Hi there, everyone!
Time for another stable, cumulative update covering the latest fixes and improvements since our last 2024-04-21 change notes. This is what many of you have been already enjoying if opted into the latest beta or sixty-four-bits branches. Via right-click on your Steam Library entry, then Properties > Betas.
There is a lot to unpack here, the "short" version is that projected soft shadows and character lighting have been overhauled and refined following community feedback; they don't match exactly the original PS2-style shading, and follows the reference 3ds Max render look that Eurocom targeted internally, but I think it is a good improvement, and even many purists in the community seem to like it. (If you don't agree with this or have any other feedback please let me know on Discord or open a forum thread)
There have been many edits to the underlying levels themselves, fixing visual and logic issues, making them look and feel better. Got rid of a handful of softlocks and other annoying behavior.
There have been even more new save statues added at strategic points. Mainly in the middle points of Wall Section II and Heliopolis Dungeon, just before big battles or places where new players tend to get game-over screens and lose a ton of progress. Reducing frustration without backtracking.
Camera code has been revamped, it should no longer intentionally stop when colliding against walls as you manually move it, and works a bit more like a modern camera, getting closer to the player on obstacles without getting stuck, letting you do a full 360º spin.
Many in-game characters now use the actual, original-quality textures, something that previously only existed for promotional or press assets. Some of them have been recovered thanks to an in-deep investigation by community members like @lordquacksmith, who managed to track down original people in charge of this. Thank you!
Finally, there is a revamped game-over checkpoint system that doesn't punish the player by just reloading the last save on death, now it brings you back to the entrance of the last level.
All in all, this addresses decades of player, developer and magazine reviewer feedback and critique, even from back in the day. Attempting to fix its shortcomings in subtle ways without changing what makes Sphinx great! Let me know what you think!
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Here is the complete changelog:
Main game
Fix some insidious bug that sometimes ended up corrupting the player position.
Fix a bug that made Sphinx's Shield of Osiris animation not move around when jiggling the left stick.
Add a way to fade out shadows when they reach too far away from their respective casters.
Fiddle with the style of the 3-point lighting system to go back to a more faithful style.
Clean up some unused textures.
Improve asynchronous file loading, fix some potential threading crashes.
Try to simplify and optimize the CPU skinning code to make it run faster; improve the loop that does the vertex bone influence blending to have less conditions and indirect memory accesses, try to help the auto-vectorizer and for loop unroller.
Try to improve frame pacing and not polling for inputs as much.
Add a new Steam capsule/banner with the red rock background.
Stop the random head spinning in the air while jump-diving from high places.
Add the initial version of detail mapping texturing for objects. This makes level objects look more detailed when up close.
Apply the stochastic terrain shader to the sandy Heliopolis beach and underwater sand textures to reduce the repetitive texture tiling effect.
Make the game understand Unicode paths on Windows while saving and loading to the memory card. Should fix saving files when the Windows account has non-English characters.
Convince Ketta and Shetta to avoid 360-degree neck turns during voodoo dance. Ketta does this in the Dark Area beta level, Shetta in her outpost tent.
Mark some textures as 1-bit alpha tested in the Monster Shop level to avoid flickering alpha-blending sorting artifacts.
Mark the Abydos Canal banners as 1-bit alpha-tested to avoid alpha-blending sorting issues.
Fix the softlock in the Abydos monster shop trader/shop keeper dialog when running from the left side. Reported by @Sat and the speedrunning community.
Avoid some possible AMD Windows driver post-shader compilation crashes.
Improve the look of and do a bit of extra R&D progress on the three-point character lighting.
Add back my fade-out-lightstreaks-at-glancing-angles effect, used for torches and glow effects.
Make the projected shadow harsher for the environment and softer for character self-shadows.
Make the detail mapping cover more distance before fading out.
Fix weird inverted white shadows in the code that avoids shadowing backfaces.
Clean up and optimize the shader files.
Fix the TR_SmallLight trigger outputting pure black in the RGBA multiplier fields, now the fireflies' lights in places like the Heliopolis Wall Room 1 map work again.
Fix random/weird shading in the portal impostors depending on the garbage values of the three-point lighting uniforms.
Add a linear interpolation to the projected shadow camera position and softly blend as the players enters a different submap without sudden shadow orientation changes.
Add a second save spot in the middle of the Wall Section II level, just before the number-one quit spot in the jumping platforms with interleaved flames section. Expand the portal Z-distance for both entrances. No more 2D stand-ins or black planes.
