2018-06-28 (Thursday)

• Made the fan-favorite intro logo thunderous again. The sound was broken on release due to a little hashcode header mismatch.
  
• Add initial support for the mouse-controlled camera that we have been teasing for a while, we still need to add a mouse sensitivity control. The player can shoot with the left mouse button and exit first-person mode via right-click. The groundwork for keyboard action mapping is laid out and it will probably come after this.
  
• Save the vertical sync changes to Sphinx.ini, fixes disabling v-sync in the in-game options.
  
• Prefix the screen name with a number in the graphics options, useful to distinguish them in case there are two or more screens with the same name.
  
• Add support for clicking the "(B) Back" labels in the pause and main menus, now the user can go back and cancel via mouse.
  
  
• Carefully hex-edit the level data to improve draw distances of NPCs and triggers in the Abydos Canals. Now characters like the the boat owner, the Mad Boy/Juggler and the giggling lady in the Main Plaza can be seen from afar.
  
• Add several much needed HQ textures for the Abydos Museum, refurbish some wall textures to add some lost detail. Make some signs and canopies partially transparent via alpha-testing/alpha-to-coverage.
  
• Remove the squarish/invisible roadblocks in the middle of the ramp in the Great Wall Entrance II Room, the collision meshes of the wooden pillars poked through the ramp they support. This is a long standing bug still present in all the original console versions.
  
• Fix the hanging flags collision in the sneak corridor of the Castle of Uruk during the second mummy visit. Now the mummy doesn't get stuck and can walk and sneak under them, hopefully without introducing some extra regressions.
  
  
• If we skipped a cutscene with the inventory key and the dialog/help window was in a pause point waiting for user input we would get stuck in the fade-to-black transition after skipping it, and we would also need to press 'accept' to return to normal gameplay. Fix that so that pressing the inventory/skip button suffices.
  
• Reimplement some beta features and mechanics asked by modders:
  
  
  
  • Add support for the PushFlag_AmunRa flag in the XTrigger_Pickupable and XTrigger_Pushable triggers; it was halfplemented. Set the needed strength to 2 if we have the Hands of Amun + Hands of Amun Ra or 1 of each. Previously it only counted the amount of HT_Item_Ability_HandsOfAmun, and there was no reference to HT_Item_Ability_HandsOfAmunRa.
    
  • Whitelist HT_Item_Pickup_FireDart for pickup creation, which is also used while dropping items randomly in breakable containers. Also, add support for dropping fire darts on intelligent item generation.
    
    
    
    • Now when ContainerFlag_SpawnPickup is checked in EuroLand the FireDart flag can generate an item in either random or intelligent mode. The behavior in the final game shouldn't change because this item isn't flagged in any container, only in beta maps.
      
    
    
  
  
• Fix the slightly offset highlight tab in the Notes section of the Book of Sphinx; the currently selected objective/entry text overflowed a bit.
  
• Update the copyright year of the boot-up/legal screen from the initial 2017 to 2018.
  
• Use the HQ selection tab texture for the Book of Sphinx again, it regressed after the latest changes.
  
• Losslessly compress all of the HQ texture replacements, reducing their disk footprint and halving loading times.
  
• Reduce HQ texture replacement micro-stutter during gameplay.
  
• Add some framebuffer discard optimizations on MSAA resolve.
  

2018-05-28 (Monday)

• Add the initial version of the HQ Sphinx/Mummy character texture replacements, they were sourced from the highest pre-rendered 3ds Max models available and they don't exactly match their final counterparts, so it will require some texture tweaking and recoloring work, but this is good enough for now; the amount of extra detail is beautiful.
  
• Add several new HQ texture replacements covering mainly Heliopolis Dungeon, Uruk Intro, Uruk Islands and Anubis Wall.
  
• Uncomment the unpossession code so that we can still play the old Sakkara maps with the Dino Oafs and Shell Critters, it should also fix the contextual buttons not changing after possessing the same monster a second time. See ContextActions.xls for HT_Trig_Context_CancelPossession / HT_Trig_Context_DinoOaf / HT_Trig_Context_Frog.
  
