shadows, as self shadows doesn’t look to great while the shadow edges are still hard.
No one of the team knows how to restore soft shadows so if any one is reading this and may know how to restore this feature (or has a friend who might can help) please reach out to us on our GitHub page!
https://github.com/elishacloud/Silent-Hill-2-Enhancements