It's been a long time

Hi there, and happy 20th anniversary since the game's release!

We were told that we should probably make some kind of announcement whenever we release a patch, instead of just silently dropping it into the blackhole that is our Official updates thread. ːsteammockingː

We might as well start now, because we are still working on your favorite missing Sphinx features. See you again until the next patch notes. Hopefully in less than four years, if everything goes well.

--

Here is what many of you missed:

2023-08-22 (Tuesday)

• Fix potentially not being able to unlock achievements on macOS under specific circumstances.
• Fix rich presence on Discord and Steam under macOS.
• Improve rich presence to publish updates faster.
• Fix macOS DPI scaling again, after more changes that broke it. Make mouse input work well with high DPI/Retina/UHD+ screens.
• Fix crashing on Linux with a «Value too large for defined data type»; start using 64-bit file offsets when reading files. This was a rare crash.
• The game should no longer crash for Windows users with AMD Radeon OpenGL drivers between v22.7.1 and v22.10.3.
  • Some laptops are stuck with these drivers from around July-November 2022 and their OEM/manufacturer blocks generic up-to-date web drivers from the AMD site. So add a game workaround. Thanks to @SR. Croft for the report, hope you can play now.

• Add support for communicating between the in-game viewer and the Euroland editor on macOS and Linux via a /tmp/XLink FIFO/named pipe, previously this functionality was Windows-only, and crashed in the other OSes.

2023-06-26 (Monday)

• Fix glitchy particles due to the Intel Xe/ARC driver not knowing how to draw triangle fans; add a workaround. Thanks to @jmarti856 for the report.
• Updated the bundled/fallback OpenAL Soft library on Linux, to make it work great without Steam Runtime.
• Add missing hashcodes.h. Some errors weren't as descriptive as they should be.

2023-06-16 (Friday)

• Fix the Steam Deck scaling problems, where misaligned text overflowed the screen.
• Make the UI 8% bigger than normal on portable/handheld PCs, like Steam Deck.
• Make the Book of Sphinx/inventory infobox wider to improve readability.
• Don't needlessly recreate the graphics when the menu option hasn't changed.
• Don't show a green rectangle during dialog mouse-clicking.
• Implement drawing debug menu borders.
• Update the bundled/fallback SDL2 library on Linux.

2023-06-12 (Monday)

• Add a working 30 FPS mode.
  • In the future this will engage dynamically, as needed. Right now it can be set via configuration file. It should improve performance in weaker hardware.
    

    VideoFrameRate=30
    

  • This can be used to override the display's refresh rate and make the game render at less than 60 Hz, like 30 Hz, 20 Hz, 15 Hz, or even less. So if you put a 30 there it will only render every other frame, improving performance by virtue of having half of the workload (and twice as much time allowance) to draw stuff, at the cost of looking slightly choppier.

• Fix sound not working under Linux after the last patch.
• Fix the game's full screen window trying to leave enough margin for the non-existing title bar on Linux. Making it look misaligned.

2023-06-10 (Saturday)

• Fixed uneven scaling and bad mouse position on macOS when using Retina/HiDPI screens. Thanks to @Price#8300 on Discord for the report.
• Fix and prevent random crashes/segmentation faults caused by enemy pathfinding-heavy levels. This at least happened on macOS, but it could potentially happen in any other version.

2023-05-27 (Saturday)

• Add the original 'making of' and 'attract' movies as part of the game data.
  • The original, but still low-resolution, .mkv files can be watched via external media player, not in-game. You can open the folder by right-clicking the Sphinx entry in your Steam library > Manage > Browse local files, and then double-clicking on the «Movies» folder.
  • They now also include subtitles.

