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.

7305 days ago a game titled Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy was first released in North America. After around three years of development and more than a few name changes, going from Shadow of Set at E3 to Misfortunate Mummy around summer, they finally settled on what we all know. The project started as a 1996 CGI movie concept from a small team of artists from Valencia, Spain called Anibyte. The team had already worked with Eurocom doing the cutscenes for a previous game of theirs called 40 Winks. In these small demos, which can now be watched here and here, thanks to Ana Amat, we can already see some familiar faces in a different fantasy setting. Eventually, the team could not get their movie funded, and joined game developer Eurocom to mutate the concept into something even more familiar. Merging Egyptian mythology, a touch of Arabian Nights, the Luna project, and a vibrant and friendly animated look. We already see a transforming Sphinx, Anubis, and some early monsters like the Goofy Lizard. [previewyoutube=8lOVy6KGjiY;full][/previewyoutube]
Once the game started pre-production we can see the landscapes and architecture solidifying into very different patterns and palettes.







We also start seeing the first efforts of getting these concepts into the custom game engine they built; fighting memory and resolution limitations to make it all fit in a console with barely 32 megabytes of RAM. Shown below are extremely early versions of both Abydos and Akaria; the underwater realm, home of piranhas and plenty of other relocated monsters, like the evil skeletal dragon boss that we can find under Abydos in the final version: [img w=10]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/31158491/4528d9e9bf90fb251a166069b5dbd0a35de5d0d1.png[/img]

With the titular character growing up and getting some new clothes, here we can see one of the very first concepts for Uruk, the lava hell, and what seems like a prototype version of Abydos, with the bird design and slanted walls:
Here we can see a more advanced underwater Akaria Dome level, as well as a later version of the Abydos Canals, and early-to-mid versions of Sakkara; the jungle world where we would originally fight the Geb Queen:
The screenshots in the top part showcase the Sakkara temple, where we are introduced to the possession dart mechanic and we transform into nearby monsters, like a frog or a Dino oaf, like the one in certain boss battle. Below that, you can see the Heliopolis Wall, with a hint of the contextual HUD and an already working blowpipe. Plus Uruk Castle, with a slightly different appearance:
As most of you know by now, the game had to be downsized and started losing regions and mechanics due to the sheer scale of the sprawling levels and a lack of time to make it all fit and stay fun. Even parts of the Mummy storyline, with Bas-Ket being playable and guard capture/stealth sections, or the winged Sphinx and its flying sections in the end part, with the titular protagonist reaching the Uruk Castle. So the Eurocom team focused on polishing the best parts of what they already had; transplanting and repurposing many of the monsters and NPCs to other areas to avoid discarding them altogether. While missing a good chunk, and very noticeably stitched together in the last two hours of gameplay, what remains is solidly built. Many of these unfinished and cut levels were eventually released in 2018 as part of the Authoring Tools DLC, and reworked versions by the community can be easily played today on PC via the unofficial Shadow of Set mod, created by @jmarti856. [previewyoutube=iJEHMh7aplE;leftthumb][/previewyoutube][previewyoutube=FkqTxU4H_qY;righthumb][/previewyoutube] [previewyoutube=ICstxaIckcs;full]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICstxaIckcs[/previewyoutube] (Unfinished 30-second CG ad made by Blur Studio back in the day; contains some swearing!) For quite a few reasons, and here we enter the realm of the subjective, ranging from badly targeted or misleading marketing, or releasing right next to other fantastic games, the title never achieved mainstream appeal despite decent-to-good reviews. So Eurocom retained full rights from the publisher and many years passed. There are hints that they explored some themes for the eventual sequel.










(2004 concepts by David Muoz Velzquez, @DavidMV)
Ex-Eurocom people would also try to repurpose the franchise during the height of mobile gaming with an infinite runner starring our friend the Mummy itself! None of these internal demos would release, and the company eventually sold it to THQ Nordic in 2016, with this high-definition PC version appearing a year later and the Nintendo Switch version after that. The game is still being actively patched and improved, still trying to give it the love and attention it sorely missed. Now ready to be experienced by old and new players alike, hopefully a bit stronger and wiser. Happy 20th anniversary, Sphinx! -- Credits: Thanks to jmarti856, lordquacksmith, SphinxLuvDuv and others in the community for contacting original team members and recovering/archiving these visual pieces. 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