Add a second save monkey statue/spot in the middle of the Heliopolis Dungeon level, in the third column connected by two movable bridges that leads to the final battle, avoids backtracking and hopefully nudges players into saving as soon as after completing one of the halves.
Fix the wobbly floor texture in the Heliopolis Dungeon exit door of the skeletons room and the distorted UV map of the right side green worm background walls.
Fix the bug with the left green worm in the Heliopolis Dungeon not appearing after reloading a save, this happened if the player had pulled the handle but hadn't killed the green worm before saving.
More improvements for Heliopolis Dungeon: fixed UV geometry issues (next to right worm wall, skeleton fight exit floor next to the door is wobbly, big stone block with the sides lined up and quadrupled geometry for better control, stone eye next to it also lined up, hieroglyph square in exit wall) improved portal distance. More fixes.
More improvements for the Uruk intro: fixed UV geometry issues (triangle in the rock terrace at the very beginning, broken eagle seal in the castle wall, broken stone lip section in the light elevator), enlarge the spawn distance of gameplay objects, portals, trees and torches.
Seems like the count/timer in the pairs minigame appears underneath my extended item rotator background. Very hard to see. Move it to the right.
Reduce the 3D monster portrait lighting positions, color and strength in the Book of Sphinx to make them look less overblown/white.
Let people disable the rich presence integration for Discord/Steam via INI config file; having it enabled may cause weird performance/frame pacing issues, some players may just want game-time privacy. \[Debug] RichPresence=0. Requested by @nas.
Update the German description of the Harvest moon achievement, it was using the word for jewel/gem.
Make shadows appear in the Luxor palace marble floor, which usually are drawn in the translucent pass.
Update the French description of some achievements to match the in-game translation.
Get rid of the UV coordinate problems in the dreamy wall representation that appears in the fortune teller cutscene. It was glitchy. Add the missing chunks in the right sky mesh, the limits appeared in widescreen. Make the wall stone texture higher definition so that the HD texture replacement kicks in. Add a radial blur and soften the lost temple and Wall Section II screen grab overlays to avoid pixelation and compensate their resolution.
Optimize the shadowmap sampling shader, by trying to avoid wasteful shadow sampling work in the rest of the projected texture box, increase the quality of character shadows.
Disable multisampling antialiasing when drawing particles and swooshes, probably helps with fillrate a bit by removing some extra (the edges aren't visible) pixel processing while blending.
Fix the item rotator menu text lines overflowing the background/not being clipped when moving the list up and down, like in the Cursed Palace stone picker.
Add overrides for the low-res planetarium floor on/off symbol textures and the pixelated golden arc.
Fix the flashing blue eyes of the movable Hands of Amun statues in the Wall Entrance 3 when soft particles are enabled and looking head-on.
Mark the Cursed Palace dark sand as terrain to break away tiling (used in walls and boss fight), mark other sands and the Impulse Planetarium marble floor as terrain to avoid the ugly underwater patterns in the planetarium puzzles from above.
Fix a big, longstanding collision hole/gap in some of the various lava entrances in the Uruk Canyon, the visual and collision meshes were misaligned, mainly in the fighting and the burnable fence entrances, one would not even need to jump, just walk slowly straddling the edge. Reported by @lordquacksmith.
Fix UV unwrapping issues in the Uruk Canyon burnable fence entrance, the rock with the stretched texture. Fixed the second layer of the main hub ground in the middle part as you start in the level showing lines. Expanded the view range of the lamps and dart targets, the tree monster, the Ka Ankh bases in the puzzle side and expanded the portal 2D impostor distances all around, the most visible ones were the three hub entrances and the sunflower with the cave entrance showing a pure black card. Improve the low resolution animated lava textures.
(Rest for a bit, weary changelog traveler, and look at the new shadow effects)
Make it so that we allow multiple concurrent game instances on Windows when -dev mode is enabled.
Add a ton of new HD texture overrides for characters and props in the Abydos Council chambers.
Fix the blocky vertex coloring glitches in the Abydos Council Chamber skyboxes where the sunflare appeared with vertical fringes due to bad ngon splitting by the Euroland PC EDB exporter; triangulate them manually. Improve the Z-Order of some godrays to avoid flickering depending on the viewpoint.
Start optimizing some of the matrix/vector math functions with SIMD intrinsics, to do more operations in parallel/faster.
Add SSE2 SIMD intrinsics to compute many of the very common vector and matrix math operations in parallel on x86/x64 computers and consoles.