• Get rid of the possession dart first-person fire action context when arriving at a Sakkara unpossession point by resetting the Sphinx action context to the default one, the HUD and buttons looked pretty buggy.
  
• Raise the large data heap again a bit (to 40 MiB, same as in Xbox) from the original 22 MiB in PC. Fixes OOM crash in the second part of the _sk_02.edb mod, right after the submap load due to big map sizes.
  
• Add an extra xxHash for the propPusheableBull texture (from _mu_eye), add a HQ texture for the triple mummy saw trap in that very same map, it was pretty low res.
  
• Fix the "/lib32/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.7' not found" error on older Linux distros. This is caused by the GLIBC update, which made Sphinx.elf use powf@@GLIBC_2.2.5. Replace it by the perfectly functional powf@GLIBC_2.0 and use manual Linux glibc versioning selection based on this: https://github.com/wheybags/glibc_version_header
  
• Tell the Linux linker to use both hash styles ("sysv" a "gnu") for compatibility. Set the OpenGL library to LEGACY to keep using libgl instead of libglvnd.
  

2018-01-30 (Tuesday)

• German translation improvements by @MagicianMana.
  
• Make the health Gold Ankh UI indicators scalable by the TextHudObjScaling key in the [Graphics] section of Sphinx.ini, too. As requested by @DaxterSpeed.
  
• Add a texture override (hudRotatorSelect.png) for the golden highlight frame around the currently selected item in the pop-up rotator of the HUD. This one has higher resolution and it doesn't look half as stretched as the original one, specially after making that list wider a few weeks ago.
  
• Disable the EGXGL_ATTRIB_DIVISOR_INSTANCING / glVertexAttribDivisor hack, it didn't seem to help. It was disabled by default; let it autodetect, as intended: http://steamcommunity.com/app/606710/discussions/0/1621726179559230606/
  
• Disable glObjectLabel'ing again to improve performance.
  
• Update the Windows version of the SDL2 (to 2.0.7) and OpenAL Soft (to 1.18.2) libraries. Don't link/import the SDL2 library symbols by ordinal anymore; do it by name, because it breaks dragging and dropping new SDL2.dll versions that don't share export order.
  
• Let the user choose if she wants to bound/restrict/confine the mouse cursor within the window borders through a new InputGrabbed key in the [RenderMode] section of Sphinx.ini. It is set to 1/TRUE by default. Suggested by @DaxterSpeed.
  
[RenderMode]
InputGrabbed=0

  
• Make the left analog stick WASD keyboard button support remappable for people that use AZERTY/QUERTZ. It can be done through new configuration keys in Sphinx.ini. For example, this is is the correct mapping for French AZERTY layouts, where WASD is ZQSD:
  
[PCKeyboardMap]
SDL_CONTROLLER_LSTICK_LEFT=20 # Q
SDL_CONTROLLER_LSTICK_RIGHT=7 # D
SDL_CONTROLLER_LSTICK_UP=29 # Z
SDL_CONTROLLER_LSTICK_DOWN=22 # S
SDL_CONTROLLER_BUTTON_LEFTSTICK=26 # W
SDL_CONTROLLER_BUTTON_RIGHTSTICK=6 # C
SDL_CONTROLLER_BUTTON_LEFTSHOULDER=4 # A
SDL_CONTROLLER_BUTTON_RIGHTSHOULDER=8 # E

  Suggested by @Alice Madieus: http://steamcommunity.com/app/606710/discussions/0/1693785669872263827/
  
• Some chests could be opened multiple times on cutscene skips. Don't let people exploit it: https://twitter.com/owashii/status/952217023567802369
  
• Skipping the Heliopolis boulder cutscene after burning the wooden platform soft-locked the controls. Make it unskippable.
  