Hi there! Those wanting to test the first version of the much-requested projected shadows on Windows and Linux + SteamOS can do so now by opting into the sixty-four-bits Steam beta branch. At the moment, they look more or less like this, but we are aware that they are way too dark in some places, so some tweaks are to be expected. Toggle the following button to preview them, and we always appreciate any feedback by posting below or by opening a discussion thread: [expand type=details]
[/expand] Other than that, textures now look even better, some levels have been hopefully improved with extended view distances, and we even get two new monkey statues at tricky spots. Phew. Full changelog below:

2023-10-09 (Monday)

• Add two brand-new save statue spots in critical places where players usually struggled or died frequently, causing frustration and backtracking:
  • One at the Uruk Intro, just before the caged Spike Spider fight.
  • Another at the Heliopolis Wall Section II entrance, for players that did not save after coming back from the second Mummy visit. Spot suggested by @SphinxLuvDuvWuv.
• Fix music not playing right after launching the game with the -slot 0/1/2 command-line argument (that directly loads a save slot and skips the main menu), until the player respawns.

2023-10-06 (Friday)

• Add 12 new HQ textures for the Luxor Pyramid, covering environmental surfaces and interactive objects.
• Add a bunch of extra HQ textures on Luxor Palace, covering the Luxor guards, stained glass windows, some plaster walls and more.
• Add more miscellaneous textures covering Abydos walls and building windows, Heliopolis exterior shooting target base and bull head on top of the Wall's forcefield, eagle water faucet's cork, beetle breeding jar. Plus breakable vases in Abydos, environmental improvements to the Corridor of Champions and the crocodile owner.
• Edit and re-export the Abydos Canals/Heliopolis Exterior/Luxor Palace/Luxor Pyramid levels on both 32 and 64-bit to enlarge the spawn distance of fires, items, NPCs, portals (avoiding ugly fade-outs to 2D stand-in cards closer to the player). Fix some railings (like the ones protecting the Shield of Osiris) and other translucent surfaces drawing in the wrong order.
• Re-export the Mummy Uruk Castle exterior map and cutscene to fix the texture clash that made some castle surfaces look metallic. Reported by @jmarti856 and @lordquacksmith.
• Vertical particles like falling water droplets and magic lightstreaks now actually face the right direction (Y-axial locking).
  • Before this many particle FX sprites rotated awkwardly and the drops appeared sideways and off center, now they look more natural.
• Mark the crow textures as 1-bit alpha (alpha-testing instead of alpha-blending) so that their wings and body are drawn in the right order.
  • Seems like the wingspan and crow head are rigged very rigidly and one can't completely avoid the clipping even after setting the texture as 1-bit/alpha-tested. But at least it doesn't shown up contorted from the inside out and flickering.
  • This has been a long-running visual issue. Reported by @SphinxLuvDuv and @lordquacksmith.
• Improvements for the experimental 64-bit branch:
  • Fix the glitchy translucent Imhotep/Anubis ghosts; their faces and hands rhythmically moved like a Winamp visualization. Reported by @lordquacksmith.
    • The mesh used the wrong index for interpolating morph vertex-animation poses.
  • Re-exported the Abydos canals without the random platform next to Kemmet.
  • Added missing version of the improved shooting minigame, already part of the 32-bit files, with textures marked as 1-bit/alpha-test to avoid z-sorting issues and flicker. A few meshes were also moved a bit to avoid z-fighting.
• Updated the SDL2 gamepad config file to support new input devices.
• Updated the OpenAL Soft 3D sound library to v1.23.1.
  • Add ASLR support to the 32-bit .DLL.

2023-09-30 (Saturday)

• Make the shadow mapping and dynamic resolution configurable from Sphinx.ini. Results can also now be viewed live by tweaking the values in the Watcher. No more hardcoded values. [Graphics] ShadowMapSize=999 DynResScaleX=.1 DynResScaleY=.5

2023-09-12 (Tuesday)

• The experimental 64-bit Steam branch that one can manually opt-into should now come with the experimental/early/incomplete projected shadows and three-point lighting.
  • Performance will be significantly worse and graphical glitches may appear.
  • Keep in mind that it won't work under certain terrain surfaces, just because it's easier for me to test it in a single variant, so it's only a temporary measure during development.
  • Let me know what you guys think, here or on Discord.
    • e.g. If they look too dark, or if you'd thing they should be different. Happy to read your thoughts.