Improve the glichy lava (UV map) circling the Eye of Ra castle pit of the last playable Mummy puzzle. 21 years later.
Reorganize the action mapping keys.
Fix the softlock that happens when Sphinx tries to do a high dive animation and the water is too shallow or there's some obstacle in the middle. Now he does a roll when he lands, with some damage/death. Instead of doing a handstand forever and forcing a save reload.
Fix the glitchy Sphinx head when doing a surface dive from swimming mode and there is some headtracking target in place, so Sphinx is looking there from the surface, causing the neck contortions worsened by the unexpected upside down animation and rotations.
Subtly fade out the water edge in the water shader.
Verify that the OpenAL extension function pointers don't contain garbage, don't assume that the OpenAL extension being active makes them correct / not NULL (e.g. the box86 translator).
Try to coerce mainly the MSVC compiler into generating good vectorized XMM code into registers through the __vectorcall calling convention.
Improve the hack for correctly drawing badly exported or incomplete water spray mesh particles; found a better heuristic of where to find the missing discontinuities/hard cuts between triangle strips and drawing them separately by exploiting the fact that most of these are flat rectangles and all the normals for the same mesh look the same.
Add some default values for previously undefined uniforms used in the translucent shader when drawing 3D and 2D debug lines. Should fix the color blinking and fade ins out as the camera moves.
Fix the single strip limitations for particle instance entities like water jets/spray particle meshes that were always bridged together and caused weird or glitchy polygons. Generate dummy/"degenerate" triangles to emulate multiple triangle strips in a single triangle strip.
Fade out translucent elements against solid geometry and add a Fresnel-style fade out at glancing angles, to hide the flat crossing planes as most effects get thinner.
Optimize sprite and text rendering. Drawing most paragraphs in one single drawcall; faster.
Fix the gap between the door and wall in Tut's bedroom. This has bothered me for a while.
Fix the misaligned parts of the Mummy Sewer connector and hub submaps, there was a visible seam next to the one-way gate to the elevator room from the walkway into the hub. Correct the stretched UVs in the interior edges of gargoyle windows in the water reservoir area.
Add HD textures for the low-res parts of Luxor Palace (like Tut's bed that appears in the intro) and Mummy Sewer.
Fix the holes in the castle lava bridge of the Uruk intro arc top walls, lower the pillars next to the elevator hole so that they aren't floating over the slanted ground anymore, fix an eagle wall texture in the ceiling, fix some broken UVs. Fix the geometry hole in the rock overlapping the stone door after the Horus climb.
Fix the rock UVs and missing second layer in the rock wall corner after the Horus climb of the Uruk intro. This has been bothering me for years.
Fix the bad visibility of sublevel pieces in the lava section after the Horus climb of the Uruk intro.
Fix a couple of bad UV'ing in the cave wall next to the torch where we first go through a ledge in the Uruk intro, there were seams. Tiled a third layer on top to hide them, added some hard rock to break away the tiling.
Fix two holes/missing chunks of wall in the Heliopolis Wall Section II, over the door to the last 1/3 section. Fix a seam in the behind part of the last spike crusher stone building. Matching the colors and reconstructing the geometry. Reported by @SphinxLuvDuvWuv.
Fix the high dive animation not having a fell-through-the-map check. Before this, falling into the void in the dive animation would softlock the game by going down forever; respawn him after falling almost 1 kilometer instead of the safety 100 meters we'd use normally, I think that is safe enough to avoid false positives, while still allowing cool speedrun/mod stuff.
Make the amount of damage that Sphinx receives user-configurable for extra fun. Load it from the Sphinx.ini configuration file under the \[Gameplay] DamageMult=2.5 section and key.
Add HD textures for the Abydos Sewer map; covering the eagle head decoration and low-res water. Make the dirt texture use stochastic tiling, to make it look less regular.
Fix star particles appearing instead of smoke in the idle electric Mummy rotating trap machines.
Implement generic Blowpipe gyro-aim support on PC mirroring what was done for Nintendo Switch. Works on DualShock 4 and other similar pads when holding the trigger buttons.
Change the normal tutorial text when obtaining the blowpipe to add a gyro-aim usage instructions.
Fix the occasional brown tinting of the button prompts in the Horus tutorial after opening the Book of sphinx. This is generally only used in the narrated Horus tutorial with the white left-aligned dialog text. Most tutorials use the impersonal/narrator style with the faint green centered text and those always tint the prompts green.