2018-03-09 (Friday)

• Improve the safe zone for 4:3 screens, some of the text in menus and HUD spilled over at either side. See this Steam forum discussion: http://steamcommunity.com/app/606710/discussions/0/1700542332338620293/
  
• Update to the latest SDL2 version in both Windows and macOS. We now use 2.0.8, which comes with a bunch of fixes and improvements.
  
• Compile and update the macOS version of OpenAL Soft to 1.18.2, we were using 1.18.1 until now; bundle the HRTF coefficients in the .dylib.
  
• Conditionally enable the frame-stepping code when a
  [Debug]
AllowGamePause=1 key appears in Sphinx.ini. Replace the forwards/backwards mouse buttons by the Scroll Lock/Pause keys.
  
  Enable this mode by keeping pressed one of the buttons until you press the other once. The game will stop, gameplay-wise. You can then either press Scroll Lock to make it go really slow or just advance one frame each time you press Pause. To disable just do the same press-one-while-keeping-the-other-pressed trick again.
  
• For some reason the dynamic lights didn't use the alpha modulation term that was enabled for things like the fireflies (i.e. TR_SmallLight trigger) so they appear and go off suddenly in a pretty jarring fashion, fix those fade-ins and outs ~15 years later. Buttery smooth.
  
• Simplify the sound streaming code in the OpenAL back-end, this is used for music and ambient sounds.
  
• Enable a bunch of important debug traces in the retail build.
  
• Get rid of the jarring one-frame flicker in the light that appears while diving fast. This is more of a workaround than a real fix, but it's simple and will do the trick for now.
  
• Add support for the GL_NV_fill_rectangle extension, that should improve drawing 2D text and all the other screen-aligned rectangular sprites. It uses the polygon's bounding box during rasterization, simplifying the computations and making them faster, at least in theory.
  
• Enable the subnormal number flush-to-zero mode at start-up to make floating point operations faster on supported hardware by trading some precision.
  
• Also, workaround the crash on file selection in the EngineX Viewer (EXGeoViewer).
  
• Make the HUD toggle option in the development Watcher dialog actually work. This should have been implemented in 2003. Now the optional [WatcherItems]
Display-Hud=0 Sphinx.ini key can be used to take superior screenshots.
  
• Improve the SDL2 event loop handling for snappier response times.
  
• Improve the SDL2 gamepad back-end performance and its hot-plugging support. There are still some underlying issues in the SDL2/Xinput library that prevent the Steam Controller from hot-plugging while using it wirelessly on Windows, an easy workaround is to connect it via USB cable or plug a different wired controller after pairing so that both are detected.
  
• Also, stop the rumbling altogether when we switch to mouse/keyboard mode.
  
• Set the TextHudObjScaling variable to 1.3, unless overridden in Sphinx.ini. Making UI text slightly larger by default.
  
• Minor cleanups.
  

2018-03-28 (Wednesday)

• Implement a `-dev` mode, make it so that most of the debug/development EngineX windows, such as the level or cutscene selector or the right-click menu, can be enabled using `-dev` as command-line parameter in the retail build.
  
  
  
  • This also enables cheats and disables achievements.
    
  • Additionally, players can enable no-clip (you can toggle it by clicking the right analog stick and going up/down with Y/A or Triangle/Cross) through a new Sphinx.ini key:
    
[Debug]
ScanMode=1

    
  
  
• Add high-resolution replacements for a bunch of commonly used low-res textures of scene props, mainly in Abydos and Heliopolis. More to come.
  
• Add some additional high-definition Abydos texture replacements sourced for the original artwork.
  
• Expose soft particles as a selectable item in the graphics menu, now that the UI fire effect regression is fixed. Kudos to @YouTube.GTuxTV for the original report.
  
• Fix the GPU freezes/stalls under Mesa/Intel/Nouveau/Linux, turns out I had forgotten to initialize the `i` counter variable in the `for` loop of the dynamic lights and that caused infinite loops in the default pixel shader, where as in the proprietary drivers it was just seemingly initialized to zero by default; working fine.
  