2023-08-30 (Wednesday)

• Add a new -lang launch argument, see the wiki for more information, but mainly it will be useful for fan translations. Now you can also use these ISO 639-1 language codes in the INI file instead of the weird Eurocom numbers.
• Fix the humongous and misaligned letters in the French version of the experimental 64-bit branch and include support for Steamworks (unlocking achievements, Steam language selection) and Discord rich presence in this early version. Windows and Linux seem to work decently, macOS still doesn't work.
• Re-enable the Scan Frog cheat in -dev mode, now Sphinx can jump around in frog shape!
• Show the active sound effect names at runtime in -dev mode, when possible, instead of just "SFX" for everything.

2023-08-27 (Sunday)

• Add even more HD textures for characters, many enemies, pickup-able 3D items, Abydos Museum jewels, special effects and various environments; like the Abydos minigames, Uruk Castle, Uruk Trials, Heliopolis exterior and many others. A grand total of 304 new files.

2023-08-24 (Thursday)

• Add a very experimental sixty-four-bits Steam branch with heavily reworked 64-bit versions of the engine for Windows and Linux, instead of the current 32-bit builds.
  • Not recommended for normal players, this is mostly directed to Sphinx veterans who want to report issues.
  • macOS will be ready in a few days, right now the branch will not work.
  • Most of the existing mods will not be compatible with this experimental version.
  • Seems to work fine on Steam Deck as-is, with some limitations.

2023-08-23 (Wednesday)

• Fix a crash when projected shadows (or NPC projected shadows) were disabled at startup in the latest version. Thanks to nas#7536 for the report.

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. steammocking We might as well start now, because we are still working on your [strike]favorite[/strike] 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. [RenderMode] 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 [GS]: 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: [RenderMode] 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: [PCKeyboardMap] 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 [InitialLevel] PCReplaceFrontEnd=1 configuration key, so that PCLevel actually makes something.
  • Also implement a -level 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 [Debug] 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 [InitialLevel] 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.

Hi there! Time for a song refresh.

• Updated all the song files; now the songs are based on the recovered high-quality 1411 kbps / 44100 Hz master files instead of derived lossy versions.
  • Instead of ~500 MiB for the combined FLAC+MP3 package, now it weights around ~300 MiB for the MP3 version and ~930 MiB for the lossless FLAC version.
  • One can freely choose between either version by toggling the Download high-quality audio files checkbox at Steam's Settings > Music section.
• Renamed most of the tracks to more friendly names, instead of using the internal, or early development tags.
  • For example; the Book of Sphinx menu music is no longer called Nomads, the Heliopolis theme is no longer known as Sakkara Main, and the Luxor Palace theme is no longer attributed to Abydos.
• Added a Readme file with optional playback instructions through foobar2000 + vgmstream, for advanced fans wanting seamless loop point control of the tagged FLAC files. Please take a look at the guide via Browse local files.
• Improved tagging, added BPM and other extended attributes where possible.
• Added an extra track; Sun Shrine Island.

To celebrate the Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy -75% off sale ending March 1st, the Discord Community Staff (@lordquacksmith and @SphinxLuvDuvWuv) have organized to give away three copies of Sphinx on Steam! Today's winner is @Shrev64#0089. Here's how to enter: [olist]

Wait for the winners to be announced. That's it! [/olist] All draws are at random, and not in control of the hosts. Now is your chance to potentially win a free copy of this classic gem! If you are a fan of Sphinx and would like to see more events like this, let us know. So far we have featured plenty of original artwork in our previous creative contests. Maybe we'll post some modding updates in the future. There are a lot of interesting things underway.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/606710/Sphinx_and_the_Cursed_Mummy/