Fix some rare NULL pointer dereference in the rope trigger physics that could crash the game.
Rework the Item update debug window, pad out the XZ coordinate columns to make them more visible, make the headers line up.
Fix the pit doors disappearing in the Mummy Castle map when going back to the jail while closed, and then going up the pit again, allowing players to skip half of the game. Reported by @monopoli and the speedrunning community.
Some sounds like SFX_AMB_WIND_STORM looped incorrectly and jumped around jarringly. Like the looping wind in the left part of the Heliopolis wife rescue. Some multi-sampled sounds are played back in an overlapped fashion, and I was deleting them mid playback, with terrible auditory consequences. Diagnosed with the help of @jmarti856.
Fix start up crashes on the AMD OpenGL driver which is currently being installed by Windows Update by default (31.0.12027.9001 / 22.20) by using signed shader uniforms instead of unsigned. Otherwise we get a NULL pointer dereference and crash to desktop after the copyright screen.
Make the Mummy ability bar 20% bigger; the color of the electric one in particular (dark blue on the dark brown background of the bar) makes it a bit hard to see the remaining time sometimes. Suggested by @AshhawkBurning.
Fix some level geometry defects in the Heliopolis exterior.
(1) Hole in the right side of the ground next to the eagle gate that goes from the Great Obelisk to the Squirt pen,
(2) Patched together some third layer texturing for the nearby rocky geometry to be less distracting, fix some UVs.
(3) Move the door to the desert ground in the back side of the gate to match and follow closely the door shape, and
(4) Properly triangulate manually the small sandy wall next to the Wall Entrance III, it was a badly triangulated quad.
Fix the misaligned Luxor Pyramid cage elevator puzzle pillar base so that it matches the hole, reported by @SphinxLuvDuvWuv.
Cap off the holes in the back of the geometry originally meant to sit flush against the wall.
Correctly triangulate the buggy ground quads in the second level of the main room, they no longer get auto-triangulated the wrong way around, showing a wedge-shaped vertex color smudge right in the landing edge. I remember looking at this when playing the original version many years ago, feels good to fix it at last. :)
Attempt to get rid of the snap back issue: our camera increasingly pointing sideways in the direction Sphinx is moving to and suddenly re-centering when he stops.
So, very slowly, recenter the camera when reducing the player speed.
Implement the first version of the camera code that doesn't get stuck on walls when the player moves the joystick, we choose to elevate the camera to look down on the player during extreme closeups.
Complete the last steps in bringing the updated Korean translation to fruition (this took more than a day of work); add a custom HD Hangul font for the front-end and memory card dialog, as the existing one was missing glyphs in the video settings menu and it was pretty low-res in general.
Fix the top wooden decorative bar in the Korean pause dialog version being too low and showing the parchment/papyrus cutout in the top edge. This has always been broken.
Improve the French translation, use "Charger Partie" instead of just "Charger", so that it lines up with the existing "Nouvelle Partie" option, just like in the other languages.
Add a revamped game-over checkpoint system that doesn't punish the player by just reloading the last save on death, and instead brings you back to the entrance of the last entered level.
Fix the broken fade-in transitions between some levels after teleport, like from South Beach to Sun Shrine interior, or Heliopolis Point to Palace area.
Change the min/max field-of-view limits from 20/110 to 14/114 degrees, to make it possible for players to go back to the defaults of 64 degrees, as the setting can only be changed in increments of 10 units.
Add an improved scan mode that lets you move faster and no-clip in both the vertical and horizontal directions by holding a button:
This also works in the smooth cam mode, which mirrors a steadicam-style handling with very soft movement to record footage.
Pressing the shift keys, L1/LB or Circle/B on the gamepad will make vertical movement faster.
Pressing the shift keys, R1/RB or Circle/B on the gamepad will make horizontal movement faster.
Toggle player visibility by pressing the Square/X button, or Tab on keyboard.
Use the NTSC value for the maximum fall speed instead of the PAL one, as we set the framerate to 60 Hz by default. PAL games are made to run at 50 Hz.
Prevent NaN propagation across the physics, gravity, friction and weight code by checking if we are being given valid floating point values.
Hopefully this will avoid the worse consequences of some complex bugs and edge cases causing despawns and other craziness.
Clamp the bottom and top elevation while in smooth cam submode (of scan mode) to avoid glitching out when reaching both extremes.
