2024-04-21 changelog

This update comes with lots of bugfixes and gameplay tweaks, improved levels (Cursed Palace, Mummy Sewer and Uruk Temple), and a few higher-quality textures.

People with NVIDIA laptops should not get black screens anymore. The fiddly part at the end of Uruk Temple with the moving metal platform has been streamlined. See the full changelog below:

2024-04-21 (Sunday)

• Tweak the Mummy Sewer level to fix the glitchy metal grate that flickered against the water plane, also fix the fast-moving water in the 64-bit version of the same level.
• Fix a bunch of player-reported crashes and bugs:
  • Fix a crash to desktop when picking up items without a parent trigger.
  • Fix a hairy issue related to «pickupable» frozen enemies who are almost dead.
  • Fix a NULL pointer dereference in the way EngineX draws in-game windows, which led to code execution redirection.
  • Fix a crash when the player tried to look at another nearby character's neck, but the neck bone did not exist. Yes, I know.

• The NVIDIA driver reports supporting up to MSAA x32 via costly supersampling when the hardware only generally handles up to x8.
  • Detect what is the actual limit to have more reliable performance.
  • NVIDIA laptops also seem to have trouble with the supersampling, causing black screens.

• Limit the valid MSAA values loaded from Sphinx.ini to x1 / x2 / x4 / x8 / x16 / x32 / +, round them down and avoid possible OpenGL driver issues when players try to run the game with something like MSAA x3 directly.
• Disable (texture) anisotropic filtering by default during the first startup if MSAA or «advanced» features are not decently supported. Better performance for potentially low-end graphics cards.
• Close the game properly, without crashing, while having a -dev mode sub-menu open while doing Alt + F4 or closing the window.
• Add HQ texture overrides for the flying stone platform in the Uruk Islands, the Heliopolis Exterior palace bird heads and the smashed obelisk floor. The low-res bird heads one was suggested by @lordquacksmith.
• Fix the wrong texture in the throne room wall of the Cursed Palace. Enlarge the spawn radius of torches, characters, breakable pots, and other triggers.
• Fix more funky texture UV coordinates in Cursed Palace; the triangular glitches in the side door frames, the flipped and misaligned wall design at either side of them. Expand the draw distance of pots, monsters, torches, portals and more. All in all, better.
• Update the boot-up copyright year to 2024, it was about time.
• Tweak the Uruk Temple level to fix the biggest collision issue in the game with the moving platform and the window blocker.
  • The released beetle would get stuck in the seam between the moving and static platform; if they detected collision against a "wall" during 15 consecutive frames they would explode, and this often happened in the seam unless the player moved it very fast to cross it before the count went up. Now the moving platform entity («platform_floor») has an invisible polygonal wedge that bridges the gap, as a geometry skirt or lip.
  • The other problem was that even after reaching the window blocker and touching the actual wall with the beetle, the stone cover wouldn't explode with it most of the time; it would only explode around a small, spherical area surrounding the trigger center.
    • To fix that we add two «anim datum» (one HT_AnimDatum_Collision + a bigger HT_AnimDatum_CollisionBound) to the «Platform01/platform1» entity of type lozenge (the shape is rectangular, box collisions don't seem to be supported, lozenge are the 2D boxy equivalent of a capsule), the entity and its datum end up being part of a script with a WaitHit event («Doors/windowblock»). If there are collision datum they will be used. Copied this from the dart targets, like «buttonright_green», which work similarly but with spherical collision and collision bound.
    • The WaitHit had the BeetleShockwave flag. The TR_Object trigger that uses this script (Windowblock in Maps/_ur_4pat_sun, inside Maps/Uruk_Sphinx/Urk_4pat.elf) has SolidCollision and HitZoneCollision set in User Flags.

• Raise the beetle-wall collision counter from 15 to 31-consecutive-frames. Making it harder to trigger via buggy ground geometry gaps like the movable platform in Uruk Temple.
  • Make it frame-rate invariant, so that it does not get more or less difficult depending on the monitor or hardware.
  • Fix a potential instant explosion that could theoretically happen randomly.

As always, if you are interested in knowing more about the game, staying up to date, or finding other fans, feel free to join here: https://discord.gg/sphinx