Game update

Now with dynamic lights, better gamepad support, new achievements and more stuff

Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy · published 10 Jan 2018, 23:10 UTC

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Happy new year! Things haven't slowed down since our last Sphinx announcement, and we have been hard at work expanding the font support, with improved glyph sizes and tweaks for all the six languages.

Also, for those wanting even more flexibility, we have made the dialog text scaling entirely configurable (take a look at the TextHudObjScaling option in the changelog below), in case you want to play on your couch without eye strain.

This Monday we added support for points of dynamic omnidirectional light. Which subtly enhance the mood when you open a chest, get a new item or there are fireflies moving nearby.

A bit more subtle is the expanded item rotator, now 1.7 times wider. The golden frame has been centered and the list extended, lending more space for the bigger typography. Previously, the overflowing text only displayed partial item names, causing problems like selecting the correct Portal Amulet while playing in Romance languages.

Many of you probably noticed the two new achievements we added in the middle of December, rewarding exploration. They cover getting all the health Gold Ankh Pieces for Sphinx and all the Onyx Scarabs found across the six mummy visits. The latter will require a new game to work properly, sorry about that.

We have also fixed a few typos, improving the flow of our Italian/Spanish/German translation of the game and achievements. Thanks to contributions by @LetsPlayNintendoITA and @MagicianMana.

You can now plug several gamepads at the same time and switch between them. Having things like joysticks, flight sticks or fight sticks connected while playing won't cause detection problems anymore. Also, Steam Controller users should be able to turn it off and on and still being able to play after idling.

The elephant in the room is contextual mouse/keyboard support. It is still being done, and it turned out to be slightly more complicated than all the other problems we have fixed so far. Hopefully, it will be out soon.

In other news, we are also working on releasing the original editor and tools that Eurocom used to make the game in 2003, so that people can make mods and custom levels. We will also try to include most—if not all—of the unpublished beta content, like the infamous worlds of Akaria and Sakkara, so that the community can fix and improve those incomplete levels, bringing them back to life, 15 years later.

Also, here is the complete cumulative changelog since our last announcement:

2017-12-09 (Saturday)

Remake all the default fonts for all the languages with more legible counterparts.

Fix the proportions of the amounts column in the artifacts/captured monsters list of the Book of Sphinx. With the new fonts there were some overlapping issues.

Make the game DPI-aware on Windows to hopefully improve the resolution limitations. Keep in mind that higher resolutions will make some parts of the interface unreadable.

Improve the alignment of the Circle/B button text in the contextual HUD to account for the bigger fonts in all the non-English languages.

Minor HUD tweaks.

2017-12-10 (Sunday)

Switch to a Clang/C2-based compiler on Windows instead of MSVC, this fixes the Abydos monkey-bars regression on Windows and probably several other subtle things.

Enlarge the internal memory pools to avoid crashing in Luxor after talking to Nefertiti and advancing to the banquet hall due to a memory compaction trigger caused by the bigger size of the new fonts.

Fix a few mistakes in the Spanish translation, mainly covering Horus lines in the Uruk intro.

2017-12-12 (Tuesday)

Reduce the Fonts.edb size again from ~3MB to 280KB to try to mitigate the Luxor State Rooms crash after meeting Nefertiti. Export the internal font textures with very reduced resolutions and use the texoverride functionality to load them at their original size externally. Now the Fonts.edb is smaller than the original one, so this should work, in theory, to workaround those pesky EngineX memory limitations.

Minor V-Sync improvements. Switch to «standard» V-Sync if «adaptive» is not supported.

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 section of Sphinx.ini. Example:
```
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.

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