Fix a breakable wall bypass in the Uruk Temple; the player could break the wall via sword/slam jump instead of a beetle/burble explosion. Bug kindly reported by @lordquacksmith.
Avoid intentionally crashing the game on any important audio error.
Update/enlarge the view range/spawn radii in _hl_ws1 (Heliopolis Wall Section I).
Update/enlarge the view range/spawn radii in _hl_ws2 (Heliopolis Wall Section II).
Update/enlarge the view range/spawn radii in _lu_pala (Luxor Palace, Tut level).
Update/enlarge the view range/spawn radii in _ab_cncl (Abydos Council Chambers, mainly interior, exterior stuff like the swimming pool was already extended a while ago).
Update/enlarge the view range/spawn radii in _mu_htrn (Mummy Hang Train). Fix the intro door visibly despawning when exiting the final treasure room.
Add HD texture overrides improving the _mu_htrn (Mummy Hang Train) environmental textures, adding textures for the Abydos juggler and lady, Sorkon/Ishka, Pairs and Simon minigames. Urukite chieftain and more.
Add some improved textures from the DVD that @lordquacksmith found via some old CGI TV ad artist contacts. The data was probably coming from Eurocom through THQ Inc, which was the one doing the promo work. Some of these monsters, like QU10/12/13, or HU03 and HU15 are original quality, whereas others aren't stamp-sized PI01 (piranha dark) anymore, others like QU02 (armadillo) aren't using 8-bit/256 color indexing anymore. QU04 and others get a nice bump.
Let modders change/customize the sinking particle effect for the surface type (e.g. while sinking in acid use a green glow instead of fire) via the Surfaces XLS spreadsheet, which has a currently-unused "Particle System" column (in the base game set to HT_Particle_HASHCODE_BASE) and fallback to the hardcoded HT_Script_FireDamageFX otherwise. Note: kindly suggested by @jmarti856 to make the toxic Sakkara levels in his mod look better :)
Edit the water shader to keep the ocean water dark-ish while not affecting gameplay stuff like the mu_roto (Mummy RotoHub) pink portal or the mu_htrn (Mummy Hang Train) second level entrance with the push button being covered less apparent.
Mark the HD texture overrides for the surrounding Uruk castle terrain, also visible in the main menu scene background, and the one used on top of the Heliopolis cursed palace and entrance, as terrain to hide tiling.
Tastefully fade out the projected shadow in world-coordinates as this shadowed pixel gets farther away from the caster position/character that blocked the sun.
Add HD versions of the Urukite Captain textures found in the production asset disc.
Implement HT_GameScript_Macro_UnPossess, so that the player can be de-possessed in Sakkara when going out of bounds, via gamescripting in barriers and collisions.
Fix a crash on badly-exported maps, where an enemy trigger referenced a non-existing hashcode. When exported and ran the enemy would try to follow a node in a path that does not exist and go kaboom. Add a handy debug print.
Fix the smooth scan rotation being buggy and unwieldy when moving and turning at the same time. Make sure that smooth scan doesn't mean the shadows appear only very close to the camera when recording stadicam-ish footage.
Dedicated to @lordquacksmith, who is trying to take some decent video footage.
The analog right trigger (R2/RT) now also modulates the speed range instead of going full throttle (as seen above). we get way more steadicam control for smooth-scan video capture.
So now we have two different ways of doing the same thing: (R1) keeps going full-speed in the horizontal plane, (L1) keeps going full-speed in the vertical plane. And now just holding (R2) to various degrees affects the speed incrementally for both at the same time.
Fix some items like coconuts appearing as ability items instead of quest items on 64-bit. Reported by @jmarti856.
The second level of the gauntlet had respawnable statues, so you could get a 5/4 or even a 7/4 score and get stuck. So fix the respawning breakable statues in the second and third parts of the walls minigame; mark every statue as see from afar and as don't suspend.
Change the gamescript in each distance trigger that opens the door to >= 4 instead of = 4, so that even when/if the statue glitches and the player has more than the required it can finish successfully; it's just fair.
Fix the misaligned archway in the inner door wall of the easiest level, it walls slightly off center and it had a visible seam. Found by @NostalgiaN8 and @pej.
Remove the last few hacks that made particle meshes not show correctly, fix it correctly after a ton of trial and error by converting the final rotation into a quaternion and relaying that to the renderer instead of Euler angles.
Finally fixes the water jet particles in every level without any level-aware hacks.
Reduce staging allocations in the OpenGL index buffer code, copy data strides directly into the graphics card. Make it optimal.