• Fix the file permission problems when loading/saving save slots on macOS and Linux. Where sometimes you could save but not load, or vice versa.
• Fix the buggy windowed mode with decoration in borderless for those two platforms.
• Improve the way particles are created and sorted to avoid random stalls and improve performance, reducing memory usage when many are on-screen.
• Fix the out-of-bounds memory corruption and subsequent crash when making the Item Update window smaller.
• Attempt to fix black/corrupted screens under the NVIDIA driver, that always reports x32 MSAA as supported but it isn't true, in some cases only up to x8 works. So, try to get the actually-supported sample count of that specific format via a more modern extension.
• First stab at trying to improve the macOS version of the game. Attacking the DPI scaling issues, and updating the OpenAL Soft 3D sound library.
• Now the game can be configured at startup to use more than the tiny 80 MiB + 100 MiB of RAM it was hardcoded to use until now.
  
  See this wiki page to learn how to use the -sdataheap and -ldataheap command-line arguments. Potentially making bigger and modern mods and levels a possibility.

• Fix the rainbow-looking noise colors made out of garbage data at startup whenever loading the gamepad support took more than a second. This was mainly an issue on Linux, where SDL2 takes its sweet time in searching for plugged pads. Now the screen will remain black since it first appears.
• Avoid flickering, black blotches and screen corruption while flipping between graphics options. Delay changing them until we start drawing the next frame, not so fast.
• Add some extra borders to the fade-out overlays, to try to cover possible one-pixel-off issues in the bottom and left sides.
• Implement the first version of the dynamic resolution system to combat the particle system fillrate issues. Which also allows supersampling at great performance cost. This can only be changed via the -dev mode Watcher window, for the time being.
• Add some extra machinery to learn to diagnose and improve frame pacing issues.
• Expose the pixel scaling factor as tweakable live option in the -dev mode Watcher window.
• Make it possible to switch between both framerate schedulers (variable/frameskip) at runtime.
• Wait for the engine to fully shut down before trying to close the game. Avoiding some awkward crashes after clicking «Exit».
• Dynamicallly-load all the old OpenGL 1.1 functions that are directly exported by the OpenGL dynamic library. Now we don't link against libgl.so under Linux anymore, potentially improving Wayland support and future compatibility. Not depending on X11, only SDL2.
• Avoid outright crashing when the game files are missing; abort softly.
• Add the MFX_ and SFX_Defines.h under the Sonix folder. As the game loads them and turns the weird numbers into informative labels when error messages happen.

2023-01-26 (Wednesday)

• Cumulative update with a whole host of features, the most important being HiDPI/4K support.
• Add higher-resolution textures for the Heliopolis exterior, Mummy Castle/Jail environmental textures, Menes assistants, footprints, first-person blowpipe, many more monsters, Abydos Jewels, minigames, Abydos Museum, Trials of the Eye, Imhotep cutscenes and their objects, the Uruk Intro and a few Luxor Pyramid environmental texture improvements as well as HD versions of almost every visual effect and particle.
• Prepare the game for the upcoming projected shadows functionality.
• Prepare the game for the upcoming 64-bit EngineX version.
• Improve the drawing order of translucent objects.
• Improve the way particles are drawn to screen.
• Prepare for the initial/preliminary version of three-point ambient lights. The last missing original effect from the Eurocom version.
• Hopefully improve frame-pacing.
• Fix the Skull Swordsman projectile attack misfiring in some levels, like the ones on Uruk Temple Trials. Fix a similar issue maybe happening to Smiling Burbles.
• Raise the tesselation level for the player's swoosh speed trail effects, for the sword and more. Make them rounder.
• Update the SDL2 binaries to 2.018; it should fix setting smaller resolutions not working as intended. See this Steam Community thread.
• Fix Sphinx dying when jumping on top of float-on-lava-marked pickup-able platforms. (What a mouthful)
• Fix some mistakes in the gamepad code causing memory corruption.
• Avoid unnecessarily crashing the game on recoverable issues. Fixes crashing when fighting a ton of monsters in the monster test map, due to too many animations being loaded at once.
• Protect the game against some not-so-frequent crashes automatically reported by players and make it more robust.
• Add support for projected-shadow-enabled NPCs during cutscenes.
• Limit the scan mode orbit camera when going downwards, too; avoid going past the 360 degree discontinuity.
• Improve the built-in gamescript debugger output; add proper hashcode ID string retrieval when possible, add further parameters for stubbed, or limited opcodes.
  • Make the variable printing wider and following the window size.
  • Add a way to automatically trigger the gamescript debugger when anything runs (Auto on Any).
  • Make the current trigger name and type visible.
  • Implement dozens of the previously-missing operations to show with all their parameters and variable/constant output.
  • Implement support for naming the first few special/hardcoded procedure variables for readability. Like MESSAGE, or CUTSEQ, or ARG0.
  • Implement initial support for gamescript debugger indentation, to mirror what is shown in the Euroland editor, as faithfully as possible.
  • Add constant value hashcode detection and auto-formatting.
  • Add the trigger coordinates at the top, don't color special variables when the current line is active and should have a yellow tint that we would otherwise interrupt.
  • Show the actual trigger identifier name (the actual human tag from Euroland) in there when possible and whenever Display > Triggers > Names option in the Watcher is toggled on.
  • Add support for viewing variables even when there is not debug information in the EDB, or tag names.
  • Add support for printing hashcodes when found in the variable display block, just like what I did in the disassembly block.

