SilentPatch for Bully: Scholarship Edition
This game, which shares a lot of the internals with GTA games, performs fairly well in its PC incarnation as is. However, it's more than likely that you have at some point spotted the amount of complaints Windows 10 users have about the game, or maybe you have encountered crashes yourself.
SilentPatch attempts to fix Bully memory management completely, so it behaves in the same way independent of Windows version. This is not the only fix included, however - most notably, it attempts to improve gameplay experience by improving frame pacing, as well as fixing a few other issues.
Fixes featured in this plugin:
Crash and bug fixes
- Collision loading code has been improved, fixing occasional crashes on initial game load
- Fixed game's objects pool usage, fixing possible crashes
- Fixed an occasional crash when starting Nutcrackin' or Music Class
- Fixed numerous instances of memory corruption on game exit
- Fixed an use-after-free in sound streaming code, causing a rare crash when talking to people
- Fixed handle leaks in audio code, preventing handles from accumulating during the game
- Fixed several memory leaks in audio code, preventing out of memory crashes during extended play sessions
- Made memory manager workarounds toggleable via the INI file - disabled by default, to be removed in the future
- Frame Limiter has been made much more precise, so the game should lock at exactly 30FPS now (as opposed to stock limiter being prone to dropping frames a lot)
- Fixed an issue where game would use more CPU than required when minimized
Quality of life improvements
- An option to change FPS cap has been added to SilentPatchBully.ini file (game defaults to 30FPS)
- FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING flag has been removed from IMG reading functions - potentially speeding up streaming
Compilation requirements
Project is supposed to build out of the box with Visual Studio 2017.
Submitting feedback
Since this is a public beta release, you may encounter crashes. Because of this, MiniDumper utility has been shipped together with SilentPatch. In case of a crash, a .dmp file will be created in your game directory.
If you want to report it as a bug (any feedback is very much appreciated), first ENSURE YOU HAVE AN UNMODDED GAME (texture mods are fine, scripts - not so much). You can report a bug (.dmp file + a brief explanation on what you were doing when the game crashes) in the Issues page.