Feb 16, 2019
Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy - Swyter
While we generally don't post Steam announcements for every single patch, and we usually update the forum thread instead, we have been improving the PC version while developing the Nintendo Switch port that was released three weeks ago.
The community is growing lately, mainly around the Discord server. We have pretty interesting fan art and we have been beta-testing the upcoming Steam Workshop support.
Patch by patch, the game is slowly being restored graphically using mainly the original artwork from Eurocom and Anibyte, with small tweaks. This is a respectful restoration, not a makeover.
Four of the most problematic defects have been fixed. Some of them were introduced during the PC port, others are still present in the original 2003 console release. A savegame corruption, suddenly vanishing NPCs, uninitialized memory as well as a few others that are less severe.
We are still planning to add most of the remaining features that had to be temporarily delayed due to the Nintendo Switch port: Things like projected shadows, better lighting and some shader improvements will appear in both platforms. Remappable controls will probably stay PC-only for the foreseeable future. We read your reviews and comments, and while we can't get some things done as fast as we would like, we will persist.
This last update should be equivalent to the Nintendo Switch v1.1 patch that we also released yesterday.
Also, here is the complete cumulative changelog since our last announcement:
Thanks for reading!
The community is growing lately, mainly around the Discord server. We have pretty interesting fan art and we have been beta-testing the upcoming Steam Workshop support.
Patch by patch, the game is slowly being restored graphically using mainly the original artwork from Eurocom and Anibyte, with small tweaks. This is a respectful restoration, not a makeover.
Four of the most problematic defects have been fixed. Some of them were introduced during the PC port, others are still present in the original 2003 console release. A savegame corruption, suddenly vanishing NPCs, uninitialized memory as well as a few others that are less severe.
We are still planning to add most of the remaining features that had to be temporarily delayed due to the Nintendo Switch port: Things like projected shadows, better lighting and some shader improvements will appear in both platforms. Remappable controls will probably stay PC-only for the foreseeable future. We read your reviews and comments, and while we can't get some things done as fast as we would like, we will persist.
This last update should be equivalent to the Nintendo Switch v1.1 patch that we also released yesterday.
Also, here is the complete cumulative changelog since our last announcement:
2019-02-15 (Friday)
- Remove the limit of 128 characters that caused truncation for long-ish paths. Properly NULL-terminate savegame paths.
- Fix spurious quotes in the Filelist.bin loader when given a mod path via arguments, it caused an occasional crash when ending a mod path in /" and sometimes the last path separator doubled as escape code.
- Don't enable the 50 Hz PAL mode in the PC version, as it works in EUR60 mode; this should change the rate at which some physics calculations are carried and doesn't affect framebuffer sizes.
- Properly zero-initialize some fields in the Enemy Mobility Path component that caused an ugly bug where if the leftover memory was 0xFFFFFFFF the value gets interpreted as -nan and first corrupts the rotation and that invalidates and corrupts the item matrix, the NPC visually disappears and collisions stop working so they fall to their death.
- To find this I instrumented the mobility code at strategic points and tested things in a modified mum_temp map for Sphinx full of container-cobras and Abydos NPCs provided by @jmarti856 that improved the chances.
- Keep in mind that denormals may have also caused some other subtle problems. This is a defect in the original code and was fixed 15 years later, should fix most of the sudden NPC despawns.
- To find this I instrumented the mobility code at strategic points and tested things in a modified mum_temp map for Sphinx full of container-cobras and Abydos NPCs provided by @jmarti856 that improved the chances.
- Protect some parts of the game against a NaN contagion to mitigate some other remaining memory-initialization problems.
- Heavily improve the softlock detection during conversation mode, now it should also work after respawnable NPCs die.
- Never round toward zero in the FPU.
- Mitigate the occasional quick sound panning issues when moving the camera, as reported by many players.
- Add a better HQ Abydos arch spike texture.
- Add a good bunch of HQ textures, mainly for the remaining prominent characters: the Portal God, the archeologist, Cursed Pharaoh + Wife, Farmer + Brother, Seti, Plain Sarcophagi, Spider boss, the Geb Queen and the watcher eyes.
