Hi, Tyler here! Computers have changed a lot since we launched Closure back in 2012. Monitors have more pixels, there's more controllers, there's more than 256mb of ram to work with, windows has gotten worse, and much much more. Technology marches on!
Over the years, Closure has gained a number of technical issues due to some of these advancements. From minor ones like the resolution being incorrect on launch to major ones like the shaders being broken on some graphics cards, its made the experience of playing this game on PC uh, less than ideal. For some people it was actually a smoother experience running the PS3 version of the game on an emulator than the official PC port! I mean, I am impressed that it runs well on emulator, I did some WONKY stuff to get the game running on the PS3.
The project file for the game had also atrophied a lot (it was referencing a lot of files on the desktop or C drive of the PC I made the game on, and as such would not build on any newer PCs without recreating that environment exactly, a task that became increasingly impossible as libraries updated and sdks became deprecated). As such it became impossible to actually fix new issues that popped up.
Anyway, thanks to Ethan Lee (flibitjibibo) we got the game building again and updated a bunch of outdated tech to fix a whole ton of issues related to it, so I give you, the 2024 Maintenance Update! This is purely a technical update, the goal is to make running the game smoother on modern hardware, not to remaster the game, so there are no gameplay changes.
(If for whatever reason you want to remain on the previous build of the game (October 2013), you can subscribe to the beta branch labeled "legacy_oct_2013" on steam to update back to that version)
Also if you're curious what I've been working on these past few years, go wishlist Mewgenics!
PATCH NOTES
MAJOR CHANGES
- A large number of issues related to windowing / fullscreen / high-res monitors have been fixed
- Shaders (graphical effects, including ones related to collision detection) should now behave consistently on all graphics cards.
- The Mac version is back! At least, on the pre-apple-silicon macs. (anything with an M1 or later chip is not supported)
- You can reset the save file from the main menu now! (Gonna be honest, I'm not sure why I even thought this was okay to omit back when we did the pc port...). You're welcome, speedrunner
s - The steam cloud save file name was made consistent between mac/linux/windows. If you had an existing save file, the new version may not be pointing to it by default. If for some reason you want to play on your old save file instead of playing from scratch again, you can point the game at it via the settings file (new savefile name is closure_001.sav, previous on some platforms was cloudsave_closure_001)
- A typo in the dev commentary was fixed (Job Schubbe -> Jon Schubbe)
BORING TECHNICAL CHANGES
- Updated from SDL to SDL2. Ironically I know SDL3 is on the way soon, but SDL2 should solve most of the compatibility issues related to windowing, fullscreen, DPI scaling, controller input, etc.
- Shaders ported from Nvidia CG to GLSL. Nvidia CG was discontinued a long time ago and did some weird stuff on some graphics cards, so porting them all to GLSL should make them behave consistently everywhere and not have that issue where some GPUS would make you fall through the ground.
- A number of link and runtime dependencies were removed, less DLLs are included with the game.