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.