  
  
  • I have reported the infinite loop/freeze problem to Mesa 3D: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105755 (the mesa glsl compiler actually caught the uninitialized part)
    
  • I have also opened one in glslang to add lint warnings: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/issues/1315 (prevention is important)
    
  
  
• Improve the drawing distance of the Anubis Wall entrance in the Heliopolis exterior, bringing the fade-out range farther apart. Now the interior is visible from the Cursed Palace and beyond, no more 2D cardboard portal.
  
• Let the player modulate the camera rotation amount by some predefined constant through Sphinx.ini. @animalmagic found the camera rotation too fast.
  
[PCKeyboardMap]
CameraSpeedMultiplierX=0.7
CameraSpeedMultiplierY=1.0

  
• Add mipmapping support for the HD replacement textures, now that we are replacing 3D-mapped objects it was pretty ugly from afar.
  
• Sanitize the OpenAL sound streaming code a bit better, should mitigate the rare bug where music stops working after a few hours of uninterrupted gameplay.
  
• Optimize the depth renderbuffer texture transfer format by using the proper type, it should improve transfer performance by avoiding possible conversions. It can't hurt.
  
• Fix a segmentation fault caused by improper use of variable arguments in Linux and macOS.
  
• Update the gamecontrollerdb.txt mappings file from the unofficial community list (https://github.com/gabomdq/SDL_GameControllerDB), adding out-of-the-box support for many gamepads.
  

2018-04-03 (Tuesday)

• Fix the user-after-free pointer dereference monster thaw crash for good. There was a tricky bug in all the previous Sphinx versions that caused a crash when trying to push the block of a big monster (frozen with ice darts) just when it starts to thaw out.
  
  
  
  • This only happened when freezing monsters like Skeletal Spiders or Wasp Spiders, instead of the smaller Fire Armadillos; which are carried around.
    
  
  
• Add animated HD texture replacements for the water surface layers in Abydos Canals/Council/Heliopolis Exterior.
  
• Add matching xxHash codes so that the Abydos Council Chambers map makes use of the already existing HD textures added in the 2018-03-28 update.
  
• Expand the portal fade-out distance of the Osiris shield room entrance (the one with the spikes), improving its drawing distance.
  
  
  
  • This 2D impostor and the one in the Anubis Wall entrance were the more noticeable ones.
    
  
  
• Let modders use additional music hashcodes instead of hardcoding the list of jumpcodes, let's be more lenient here on PC.
  
  
  
  • Just ensure that the jump code is within the valid range and call it a day.
    
  • Now people should be able to add extra music tracks if needed once proper tooling is in place. New ambient sounds should already be possible, no hardcoding there.
    
  
  
• Remove a bunch of additional precompiled beta maps included the release day that don't work in the normal game. Now that the Authoring Tools are public proper levels can be exported by prospective players using EuroLand, most of those will actually work.
  

2018-04-08 (Sunday)

• Add a savestate-ish player position save/restore functionality useful for speedrunning practice. Save position with LT + RT + Left analog click / Page up, restore with Left analog click / Page Down. You need to use -dev mode and have [Debug] ScanMode=1 in Sphinx.ini for it to work. Dedicated to speedrunners like Remi and turothking.
  
• Optimize several HD texture replacements.
  

2018-04-12 (Thursday)

• Export a series of useful static global variables using a signature/marker that third-party software like LiveSplit can read across versions, this avoids having to hardcode addresses. Should open the door to third-party auto-splitters for speedruns.
  
• Expose the game status in the gExportedBlock so that third party tools can know if we are in a loading screen or waiting for an async submap (black screen with the spinning Ankh icon).
  

2018-04-26 (Thursday)

• Use GPU-persistent buffers for streamed vertex data (skinned meshes/cloth physics) when possible. This requires at least OpenGL 4.3 + ARB_buffer_storage.
  
• Extend the Game Over background screen to also cover the entire left side in widescreen and ultrawidescreen monitors.
  