- Add HQ textures for the Abydos Mayor and Physician, the final boss, the flying Akarian bird boss and the fat ruler that gives Sphinx the Abydos stair key, as well as environmental textures for the Cursed Palace and the final battle.
- Add some extra HQ textures the Abydos Sewer Amulets and several particle effects.
- Update the SDL2 Windows library to 2.0.9.
- Add more Abydos Sewer and Cursed Palace HQ textures.
- Fix some UV texture clamping issues that when combined with mipmapping caused minor visual glitches in the Abydos Mayor and the watcher eyes.
- Attempt to fix a rare objective corruption that may happen at the end of every Mummy visit, where the Mummy state doesn't get correctly set due to a reallocation defect in the Onyx money-counting achievement code that caused a stale pointer on return. Also known as the 'Super King Castle' glitch, kudos to @superking1077/bellboy_64 for the helpful report.
- Change the HT_Objective_Aby_ElectricWater mod override, so that if we set it to 2 we enable the effect everywhere, 3 will disable it even in Abydos (previously was 0). Thanks to @Remidemmi. for the old save game.
- Add HQ textures for the burn boxes, levers, monkey statue and the planetarium door and a few other details.
- Add better textures for the Cursed Palace and the Uruk Castle, improve the hue of some retouched textures to make them more faithful to the original ones.
- Compress most of the textures as .DDS with BC7 block compression. Should generally reduce VRAM pressure across the board and mitigate those VRAM depletion issues.
- Simplify the resolution selector. Make it so that we can only select resolutions with the same aspect ratio as the desktop resolution, fix a defect that caused the selection to show different resolutions when going to the right.
- Fix ghost clicking of some Back button prompt labels.
2019-01-18 (Friday)
- Optimize all the new HQ textures and reduce its size on disk.
- Minor cleanups.
2019-01-17 (Thursday)
- New HQ textures for BasKet, the Sarcophagi King, most of the Mummy levels and the final battle. Better floor textures for the Lost Temple of Heliopolis.
- Fix a few mishaps.
2019-01-15 (Tuesday)
- New HQ textures for Sphinx, Horus, Imhotep, Akhenaten, Menes, Set and Nefertiti. Update some rocky, wall and FX-related textures to reduce pixelation and blocky S3TC artifacts.
- Properly move actors to their correct positions while skipping cutscenes.
- Remove the initial Tut wake up scene from the blacklist of unskippable cutscenes now that it works properly. With this implemented practically all the important cutscenes should be optional by just pressing the Book of Sphinx/Inventory button.
- Fix a regression in floating point rounding mode that caused collision issues, mainly Sphinx receiving unwarranted damage when stepping over the lowered spiked gates in the Uruk intro and also spurring the Abydos piranhas to swim in the air. Round to nearest instead of chopping decimals toward zero.
- Add an entity flag (0x8000, previously reserved but wrongly tagged as 'Ignore Auto Collision Macro' in EuroLand) to conditionally re-enable LODs for new 3D models from modders, if requested. That way mods can still optimize bigger levels while still disabling LODs for the original (now-low-poly) meshes.
- Update the game controller mapping database. Add support for USB GameCube adapter mapping, too. Thanks to @Remidemmi.
- More vertex collision struct refactoring that should improve the undefined behavior situation.
- Minor cleanups.
2019-01-10 (Thursday)
- Refactor the vertex collision structs to plain old data and avoid undefined behavior. This should hopefully mitigate the occasional NPC despawning/clipping-through-floor and improve portability in general. Please retest and report your findings.
- Minor cleanups.
2019-01-09 (Wednesday)
- New batch of HQ texture updates sourced from original artwork; covering flares, most of the Abydos Monster Shop, a few parts of the Mummy Planetarium, Luxor Pyramid and Palace, a few Wall sections and some other places, metallic fences, the sun, shoot targets, a few statues, platforms, walls and floors. Add a better version of the dirt and tiling terrain textures.
- Minor cleanups.
2019-01-04 (Friday)
- Fix possible framerate judder/frame skip issues by ensuring that we only use monitor resolutions and frame-rates compatible with the fixed in-game display/update rate.
- Should fix issues where the monitor exposes 59 Hz or 70/75 Hz refresh rates and we pick that by mistake.