Make the 32 and 64-bit Windows .exe compatible with Windows Vista by changing a few small things, compatibility issues reported by @nas.
Enable the flush-to-zero and denormals-are-zero floating-point mode every frame in case other libraries change it or do weird things after startup.
Make the 32-bit Windows variant run and completely work under Windows XP, as long as OpenGL 3.0+ is supported. Yes, really. This is only on a best-effort basis, not officially supported.
Disable the legacy x87 FPU usage on Linux and macOS, only emit SSE and SSE2 instructions.
Refresh the save data folder location/path again when attempting to load or save in their respective menus, in the unlikely (but still possible) case that the path has changed. This can happen on Windows if the profile relocates and the player wouldn't be able to save otherwise, receiving a memory card error message.
Tweak some gameplay numbers, so that Sphinx no longer drops rocks and statues when you press throw:
They made it so that you wouldn't break your rocks by mistake if you pressed the wrong button if you are in front of a wall, but I think it worked from too far away.
Now you also need to be much closer to an NPC/tree compared to a part of the map for that to kick in.
Fix the nauseating snap-back camera effect caused by the code anticipating the player position.
Now it will only do that when the player is moving sideways, and not towards/away from the camera.
Reduce the final movement blending to get rid of the final camera bounce.
With this and all the previous tweaks and improvements I think I'm happy with how the camera works now.
Soften a bit the stuttery camera movement when controlled via mouse.
Mitigate potential exploits dropped at runtime on Windows to prevent mod exploits, try to protect the user without breaking the Steam integration and other overlays, which unfortunately force us to weaken security.
Fix some English grammar issues a few Abydos dialog screens, as well as some double-space problems for the Monster Inspector found by @lordquacksmith.
Add a small leeway factor in the help window text formatter maximum width line so that small glyphs like periods or commas don't overflow into the next line.
Make Steam achievements work in -mod mode, people seem to want to do this, and I can't think of any reason to forbid it. We still forbid achievements while in -dev mode.
Enlarge the visibility radii of the torch distances in the Mummy Treasure Chamber. Suggested by @lordquacksmith.
Add environmental HD texture overrides for the Mummy Treasure Chamber. It looks much better now, this level was super low-res.
Move the V-Sync framerate re-lock code in the loading screen later on, right when it finishes and the background is going to disappear. Hopefully this means that the game ends up loading faster without waits.
Add HD texture overrides for Wall Section III and the Simon-says platform, update the torch/fence/button/glyph pedestal/Ka Ankh distances so that they can be seen from far away.
Fix some holes in the fires on top of the stairs with the spike puzzle.
Fix buggy UV unwrapping in the Simon-says mesh.
Add even more HD texture overrides for Luxor Pyramid and the trader NPC for Abydos shop and Heliopolis Point.
Hi-res skeletons/elevators/ladder/pullbull/simon says breakable cat door/glass window in ceremony room/big-mass amulet in the Luxor pyramid.
Fix broken UVs in the Luxor Pyramid pull switch frame bull head. Mark one of the initial breakable vases next to portal god as intelligent so that it also gives health instead of only Gold Scarabs.
Add even more HD texture overrides for the Abydos shop ceiling, the Squirt Herder skin and the three Urukites that the Mummy encounters in the castle in chapters 5 and 6.
Add even more HD texture overrides for Wall Section I, missing HD walls, Anubis statue, torch, blowpipe target bases, and wooden walkway wooden support structure.
Fix the accelerated playback when loading a save slot via -slot 0/1/2 command-line argument.
Add original-quality HD textures for the Knives Cat, Shetta and the Manta Ray. Found by @lordquacksmith on the production assets DVD for the Blur Studio CG ad.
Update the boot up screen copyright year to 2026. About time, I think.
Add a small mention and nod to long-time community members, and the community at large, at the end of the credits.
Change the current multisample antialiasing settings if the driver-forced value returned something else, I believe that the NVIDIA Control Panel's DSR or Antialiasing enforced-options may cause black screens if we get something different from what we asked for.
Soundtrack DLC
Re-encode the following Official Soundtrack DLC tracks as fake stereo instead of mono to avoid problems with certain software (like XLD) that struggles with mixed mono/stereo albums:
(56) Bedouin Outpost, (57) Heliopolis Point, and (58) Sun Shrine Island. Reported by @nas.
Authoring Tools DLC
Plenty of modding improvements. For the full list of modding changes see the official thread here.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Enjoy the game!