• Completed the German and French translation of the remaining Steam achievements. Thanks to @LetsPlayNintendo, @Remidemmi (DE), and @SenseiTional (FR).
  
• Changed the localized versions of some achievement names to match with their original in-game names.
  
• Enable alpha blending in the alpha-tested textures of the Book of Sphinx. Fix the Book of Sphinx info box misalignment when the Artifacts tab is selected, the position is exactly the same when in the Monsters or Note pages, but it moves a little when switching to Artifacts.
  
• Also, add a non-pixelated Book of Sphinx background, the original looked pretty stretched.
  
• Change the gamepad button bindings in -dev mode to save player position with LT + Left analog click / Page up, and restore it with RT + Left analog click / Page down. No more clicking by mistake.
  
• First batch of HQ texture replacements.
  

2018-04-30 (Monday)

• Additional preventive checks against rare teleport-based softlocks.
  
• Fix the animated HQ water texture tiling issues. Repainted the seams of the 72 texture frames, now they aren't noticeable anymore.
  
• Improve the papyrus background image.
  

2018-05-23 (Wednesday)

• Add a massive amount of HQ texture replacements sourced from the original artwork, mixed with tweaked versions of the texture pack. Covering mainly Uruk Intro, Uruk Islands, Abydos Canals, Heliopolis, Dark Area, Uruk exteriors, Cursed Palace surroundings and the Anubis Wall itself.
  
• Flip the conditions in the ISSAID command to hopefully try to fix some rare softlocks when a gamescript is waiting for ISSAID after LOCKCONTROLS + PRINTMESSAGE and then some other trigger overlaps in time and also does LOCKCONTROLS 1 + PRINTMESSAGE while we are waiting, causing the first trigger to never return from ISSAID and unlock the controls with the tailing LOCKCONTROLS 0, leaving the player stuck. This can happen in the crawlspace of the Luxor throne room, if the crawl help text wasn't triggered by not moving the throne all the way and then we accidentally move it just when the old NPC called Sorkon talks to us when coming back.
  
• Don't let the user set negative display indexes in Sphinx.ini, clamp it to {0, max-screen-index} range. Fixes displaying the resolution when [RenderMode] Display=-1.
  

2017-12-09 (Saturday)

2017-12-10 (Sunday)

2017-12-12 (Tuesday)

2017-12-16 (Saturday)

• Added two additional achievements to the game:
  
  
  
  • Golden: Get all the 12 Gold Ankhs and reach the maximum health.
    
  • Onyx Completionist: Get the 480 Onyx Scarab collection from the Uruk Castle. I have just tested it by scavenging them across all the six mummy levels and it works. You can spend them normally, no need to keep them all in the inventory/Book of Sphinx. Due to the way skarabs are counted it will require a new game, or at least starting from the first mummy level.
    
  
  
• Minor cleanups.
  

2017-12-18 (Monday)

• Fix the «Practice Makes Perfect» achievement, unlock it only after improving a valid time.
  
• Correct the description of the «Acrobatic Ease» achievement, replace the 77 in «77 seconds or less» by 78 to make it match the game times.
  
• Use the LB/RB naming scheme in the HUD while using the Xbox controller button prompts, instead of L1/R1.
  
• Strip some superfluous trailing spaces in contextual strings of the French translation that caused text misalignment and artificial padding.
  
• Make the ability/item rotator 1.7 times wider and center the gold framing. The bigger font made it difficult to select the correct Portal God Amulet in some languages.
  
• Fix some additional overlapping/misalignment problems caused by the bigger font, specially in the SWAP strings used while in triple mummy mode.
  
• Improved the gamepad hot-plug mechanism on PC to change the active gamepad used by EngineX, now the player can simultaneously plug various gamepads and switch between them at any given time, the game will always use the one you pressed last. Allow an infinite number of un/plugging combinations instead of the original 8 slots.
  