[ 2021-02-25 09:46:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

A lot of things happened in the Sphinx community since our last announcement; the Sphinx Discord server got verified, meaning that it is now officially the place to hang out to talk about the game, and is now jointly managed by THQ Nordic and the previous community staff. Also, the Sphinx wiki got a big overhaul, jmarti856's huge beta restoration mod is chugging along after we released even more beta content last summer and retrofitted more deleted gameplay mechanics into the engine... and, you guessed it, we had another nifty contest organized by our resident duck lordquacksmith, of course helped by the rest of the moderation team. This is what they have to say. -- Calling all goblins and ghouls! Another contest is upon us, this time it's a... Design your own Monster contest! What better time to hold this event other than Spooktober? This contest required the participants to design a monster that would fit in the world of Sphinx, using any sort of visual medium to do this: drawing it, painting it, making a 3D model, using Photoshop, making a sculpture, making it out of cheddar. The lucky winner wins a currently released THQ Nordic game of their choice! -- We had some excellent entries this time around, very imaginative designs and styles and in a wide array of mediums, with the Hippo lady taking the crown. Take a look. [Nickname] super cutie/Amnit: Hippo lady (7 votes) [quote]Anubis told me to bully sphinx, so that's what I'm gonna do![/quote]
SphinxLuvDuvWuv: Seahorse (5 votes) [quote]I was making a sculpture for my entry, today I was adding the finishing touches and had just finished making his teeth, eyes and hooves (made out of polymer clay so they looked more like actual teeth) when he fell off of the table. Sadly he cannot be salvaged as he's shattered into multiple pieces.[/quote]
HeavensBullet: Krow (4 votes) [quote]Alright, here's my finished product straight from my mind, I'm pretty proud of it. So his name is Krow, and he's a woodland creature that protects the woods. He is known as nature knight, he used to be human but when he died he was mummified and reincarnated into a wood-like creature.[/quote]
Basket/braxwheeler: Ancient mummified goose (4 votes) [quote]Here's my submission. It's an ancient mummified Goose! It's used for annoying/ distracting your enemies. Very rare. Its honking was praised for its ability to wake even the deepest sleeping evils.[/quote]
BQoverlord: Golden cobra (3 votes)
Egyptian-Enthusiast: Full brute (3 votes) [quote]LuvDuv recommended I submit the joke I made in one of my more recent Sphinx Videos -- the full brute! As described by LuvDuv in the video, it's like a human centipede made of two brutes.[/quote]
If you want to stay up to date with the latest contests and community news, you can join our official Sphinx Discord server. Which one is your favorite?

For those that didn't know, the good folks at the Sphinx Discord server have been running a community-led art contest to gauge interest. The results are pretty good. Nefertiti, by veteran Sphinx artist Norvadier. Here is the speedpaint in video form.
Bye Hater, by DaxDraggon.
The Grand Battle, by SphinxLuvDuvWuv.
-- Kudos to lordquacksmith for organizing the event, and also props to the rest of the moderation staff and our resident meme expert, Ven7roX, for the art. Right now the community seems to be organizing to revamp the unofficial wiki, check it out and contribute if you find it interesting. Every little bit helps. See you next time, hopefully with more game updates.
P.S. Which one is your favorite?

While we generally don't post Steam announcements for every single patch, and we usually update the forum thread instead, we have been improving the PC version while developing the Nintendo Switch port that was released three weeks ago. The community is growing lately, mainly around the Discord server. We have pretty interesting fan art and we have been beta-testing the upcoming Steam Workshop support.
Patch by patch, the game is slowly being restored graphically using mainly the original artwork from Eurocom and Anibyte, with small tweaks. This is a respectful restoration, not a makeover.
Four of the most problematic defects have been fixed. Some of them were introduced during the PC port, others are still present in the original 2003 console release. A savegame corruption, suddenly vanishing NPCs, uninitialized memory as well as a few others that are less severe.
We are still planning to add most of the remaining features that had to be temporarily delayed due to the Nintendo Switch port: Things like projected shadows, better lighting and some shader improvements will appear in both platforms. Remappable controls will probably stay PC-only for the foreseeable future. We read your reviews and comments, and while we can't get some things done as fast as we would like, we will persist.
This last update should be equivalent to the Nintendo Switch v1.1 patch that we also released yesterday. Also, here is the complete cumulative changelog since our last announcement:

2019-02-15 (Friday)

