Silent Engine

Silent Engine is an in-progress cross-platform engine port designed to run the original Silent Hill on modern systems. It aims to be a monolithic, flexible, and future-proof foundation with modern standards that will enable long-term goals such as translation support and modding. Written from the ground-up with a high-quality, no-compromise codebase.

Q: CAN I PLAY THIS? A: Not yet! There's still significant work to be done. Very little game logic resides in this repository so far, as the focus is on building a solid engine foundation before integrating gameplay and graphics. All considerations are being made to avoid technical debt. Additionally, the decompilation must be farther along before most of the porting work can begin. While basics like game menus are slowly underway, it's best to wait on the rest while the decompilation remains in constunt flux. Much of the original engine code is yet to be deobfuscated and documented.

Decompilation progress can be tracked here: https://github.com/Vatuu/silent-hill-decomp

Prospects

• Windows/macOS/Linux support out of the box, with the potential for other platforms later.
• Modern renderer supporting Vulkan, DX12, and Metal, with the potential for other backends in the future if needed.
• Various graphics toggles for a retro or modern look.
• Retro and HD font options. .TTF fonts matching the originals have been found or meticulously recreated.
• Clean, well-documented codebase.
• Lua scripting.
• Translation support.
• Modding support.
• Many others.

Current foundations

• Math wrappers and functions (similar to DXTK but with some usability improvements)
• Input handling
• Savegame handling
• Config options handling
• Window handling
• Asset streaming
• Timestep handling
• Parallel task handling
• Filesystem handling
• Extensive warning and error logging
• Renderer with swappable backends
• Translator for internationalized scripts
• Font manager
• "Power" menu for deubgging
• Various utilities pulled from other projects

TODOs

• Switch to GCC as the compiler. Works on Linux, Windows build has problems and relies on MSVC for now. Need MinGW?
• Forward renderer. Basic system abstraction is done, now it needs expansion.
• Sound system. Need to write a KDC+VAB -> XM converter?
• Parsers for all proprietary game file types.
• Renderer expanison.
• Lua scripting.

Building (Windows/macOS/Linux)

This section is incomplete. Ideally, the project will be able to cross-compile between all main development platforms.

Install dependencies

The project has the following requirements:

• cmake
• git
• ninja
• pip
• python3

Windows

winget install Kitware.CMake Git.Git Ninja-build.Ninja Python.Python.3

macOS

# TODO: Add macOS instructions here

Linux

sudo apt install build-essential git ninja-build python3 python3-pip

Clone the repository

Clone https://github.com/Sezzary/SilentEngine to your desired directory. Cloning recursively will ensure the submodules are included in the process.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Sezzary/SilentEngine
git submodule update --init --recursive

Build LuaJIT locally:

cd Libraries/LuaJIT && make && cd ../..

Linux

sudo apt install build-essential git ninja-build python3 python3-pip

Install SDL dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential git make \
pkg-config cmake ninja-build gnome-desktop-testing libasound2-dev libpulse-dev \
libaudio-dev libfribidi-dev libjack-dev libsndio-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev \
libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev libxfixes-dev libxi-dev libxss-dev libxtst-dev \
libxkbcommon-dev libdrm-dev libgbm-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libgles2-mesa-dev \
libegl1-mesa-dev libdbus-1-dev libibus-1.0-dev libudev-dev libthai-dev

Set up Python virtual environment:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Transfer assets

Copy the Assets folder from the root of the repository to the Build folder. Then, extract all folders from the ROM's .SILENT archive to Assets/Stream/Psx. Original game assets are not provided and your own ROM of the 1.1 US release of the game must be sourced.

This is yet to be streamlined and automation of this step will be provided in the future.

Build the code (Debug/Release)

Available commands:

• Configure Debug:cmake -S . -B Build/Debug -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

• Build Debug: cmake --build Build/Debug

• Configure Release:cmake -S . -B Build/Release -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

• Build Release: cmake --build Build/Release

• Activate Python virtual environment: source .venv/bin/activate

Contributing

Too early for this, but feel free to take a look around in the meantime!