Update #5

OVERVIEW

🎧 Reprocessed Audio: English, French and Spanish speech 🖥️ Frame Pacing: for a smoother experience on various monitors 🍎 MacOS: Xbox controller support 🎮 Gamepads: triggers now adjust cursor speed

Let’s get to the bit you’re probably most curious about…

🎧 REPROCESSED AUDIO

We went back to the original low quality source recordings, and reprocessed tens of thousands of speech lines, using a mixture of new methods and settings best suited to language and character performance.

😱 10 thousand? Yes, per language! Inspired by your passionate feedback, and with careful guidance from native speakers, we manually reviewed each character and their different recording sessions and tried to improve quality and achieve a consistent sound across all dialogue lines.

😮 So what’s changed? For some lines, not a huge amount, and expectations were realistic. Yes, some audio files in a vacuum could be pushed further, but with diminishing returns, and at the cost of sounding really incongruent with the rest of the cast.

However, overall background noise has been reduced and significant distortions have been addressed, for a cleaner more balanced sound that best preserves the nuances of the original actor performances.

It might not sound drastically different in some cases, but it should sound a lot more enjoyable now, especially over longer gaming sessions with headphones on.

🤓 Some interesting things that factored into this process

• While the original voice lines from 1996 were recorded at 44kHz, they had to be reduced to 11kHz because of memory limitations at that time. That doesn’t sound like a big difference, but it sounds like a big difference!

• At least twice a day someone will perform a flawless 🎶 Hello George, what can I do for you now 🎶 in the office.

• If you try to routinely compare thousands of audio files in a collaborative database your browser freezes. This is a clever design that forces you to take breaks before everything starts sounding the same 🙃

❤️ Conclusion All in all we’re still glad we chose preservation of these original audio performances over re-recording them. This has been a subjective and exhausting process, we have learned a lot, and are pleased with the end result. We really hope you enjoy it too.

🖥️ FRAME PACING

Some of you reached out to us about uneven frame rates. And unfortunately, there was a delay in that feedback reaching the tech team. Ironic. Anyway, some effort has finally been spent fixing this up.

The game should now detect your monitor refresh rate and automatically deliver a smooth and efficient experience! Even if you drag the game window to a different display. Hurray!

If you prefer your settings manual - or just wanted to fiddle about with our “creaky OpenGL backend”, there are some new vt7.ini config values to play with too:

// Automatically adjust swap interval and frame rate limit for current display video_frame_pace_auto=1 // GPU synchronisation video_swap_interval=-1 // CPU FPS limiter video_frame_rate_limit=60 // Latency/performance tradeoff video_pipeline_mode=1 // Show debug overlay video_performance_widget=0

🍎 MACOS XBOX CONTROLLER SUPPORT

Fixed support for wired XBox controllers on macOS 15 Sequoia.

We use a brilliant library called SDL - Simple DirectMedia Layer. Libraries are chunks of 3rd party code that teams can use to avoid having to re-invent the wheel! Super practical, very common! We noticed that since our last update, they released a fix for something that some of you reported in our game. So now we’ve updated to the latest version of SDL which includes fixed support for wired XBox controllers on macOS 15 Sequoia. So if you were trying to use a wired XBox controller on macOS 15 Sequoia then this is for