• Fix a defect in the SDL2 gamepad back-end that caused it to stop looking for valid controllers after finding a connected joystick, wheel or flight stick.
  
• Minor cleanups.
  

2017-12-21 (Thursday)

• Improvements done to the German translation, courtesy of @MagicianMana.
  

2018-01-08 (Monday)

• Implement omnidirectional point lights in the OpenGL back-end. Happy new year!
  
• Let the player configure the text size for the font used in the dialog/cutscene/help window through a TextHudObjScaling key in the [Graphics] section of Sphinx.ini. Example:
  
[Graphics]
TextHudObjScaling=1.4

  
• Use the texture-based fallback technique by default for particle instancing, let's see if this is more compatible with Intel(R) HD Graphics 3000 users.
  
• More German translation fixes and stylistic improvements, courtesy of @MagicianMana.
  
• Make the hardcoded button prompts bigger by default.
  
• Disable RTTI to improve performance, minor cleanups.
  

2017-11-22 (Wednesday)

2017-11-23 (Thursday)

2017-11-24 (Friday)

2017-11-27 (Monday)

2017-12-04 (Monday)

2017-12-05 (Tuesday)

2017-12-08 (Friday)

2017-11-10 (Friday)

• Fixed an off-by-one bug in the resolution selector that skipped one entry while going to the left, never showing the biggest resolution unless pressing the right key again.
  
• Don't show a message-box showing GLSL compilation errors when the compilation was successful but the error string was not zero; this only happened under the Intel OpenGL driver.
  
• Mitigate the occasional sound-looping problem. A more comprehensive fix is in the works.
  
• Added a workaround for people reporting black screens and framebuffer issues: http://steamcommunity.com/app/606710/discussions/0/1483235412207725225/#c1483235412209019801
  
• Minor cleanups.
  

2017-11-11 (Saturday)

• Rename «Antialiasing» to «Anisotropic Filtering» to make it less confusing.
  
• Make the windowed mode bigger by default.
  
• Add five graphics options (FOV, particles, anisotropic filtering, multisampling, vertical sync) and one sound option (reverb toggle) in the English version of the pause menu. More languages coming up.
  
• Don't make the window resizable to avoid possible sprite misalignment issues. Disable Alt+Enter for the same reason.
  
• Lock the mouse within the window bounds while the game is in the foreground.
  
• Added a configuration key to let the player choose PlayStation-style button prompts: http://steamcommunity.com/app/606710/discussions/0/1483235412206736841/#c1483235412208681177
  
• Added a Sphinx.png icon file for the Linux version of the game, it will be used in the game window.
  
• Move the Sphinx.ini configuration file to the following folder, ensuring that settings are always writable:
  
  Windows: %appdata%\Sphinx\Sphinx.ini
  macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Sphinx/Sphinx.ini
  Linux: ~/.local/share/Sphinx/Sphinx.ini
  
  

2017-11-12 (Sunday)

• Fix the Crocodile Scales Steam achievement.
  
• Make it so that players can also unlock the Crocodile Scales achievement if they beat their best time in the Heliopolis swimming course. Avoiding having to start a new game just for this.
  

2017-11-13 (Monday)

• Second attempt at fixing the sound loop problem.
  

2017-11-14 (Tuesday)

• Fix the Harvest Moon achievement. Trigger it the last time the farmer gives you what they found while digging in the farm instead of when marking the last plot of land. All the achievements should now be obtainable.
  
• Fix the occasional sound loop problem once and for all. Tested in the Anubis wall entrance and verified various times. But one can never be completely sure.
  
• Always disable the original 'fake' widescreen option on load, as the option will be inaccessible very soon.
  
• Don't store the music/sound effect volume, gamepad rumble or camera axis inversion options in each savegame. Instead make them global across the game and persistent in the Sphinx.ini configuration file, just like the new graphics settings.
  
• Minor cleanups.
  

2017-11-15 (Wednesday)

2017-11-17 (Friday)

2017-11-18 (Saturday)

2017-11-20 (Monday)