• Bring back the Akaria salt crystal container regeneration flags from the death.
• Implement HT_GameScript_Macro_AddAnimator and HT_GameScript_Macro_RemoveAnimator.
• Implement the initial version of HT_GameScript_Macro_GetAnimSkin and HT_GameScript_Macro_SetAnimSkin.
• Implement HT_GameScript_Macro_GetModValue, HT_GameScript_Macro_SetModValue, HT_GameScript_Macro_GetGlobalValue and HT_GameScript_Macro_SetGlobalValue.
• Implement HT_GameScript_Macro_GetSaveSlot, HT_GameScript_Macro_GetGameVersion and HT_GameScript_Macro_GetTimeDate.
  • See the Sphinx Wikia (Script Scripting Language page) for more information.

• Add a new HT_ScriptEvents_WaitHitOrMessage to the list of available script events in triggers.
  • Because the script state machine only processes the first event at each time point we can't do complex OR logic when waiting for more than one event type without implementing something like this.
  • This should combine the WaitHit and WaitForMessage functionalities.

• Enable rendering entity bounds, if toggled in the -dev mode Watcher window.
• Make so that the Watcher, Stats and other debug windows have priority over the pause menu, so that we don't need to Ctrl + Shift + Tab,
• Show the cursor whenever we right-click in the gameplay window to open a debug menu to see where we are aiming at.
• Improve the Sphinx.ini configuration file reader to be more forgiving, now it also understands hexadecimal numbers.
  • Fix a bug where we saved signed integer values to the Sphinx.ini but read them as unsigned; save all integers as signed, fixing the roundtrip issues.
  • Save some hashcode-based Sphinx.ini keys as hexadecimal for readability, now that we support that.

• Save and restore the ShowKey and BkColor values for debug window elements to make their launch hotkeys and background color customizable from Sphinx.ini.
• Add a new "Script Output" window; useful for normal users to track down gamescript problems (as a dumping ground for the DEBUG and DEBUGS commands) without DbgView.exe or C++ access.
• Switch the normal gamescript debug printing prefix from GI: to : to make it easier to search for text and grep.
• Improve the OpenAL Soft sound effect/reverb code.
• Improve the gamepad and rumbling code.
• Improve the savegame code, especially for mods.
• Make reading the Book of Sphinx/inventory its own separate thing in the rich presence status, as it isn't just another menu.

2021-09-22 (Sunday)

• Quick fix for not being able to save or load save games on Windows when the user name and save path used non-English characters, due to partial Unicode support.
• Update the bundled SDL2 library version, potentially improving gamepad support.

2020-12-26 (Saturday)

• Early 64-bit version, for closed technical testing. Incomplete.

2020-10-07 (Wednesday)

• Fix several reported crashes, mainly mod-related.
• Fix a faulty GLSL compiler not supporting #if 0 blocks on certain NVIDIA macOS drivers, causing a bogus pop-up message at startup.
• Other minor improvements.