• Remove the limit of 128 characters that caused truncation for long-ish paths. Properly NULL-terminate savegame paths.
• Fix spurious quotes in the Filelist.bin loader when given a mod path via arguments, it caused an occasional crash when ending a mod path in /" and sometimes the last path separator doubled as escape code.
• Don't enable the 50 Hz PAL mode in the PC version, as it works in EUR60 mode; this should change the rate at which some physics calculations are carried and doesn't affect framebuffer sizes.
• Properly zero-initialize some fields in the Enemy Mobility Path component that caused an ugly bug where if the leftover memory was 0xFFFFFFFF the value gets interpreted as -nan and first corrupts the rotation and that invalidates and corrupts the item matrix, the NPC visually disappears and collisions stop working so they fall to their death.
  • To find this I instrumented the mobility code at strategic points and tested things in a modified mum_temp map for Sphinx full of container-cobras and Abydos NPCs provided by @jmarti856 that improved the chances.
  • Keep in mind that denormals may have also caused some other subtle problems. This is a defect in the original code and was fixed 15 years later, should fix most of the sudden NPC despawns.
• Protect some parts of the game against a NaN contagion to mitigate some other remaining memory-initialization problems.
• Heavily improve the softlock detection during conversation mode, now it should also work after respawnable NPCs die.
• Never round toward zero in the FPU.
• Mitigate the occasional quick sound panning issues when moving the camera, as reported by many players.
• Add a better HQ Abydos arch spike texture.
• Add a good bunch of HQ textures, mainly for the remaining prominent characters: the Portal God, the archeologist, Cursed Pharaoh + Wife, Farmer + Brother, Seti, Plain Sarcophagi, Spider boss, the Geb Queen and the watcher eyes.
• Add HQ textures for the Abydos Mayor and Physician, the final boss, the flying Akarian bird boss and the fat ruler that gives Sphinx the Abydos stair key, as well as environmental textures for the Cursed Palace and the final battle.
• Add some extra HQ textures the Abydos Sewer Amulets and several particle effects.
• Update the SDL2 Windows library to 2.0.9.
• Add more Abydos Sewer and Cursed Palace HQ textures.
• Fix some UV texture clamping issues that when combined with mipmapping caused minor visual glitches in the Abydos Mayor and the watcher eyes.
• Attempt to fix a rare objective corruption that may happen at the end of every Mummy visit, where the Mummy state doesn't get correctly set due to a reallocation defect in the Onyx money-counting achievement code that caused a stale pointer on return. Also known as the 'Super King Castle' glitch, kudos to @superking1077/bellboy_64 for the helpful report.
• Change the HT_Objective_Aby_ElectricWater mod override, so that if we set it to 2 we enable the effect everywhere, 3 will disable it even in Abydos (previously was 0). Thanks to @Remidemmi. for the old save game.
• Add HQ textures for the burn boxes, levers, monkey statue and the planetarium door and a few other details.
• Add better textures for the Cursed Palace and the Uruk Castle, improve the hue of some retouched textures to make them more faithful to the original ones.
• Compress most of the textures as .DDS with BC7 block compression. Should generally reduce VRAM pressure across the board and mitigate those VRAM depletion issues.
• Simplify the resolution selector. Make it so that we can only select resolutions with the same aspect ratio as the desktop resolution, fix a defect that caused the selection to show different resolutions when going to the right.
• Fix ghost clicking of some Back button prompt labels.

2019-01-18 (Friday)

• Optimize all the new HQ textures and reduce its size on disk.
• Minor cleanups.

2019-01-17 (Thursday)

• New HQ textures for BasKet, the Sarcophagi King, most of the Mummy levels and the final battle. Better floor textures for the Lost Temple of Heliopolis.
• Fix a few mishaps.

2019-01-15 (Tuesday)

• New HQ textures for Sphinx, Horus, Imhotep, Akhenaten, Menes, Set and Nefertiti. Update some rocky, wall and FX-related textures to reduce pixelation and blocky S3TC artifacts.
• Properly move actors to their correct positions while skipping cutscenes.
• Remove the initial Tut wake up scene from the blacklist of unskippable cutscenes now that it works properly. With this implemented practically all the important cutscenes should be optional by just pressing the Book of Sphinx/Inventory button.
• Fix a regression in floating point rounding mode that caused collision issues, mainly Sphinx receiving unwarranted damage when stepping over the lowered spiked gates in the Uruk intro and also spurring the Abydos piranhas to swim in the air. Round to nearest instead of chopping decimals toward zero.
• Add an entity flag (0x8000, previously reserved but wrongly tagged as 'Ignore Auto Collision Macro' in EuroLand) to conditionally re-enable LODs for new 3D models from modders, if requested. That way mods can still optimize bigger levels while still disabling LODs for the original (now-low-poly) meshes.
• Update the game controller mapping database. Add support for USB GameCube adapter mapping, too. Thanks to @Remidemmi.
• More vertex collision struct refactoring that should improve the undefined behavior situation.
• Minor cleanups.

2019-01-10 (Thursday)

• Refactor the vertex collision structs to plain old data and avoid undefined behavior. This should hopefully mitigate the occasional NPC despawning/clipping-through-floor and improve portability in general. Please retest and report your findings.
• Minor cleanups.

