Update #3

OVERVIEW

🎨 Graphics: less shadow, same amount of templars, and fixed a rare cropping bug 🔤 Text: another swing at typos ⚙️ UI: no more double-cursor, and minor SFX adjustments

Without further ado; Let's take another look at the manuscript...

GRAPHICS

👤 Performance! At the Mausoleum In a previous update we briefly touched on how shadows in Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged work, and part of that is exposing a "softness" parameter to control blur. Blurring in itself can be quite an expensive operation, and softer results require the engine to redraw, and re-blur elements over and over again. We noticed some performance issues in the mausoleum on lower end devices, which turned out to be every shadow being redrawn 35 times - a beautiful number the art team landed on! We probably should have told them that in total it should never exceed 10 pongs...

The good news is that most PCs would have probably blasted through that. But we care a lot about supporting lower end devices and non-gaming laptops, as well as handhelds! So if you noticed frame rate issues, or a choppy curser, please let us know if this made a difference!

👻 Floating Maguire Some of you reported that the shadow beneath Maguire's feet made him look like he was floating. Well, Halloween is over, so the Pub is now officially less haunted.

🎞️ Cropping gone wrong for dedicated adventurers This one is super obscure, but it relates to a feature Andy is quite proud of! When Broken Sword first released in 1995 its aspect ratio was 16:10 (4:3 minus the 40 pixel borders top and bottom reserved for the menus = 16:10). In Reforged we support both the original aspect ratio by using black bars, or 16:9 for a contemporary fullscreen experience.

16:9 is a very subtle crop, only a 10% reduction in height. Usually that means 5% from the top, and 5% from the bottom, but there are screens in which the top section is a lot less important than the bottom section. That's why we decided to go through each screen and tailor those offsets manually.

Onto the bug. If you played through the entire game, and stayed around after the credits you will have noticed

the post credits bonus scenes

!

The last bonus scene is set in Hotel Ubu

where the custom crop had been set to focus on the bottom section of the screen. If you went from there, to immediately re-playing the game, the intro would adopt that specific crop setting! We now made sure that the intro always starts as intended. We're kind of curious how many of you noticed...

TEXT

✍️ Typos and Errors Another swing at the text correction in the French controls help menu. Please let it be correct this time! "If not, I give up" - Andynonymous Programmer

📜 Updated Credits Credits were missing the German voice for George Stobbart! All fixed now :)

UI

🔊 Menu sound effects In most cases you can open the menu by pressing ESC or by using your mouse, but in some moments we might prohibit that from happening for gameplay reasons, like on the Map screen, where the UI correctly prevents you from opening it. However if you tried to open the menu on those screens you could still trigger the sound effect associated to that action. It now makes that noise less. In fact hopefully only when it should...

🖱️ Double Cursor on