2020-10-05 (Monday)

• Enhanced water shader. Now bodies of water show dynamic waves of various sizes instead of a tiling texture, all while still retaining the original look as much as possible.
• Improve the asynchronous I/O thread and temporarily unlock the framerate for even faster loading screens. Avoid load-screen flickering in some OpenGL drivers.
• Fix Unicode paths on Windows; use wide strings instead of UTF-8. There was a problem with paths containing international symbols on Windows. So if your username/user folder contained Greek, Chinese or Cyrillic glyphs the game couldn't even find or open the configuration file (Sphinx.ini) or apply the configuration/optimized defaults. Sometimes causing black screens.
• New HD textures for Smiling and Slim Burbles, clouds, bubbles and smoke, electric objects and almost every other particle effect. Improved textures for environmental Heliopolis props and zip lines.
• Remove the hack to hide the glitchy parts of the skinned Imhotep and Anubis ghost models now that the export-time problem has been found, and skinned/multi-layer meshes with morph targets work properly. Tangentially, tweak the Anubis nose mesh to minimize seams.
• Blinking particles fix/workaround.
• Try to recover the OpenAL audio context when the device disconnects.
• Force disabling soft particles when UseFramebuffer is set to zero or when MSAA is not supported by the graphics card.
• Reduce any possible flickering while changing v-sync options.
• Scale the zipline fall/inactivity counter by the framerate; not the perfect solution, but fixes Sphinx infinitely re-hooking after falling at the end of a line at 80+ FPS.
• Make the (optional) cutscene exit fadeouts last exactly one second (i.e. 60 ticks of nominal framerate)
• Override the framerate limits via configuration file.
  • 50-75 Hz is an acceptable range, 30 Hz is already pretty unstable and Sphinx can go through walls just by accelerating a bit, at 85 Hz the main problem was the zip line re-hooking while falling at the end of the line loops.
  • What's still broken? Swimming/diving speed, and released/moving Scarabs need a multiplier.
  • Here is a quick template, this function is experimental and unsupported:
    

    MinFrameRate=30
    MaxFrameRate=120
    

• Allow (again) resolutions that don't natively match the screen aspect ratio. As requested.
• Add some leeway to the maximum framerate to accomodate the current display; from 50 Hz to 85 Hz for now. Experimentally, it seems safe and avoids tearing.
• Use Adaptive Vsync by default to reduce slowdowns.
• Translation fixes for English, Spanish, Italian and French; fix some longstanding spelling and formatting issues. Kudos to @LetsPlayNintendoITA, @MaskDemasque and @lordquacksmith. Add Richard Foster to the credits roll, he was only credited in some languages.
• Heavily improved third-party localization support. Improved support for custom fonts and language-dependent assets. Rewrite a big part of the EngineX language code to make some hardcoded parts completely modular.
• Change a bunch of conditions that checked against hashcode masks 0xffff0000 to detect if the code was of type HT_File_HASHCODE_BASE. Now that we use EDB files that start from the other way around and decrement themselves, check for 0xff000000 instead. That's where the section/type "code" is actually stored in the number. Eurocom wasn't consistent with the kind of checks it did.
• Add an option to ignore controller input; some players asked for a way of disabling the gamepad support altogether. It can be done like this:
  

  IgnoreGamepadInput=1
  

• Improve level changes to only force-unload what's needed instead of the first 999 sequential EDB files by hashcode. It was slow and it didn't cover everything, so now the game loads even faster and does things correctly.
• Restrict the no-particles option. It can still be accessed via INI file, but it confused many players and caused the current menu option highlight effect to disappear.
• Add support for 20-ish new game controllers. Button mapping fixes.
• Improved -mod mode:
  • Re-enable more useful -dev mode windows and options. Display collisions, sound effects, skeletons and more.
  • More information in the logs for mod and map developers. Re-enable the original Eurocom gamescript debugger and line-stepping.
  • Show memory blocks for all heaps in the Resource view.

• Add a time variable that can be used for more complex behaviors in shaders.
• Minor cleanups and other small improvements.
• Prepare the groundwork for 64-bit support.