2019-01-09 (Wednesday)

• New batch of HQ texture updates sourced from original artwork; covering flares, most of the Abydos Monster Shop, a few parts of the Mummy Planetarium, Luxor Pyramid and Palace, a few Wall sections and some other places, metallic fences, the sun, shoot targets, a few statues, platforms, walls and floors. Add a better version of the dirt and tiling terrain textures.
• Minor cleanups.

2019-01-04 (Friday)

• Fix possible framerate judder/frame skip issues by ensuring that we only use monitor resolutions and frame-rates compatible with the fixed in-game display/update rate.
  • Should fix issues where the monitor exposes 59 Hz or 70/75 Hz refresh rates and we pick that by mistake.
  • Now it should only use 60 Hz, 120 Hz (or 180 Hz+) physical swap rates. To ensure it can be properly v-sync'ed.
• Implement soft distance fade-ins and outs for lamps, the tilting boat platforms in the small Abydos canal, and few other triggers. Now they don't appear suddenly anymore.
• Completely fix the inside-out or pure black graphics issue caused by overlays or third-party hooking programs. Thanks to @Anderson and @Nish the Fish for testing.
• Make the deadly electric water configurable for mods via objective so that it can be enabled or disabled globally. Previously it was hardcoded to work only on HT_File_Map_ab_cana.
  • Now HT_Objective_Aby_ElectricWater can be set like this: if the objective is 2 enable the effect everywhere, 0 will disable it even in Abydos. 1 is the default behavior.
  • Setting this objective dynamically or when entering/unloading specific maps will lead to advanced mechanics with a lot of flexibility. Only works for Sphinx.
  • There's an exception; the deadly water has always been blacklisted/disabled in spitting toad mode.
• Add support for beta Sphinx attacks in mods through HT_GameScript_Control_SlamEffectType, HT_GameScript_Control_WaveAttack to dynamically control the "Slam Effect" and "Wave Attack" options that appear in the debug Watcher under Cheats.
  • They change the default ground slam behavior and can be useful for additional mechanics. e.g: use them like SETITEMFLAG HT_GameScript_Control_SlamEffectType 1/0 and GETITEMFLAG HT_GameScript_Control_WaveAttack and vice versa.
• Enable printing to stdout with the DEBUGS gamescript operation in the PC builds.
  • On Windows you will need a Microsoft program called DebugView to read the game's output, on Linux and macOS just launch it from terminal.
• Fix some incorrect use of the OpenGL framebuffer discard functions.
• Add further build-time optimizations.

2018-09-05 (Thursday)

• New Luxor Palace and Heliopolis Exterior textures.
• Avoid rare softlocks in the middle of a conversation if the NPC/monster dies for any reason. Go back to normal game mode and unfreeze the controls.
• Proper mod folder support, by letting third-parties/modders provide their own BuildData/Filelist.bin while using the original one as fallback.
  • When possible the new resources will override the original ones through a Sphinx.ini configuration option or the -mod command-line argument; in that order. Example mod folder path via configuration key: [BootState] PCMod=H:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\workshop\content\606710\1450113507
  • Use a custom savegame namespace/folder for each mod. Now mods and the main game won't share the same set of save slots. Hopefully each mod will have its own suffixed version.
  • While in -dev mode, fill the list of levels by looking for maps in multiple Filelists and not just the first one, and merging the results. This makes it possible to select all the available levels from the right-click menu list.
• New color-tinted Xbox button glyphs.
• Workaround to prevent the lack of depth-testing when RivaTuner RTSS and other badly-programmed/misbehaving overlays disable it by mistake.
• Add a Sphinx.ini configuration option to disable tutorial prompts and tips: [Control] TutorialPrompts=0
• Fix the rare cutout glitches in translucent surfaces when soft particles are enabled.
• Limit the FOV to 20-110 degrees.
• Invert the 3rd person camera in both axes by default. Shouldn't affect existing configurations.
• Reduce the spawn radius distance of the Bird guarding the Abydos Museum entrance to 460 from 700 meters (it didn't let you enter the Museum after getting the Stairs key unless it despawned).
• Remove the buggy beta levels bundled with the game (not needed anymore when there's a mod for it and the Authoring Tools).
• Add a proper message box error when we are loading an .EDB file and run out of memory, also add another one when the .EDB path can't be found/opened.
• Add proper glBufferStorage synchronization, fixing the occasional graphics glitches that made characters look like they were ripped apart.