- Now it should only use 60 Hz, 120 Hz (or 180 Hz+) physical swap rates. To ensure it can be properly v-sync'ed.
- Should fix issues where the monitor exposes 59 Hz or 70/75 Hz refresh rates and we pick that by mistake.
- Implement soft distance fade-ins and outs for lamps, the tilting boat platforms in the small Abydos canal, and few other triggers. Now they don't appear suddenly anymore.
- Completely fix the inside-out or pure black graphics issue caused by overlays or third-party hooking programs. Thanks to @Anderson and @Nish the Fish for testing.
- Make the deadly electric water configurable for mods via objective so that it can be enabled or disabled globally. Previously it was hardcoded to work only on HT_File_Map_ab_cana.
- Now HT_Objective_Aby_ElectricWater can be set like this: if the objective is 2 enable the effect everywhere, 0 will disable it even in Abydos. 1 is the default behavior.
- Setting this objective dynamically or when entering/unloading specific maps will lead to advanced mechanics with a lot of flexibility. Only works for Sphinx.
- There's an exception; the deadly water has always been blacklisted/disabled in spitting toad mode.
- Now HT_Objective_Aby_ElectricWater can be set like this: if the objective is 2 enable the effect everywhere, 0 will disable it even in Abydos. 1 is the default behavior.
- Add support for beta Sphinx attacks in mods through HT_GameScript_Control_SlamEffectType, HT_GameScript_Control_WaveAttack to dynamically control the "Slam Effect" and "Wave Attack" options that appear in the debug Watcher under Cheats.
- They change the default ground slam behavior and can be useful for additional mechanics. e.g: use them like SETITEMFLAG HT_GameScript_Control_SlamEffectType 1/0 and GETITEMFLAG HT_GameScript_Control_WaveAttack and vice versa.
- Enable printing to stdout with the DEBUGS gamescript operation in the PC builds.
- On Windows you will need a Microsoft program called DebugView to read the game's output, on Linux and macOS just launch it from terminal.
- Fix some incorrect use of the OpenGL framebuffer discard functions.
- Add further build-time optimizations.
2018-09-05 (Thursday)
- New Luxor Palace and Heliopolis Exterior textures.
- Avoid rare softlocks in the middle of a conversation if the NPC/monster dies for any reason. Go back to normal game mode and unfreeze the controls.
- Proper mod folder support, by letting third-parties/modders provide their own BuildData/Filelist.bin while using the original one as fallback.
- When possible the new resources will override the original ones through a Sphinx.ini configuration option or the -mod <folder> command-line argument; in that order.
Example mod folder path via configuration key:[BootState] PCMod=H:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\workshop\content\606710\1450113507 - Use a custom savegame namespace/folder for each mod. Now mods and the main game won't share the same set of save slots. Hopefully each mod will have its own suffixed version.
- While in -dev mode, fill the list of levels by looking for maps in multiple Filelists and not just the first one, and merging the results. This makes it possible to select all the available levels from the right-click menu list.
- When possible the new resources will override the original ones through a Sphinx.ini configuration option or the -mod <folder> command-line argument; in that order.
- New color-tinted Xbox button glyphs.
- Workaround to prevent the lack of depth-testing when RivaTuner RTSS and other badly-programmed/misbehaving overlays disable it by mistake.
- Add a Sphinx.ini configuration option to disable tutorial prompts and tips:[Control] TutorialPrompts=0
- Fix the rare cutout glitches in translucent surfaces when soft particles are enabled.
- Limit the FOV to 20-110 degrees.
- Invert the 3rd person camera in both axes by default. Shouldn't affect existing configurations.
- Reduce the spawn radius distance of the Bird guarding the Abydos Museum entrance to 460 from 700 meters (it didn't let you enter the Museum after getting the Stairs key unless it despawned).
- Remove the buggy beta levels bundled with the game (not needed anymore when there's a mod for it and the Authoring Tools).
- Add a proper message box error when we are loading an .EDB file and run out of memory, also add another one when the .EDB path can't be found/opened.
- Add proper glBufferStorage synchronization, fixing the occasional graphics glitches that made characters look like they were ripped apart.
Thanks for reading!
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