2020-03-05 (Thursday)

• Make audio I/O and soundbank loading completely asynchronous, for smoother frame pacing.
• Add fade-in and out support to most game levers and pushable blocks, the worst offender being the centerpiece lever of the Mummy RotoHub puzzle. Fix missing fade-outs for containers.
• Update SDL2.dll to workaround choppy mouse movement on Windows caused by bug #4748.
• Add initial support for additional third-party languages and fan-translations:
  • Conditionally toggle them only if the FrontEnd/PickUps for that language are there.
  • Reserve hashcodes for additional language files; the game enables one of these languages if it detects that both its FrontEnd and PickUps exist in the Filelist. They aren't shipped with the game, though.
  • These hardcoded hashcodes are issued backwards, for mod compatibility reasons.

• Fix the trapped mouse toggling other options, when holding to change volume bars and accidentally releasing while hovering over the reverb button.
• New terrain and initial water shaders.
• New asynchronous asset loading for instantaneous level transitions, it should also reduce the frametime spikes and judder.
• Fix a crash while skipping the intro cutscene of the Mummy Uruk Castle exterior at startup.
• Avoid black screens and tiny visual glitches when switching graphics settings or MSAA levels too fast.
• Fix the problem of particles disappearing while switching between soft-particles/no multisampling without restarting first.
• Update the gamepad button mapping file, adding support for more gamepads.
• Log several prominent trigger errors and trigger message prints.
• Improve performance by inlining and removing some indirection.
• Properly tag the EngineX windows with their names.
• Other smaller changes and error-checking.

2019-08-28 (Wednesday)

• Add a preliminary version of sRGB-aware linear color blending, for correctness. This means that now textures and colors should display more vividly, as the artists intended.
  • The final image should have more contrast and mix in the right proportions for a more pleasing result.
  • It is not yet perfect in the sense that water and some other transparent surfaces look fainter, and will require some tweaking via future updates that are being worked on.

• Add more high-resolution HQ texture overrides.
  • Mainly covering Uruk Temple Trials, Mummy RotoHub, Heliopolis Exterior, Uruk Canyon, Mummy Hang Train and several particle effects.

• Add more level portraits to the Discord Rich Presence integration.
• Fix an ugly stack overflow issue during enemy AI avoidance recursion.
• Particle orientation fixes, previously some particles faced the wrong direction.
• Fix gameplay logic defects for the wall sneak mechanics and ceiling collision checks. Fix other various original logic issues.
• Mouse cursor handling has been rewritten and optimized to be more responsive in preparation for remapping.
• Get rid of the Sword of Osiris blade gap; the light-blade ended a bit short of the handle, with nothing in between. Now both components are joined together.
• Reduce the Sword of Osiris guard/hand/finger clipping by making the sword grip more natural without changing its orientation; doing so would have affected gameplay, cutscenes and attacks.
• The Abydos/Heliopolis ferry boat nets now appear on both sides. Fixed other flipped geometry elements and correct the bad UV mapping at the top of most of the nets so that they appear solid black instead of like small transparent holes. It looks better now, this one took a few years to fix.
• Re-enable the wheel platform trigger (TR_WheelPlatform). While most of the physics code existed, the rest had to be partially guessed and reconstructed from existing documentation and hints left by Eurocom, so it may not exactly match the original functionality, but it seems to work fine. Please report any issues if you use this fun beta device in your custom levels.
• Add fade-in and out support to the wheel platform trigger, its spindle and various platforms.
• Add fade-in and out support to the boids of flock triggers, mainly for schools of fish and many other "flocking" creatures.
• Fix possible black screen buffers under very specific circumstances.
• Switch the gamepad subsystem to always use all the available gamepads and fuse all their analog and digital inputs together.
  • By doing this we can do multiple actions from various devices at the same time without any artificial switching.
  • This should improve the Steam Controller support, as well as third-party remappers that mix and match inputs.

• Cut off any remaining rumbling before switching to a new active gamepad. Only the controller that is actually in the player hands will actually vibrate.
• Add some hysteresis to the keyboard/mouse and gamepad switching modes.
  • Now it only marks a controller as active after after giving it some leeway to avoid spurious analog movement.