Yesterday we added the much requested mouse-controlled blowpipe controls, this is the first step towards having full-featured mouse and keyboard mapping support in EngineX.
Now that most of the groundwork is in place it should not take long. We still need to add extra sub-menus and configurable options; ensuring that everything runs as expected will probably take most of the remaining work. In other news, we also added several high-quality textures for the Abydos Museum and brought back some original (really high resolution) character textures for Sphinx and the mummy that will be tweaked in future updates to better match their final look. We also improved the draw distance for various Abydos NPCs like the ones in the main plaza, as requested.
Today's update also brought many other fixes and improvements; we brought back the iconic thunder sound that sounds when you first enter the main menu, we made the back/cancel labels clickable, fixed a bunch of long-standing collision issues, skipping cutscenes now works even if the dialog is in wait state, brought back or implemented some beta/modding features needed by the beta map restoration project, and little tweaks everywhere.
Also, here is the complete cumulative changelog since our last announcement:

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.

During the past few months we have been recovering and tweaking more than ~130 environmental textures from original sources, and now we are transplanting them back into the game 15 years later. Many scenes and props now look crisp and more detailed than their sixth-generation, compressed counterparts.
The Eurocom and Anibyte artists originally painted their images at bigger sizes, but due to serious console and memory limitations at the time they had to be downsized and compressed to Heliopolis and back. These upgrades mostly cover common gameplay elements; like buttons, statues and levers and, more specifically, Heliopolis Exterior, Anubis Wall, Abydos Canals and the Uruk Intro. We will probably keep adding more original assets in zones that still need some care, like the Lost Temple, some Mummy dungeons and Luxor.
Modern computers are much more capable than a PlayStation® 2 or GameCube™. Enjoy playing Sphinx as it was originally meant to be seen, it holds up pretty well.

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

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.

After working on it for three long months and beta-testing it in the Sphinx Discord servers for a few weeks, @jmarti856 has announced the first public mod for the PC version of Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy.
He is now trying to bring back to life the lost levels of Sakkara as best as he can, given that many cutscenes and mechanics are missing or unfinished. https://steamcommunity.com/app/606710/discussions/1/1696045708662788270/ There are still many cozy secrets tucked away in the files that we released with the Authoring Tools DLC. As more modders start learning the EngineX tools and making their own mods we will feature them in announcements like this. Have fun!

Hello, We just shipped the Authoring tools that were also used crafting the game. It also includes source assets. You can find it here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/750430/Sphinx_and_the_Cursed_Mummy_Authoring_Tools/ Please be aware that you need to tell Steam to download it. We prepared a guide here on how to set it up and first steps with it: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1306820082 Enjoy!

Hello, We just shipped the Authoring tools that were also used crafting the game. It also includes source assets. You can find it here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/750430/Sphinx_and_the_Cursed_Mummy_Authoring_Tools/ Please be aware that you need to tell Steam to download it. We prepared a guide here on how to set it up and first steps with it: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1306820082 Enjoy!

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)

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 mostif not allof 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)

We have just pushed a tentative update that should make things easier on the eyes by improving the glyph sizes for things like the dialog-heavy cutscenes, inventory and HUD. Let us know what you think and provide screenshots in the likely case you find something wonky or misaligned. If feedback is positive we will do the same thing for the other languages, if not we can roll it back. Take a look:

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

2017-11-22 (Wednesday)

We have just pushed a tentative update that should make things easier on the eyes by improving the glyph sizes for things like the dialog-heavy cutscenes, inventory and HUD. Let us know what you think and provide screenshots in the likely case you find something wonky or misaligned. If feedback is positive we will do the same thing for the other languages, if not we can roll it back. Take a look:

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

2017-11-22 (Wednesday)

As many of you already know, we have been busy since launch day updating the game with several stability fixes and gameplay improvements as they were reported by the community. Now that the game is in much better shape we will start implementing some of the most commonly requested things: scalable text during cutscenes and remappable keyboard controls. We know that some of you don't read the discussions section, so here is the cumulative changelog to date:

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%SphinxSphinx.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)

As many of you already know, we have been busy since launch day updating the game with several stability fixes and gameplay improvements as they were reported by the community. Now that the game is in much better shape we will start implementing some of the most commonly requested things: scalable text during cutscenes and remappable keyboard controls. We know that some of you don't read the discussions section, so here is the cumulative changelog to date:

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)