• Fix a logic bug in the CAMERATOPLAYER gamescript operation. This may change some angles and behavior that depended on it.
• Enable the Euroland, EDB FileInfo, OBJ FileInfo, Watcher, Resources, Stats and Draw Mode elements in the 'Viewer mode'.
  • Also enable the Collision Info data dumping section in the EDB Info window. These are all useful menus, some of them exist in normal mode.
  • Let the game open EuroLand files directly from Viewer mode via pipe messaging.

• Re-enable the Output Items, Output Solid, Output Contour, Output Usage, R2 ScreenDump and List Trig Files entries in the Watcher. These dump text reports via stdout every time they are ticked.
• Most EDB and soundbank loading errors should now be user-facing instead of failing silently.
• Fix the high-resolution timers in the Item Update window. Now the more costly items (the ones that take more game cycles to process) should be visible.
• Implement a PCReplaceFrontEnd=1 configuration key, so that PCLevel actually makes something.
  • Also implement a -level <hashcode> command-line parameter that overrides it and does the same thing.
  • If set to 1 it will load the PCLevel value, if not it will interpret it as a hash code. It only works in -dev mode.
  • See this wiki page for more information.

• Implement a KeyboardOptions=1 Sphinx.ini configuration entry. That will enable a series of keyboard shortcuts while in -dev mode.
  • Ctrl + M: Reloads the current level.
  • Ctrl + N: Toggles trigger markers, same as in the Watcher.
  • Ctrl + D: Toggles viewing trigger radiuses, same as in the Watcher.
  • Ctrl + G: Toggles god mode, same as in the Watcher.
  • Ctrl + I: Toggles the 'Always has item' cheat, same as in the Watcher.
  • Ctrl + {1,5}: Quickly loads the level stored in QuickLevelJump1=hashcode.
  • Ctrl + Shift + {1,5}: Assigns the currently loaded level to that jump combo key.

• General performance improvements and optimizations.
• Minor cleanups.

2019-07-15 (Monday)

• Several Italian translation improvements. Thanks to @LetsPlayNintendoITA for reporting the typos.
• Add two new environmental sound tracks to the Soundtrack DLC:
  • (56) Nomad Outpost: The iconic Bedouin Outpost tune.
  • (57) Trading Outpost: Diegetic music from the Heliopolis Point shops.

  
  Thanks to @AshhawkBurning for tabulating the tracks for the wiki and the reminder.

2019-03-26 (Tuesday)

• Add Discord/Steamworks Rich Presence integration. It shows the current level, character and gameplay status (including Mummy abilities).
  • It also shows the current/maximum health (in Ankhs) and money (Bronze/Onyx) while hovering over the little Scarab coin.
  • Most zones have their own portrait.

• Fix the Practice Makes Perfect and Crocodile Scales achievements. Now they unlock as intended, again.
• Always keep the little arrow markers in the choice dialog prompts vertically aligned, to account for the bigger text size.
• Fix a text length limitation that prevented some original Eurocom credits from appearing. Found by @Freeman at MobyGames.
• Make the credits scroll comparatively faster, now that we have a lot of new staff entries.
• Fix the terribly glitchy scrolling in the Trigger debug dialog, improve the entry alignment and add nifty color support. Remember to enable Display > Triggers > Names in the Watcher (Ctrl + W) to make this window even more useful for map-making.
• Add a new Display > Item Update > Show them all Watcher option to individually show all the active map items, this should make the Item Update debug window actually useful.

2019-02-20 (Wednesday)

• Fix monster possession-related crashes in the beta Sakkara 3 map. Add missing effects and other possession improvements, ignore AI gamescript instructions during player posession.
• Roll back SDL2.dll to 2.0.8 as some players reported random beeping and input problems with the 2.0.9 release. We will be using the previous version until these regressions are fixed.
• Remove some unnecessary drawing of debug borders and dynamic resolution size calculations that should improve performance.
• Minor cleanups.

P.S.: Don't forget that the game now has a pretty neat verified Discord to chit chat with SatCM fans like me and you: https://discord.gg/sphinx