OVERVIEW
💬 4 New Text Languages: fully subtitled
🔧 Minor Improvements: because you're worth it
🎮 Interface: for better clicking
✨ Steam Deck: just some bits we noticed
🎤 Charles is giving a talk: at at TEDxNorthernQuarter
🛩️ Congratulations Rolf Saxon: he made that mission possible
💖 Overwhelmingly Positive: user rating 😱
But first, let's talk about…
💬 4 NEW TEXT LANGUAGES
Thank you to everyone who's been vocal about what languages you would like to see in Broken Sword. It's not always possible to do these out of the gate, but encouraged by your passion, and by some very dedicated Broken Sword fans, we are able to announce subtitles for:
🦜 Brazilian-Portuguese
🥟 Polish
🧿 Turkish
✍️ Russian, and support for Cyrillic character fonts
Please give your love to Michał "mziab" Ziąbkowski and his friends for their phenomenal work on the Polish localisation, and Gökhan Halil Düzgün and his team for the extraordinary work they put into Turkish. For full credits of the localisers, who did such a wonderful job, please go see the updated credits in-game!
🔧 MINOR IMPROVEMENTS
Because we listen, and we do judge (ourselves, for not finding these sooner!)
♟️ Check Mate for this bug
The chess puzzle at the Villa de Vasconcellos was designed on a 5x5 checkerboard, rather than the more traditional 8x8 grid. So not 'real' chess, but chess adjacent, we would argue. Nevertheless, the reforged UI uses standard notation to label each position on the board, so for the first time - you could hover over each spot to reveal what square you were moving your chess piece to: A3, B3, C3, D3, or E3.
So what in the fresh hell is this?! King to A7?!
Low and behold, seems like the chessboard labels had gotten the 'smart copy' treatment in the localisation sheet, going up one per language - all the way to A9 in Spanish! No bueno!
No new languages were harmed in the solution of this "bug".
Shoutout to ArcticXWolf for shining a light on this one over on Discord!
Also on this screen, we now temporarily disable the 16:9 cropping to make it easier to select any piece placed in the top square, A1.
🎇 4 kay bye - Rare Memory Crashes at 4K
A long, long time ago, many of you will still remember - let's be honest - computers were 32-bit and couldn't address more than 4GB of RAM! Turns out, our old resource manager was still using a 32-bit integer to track certain memory usage. Not a problem in itself, but now that the game is playable in 4K, it could hit that limit if you played for long enough, and in rare instances cause crashes that would seem out of the blue! Well, no more! You deserve the 64-bit integer treatment 💅
🎞️ Movie Player Read Overrun
Movie files (cutscenes) are a data format designed to be streamed, which means they are loaded in chunks, one after the other, until reaching the end of the file (EOF). In Broken Sword we package lots of files into archives, a bit like zip files, and on PC that includes the movies, all snug in one single archive together. Cosy AND organised. Anyway, turns out there was a bug that didn't correctly detect the "EOF" when streaming a movie from an archive.
So how did this affect you? That's where it gets interesting; it was never reported in the wild!
Because our PC movies are encoded at high quality bitrates, the streaming chunk size was such that the movies ended at the correct time anyway due to reading a bad chunk!
But we're currently working on bringing Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged to mobile (yay, small plug!!!! It's out on July 25th and you can already find it on Google Play and the App Store!!!) and when we were re-encoding the movies at lower bitrates, we found and fixed the issue.
10/10 rest in bits little bad chunk, thank you for your service.
🍎 macOS Retina Displays
Because noone wants to squint at tiny content on high-DPI screens, macOS will apply resolution scaling on Retina displays to protect our eyes. We have made the game aware of this and opted-in to full native resolution rendering so that you can play the game in pristine 4K without having to fiddle with anything.
⚙️ More Robust Config File Loading
In a previous update we briefly discussed the config file!
Menu options and some other game states are stored in a privately saved config file that the engine reads once as it launches. Each line in the text file is read in turn and parsed as a "key-value pair" that maps to a parameter in the engine. If it encountered something that didn't make sense, it would stop reading further and ignore anything from that line on, since you clearly don't know what you're talking about anymore with your hand edits and how is anyone supposed to work under those conditions?!
Overreaction much - so we dialled it down. It still won't consider your nonsense, but it has now learned to brush past it and continue reading the rest of the file, happily ignoring what it doesn't understand! Growth.
⏩ Subtitle Continue Arrow Error
Try saying that three times fast...
Broken Sword lets you customise quite a lot, and if you happened to choose playing with original subtitles (the floaty ones, rather than those on the bottom) and combined that with turning off auto-play, you might have seen this..
This happened because in order to avoid text blocks going off screen there are instances where they are 'pinned' in place - the bounce arrow claimed it was never informed of such a pin! We've made sure they have better communication, and can rely on each other going forward.
📖 Meanwhile...
You know when the screen goes dark and it says "Meanwhile..." or "Back in Paris..." - turns out these bits were not just important bits of story telling, they were also subtitles.
Guess what important bits of story telling vanished when you turned off subtitles 🙃
You saw nothing!!! Well... Anyway, fixed now!!!
🔴 Obtuse Credits Bug
If you played through the game, let the credits roll, waited for the game flush you out onto the main menu screen, and then clicked to see the credits again, you'd have a weird bug where our logo just wouldn't allow itself to be pushed up properly??? Mortifying, and not the case anymore!
🖥️ Frame pacing adorned with better defaults
Adjusted to better suit your display's native refresh rate.
🤏 Overall reduction in data size
It's kind of hard to draw a direct comparison, because we also added 4 new languages, but we were able to make significant improvements on file sizes. In my notes here it says something about archive compression, optimised audio and intro movie overlays, but I'm gonna make the bold claim it was witchcraft.
✔️ Third party library update: including Steamworks & SDL
We've mentioned SDL before in a previous update in case you're curious, but this one is just to make note that we moved to the latest versions! Woo!
🎮 INTERFACE
These are gonna be short and sweet!
🔤 New Interface Scale Options
Fancy making the in-game UI bigger or smaller? Fill your boots.
🔊 New Audio Volume Sliders
You can now turn off UI sounds - we heard your prayers!
📏 Max Text Width Management
Words like "Benutzeroberfläche" don't overlap button icons anymore 🤞
✨ STEAM DECK
Mostly changes to how we interpret touch inputs!
🚪 Exits
Are now operated the same way as other hotspots on a touchscreen - much less confusing!
👇 Long presses
Have been narrowed down; they now "latch" so the game doesn't interpret your linger finger as a new unintentional input.
🎤 CHARLES IS GIVING A TEDX TALK
TEDxNorthernQuarter - September 8th in Manchester
The event includes:
☕ Breakfast networking sessions
🎤 Over 200 minutes of talks, plus live entertainment
🎻 Live performance by Lucia La Rezza "The Nerd Violinist"
🥪 Structured networking over lunch (with lunch included!)
🍸 VIP TEDx industry mixer in the evening for further networking with attendees and speakers
More info on their website: https://www.tedxnorthernquarter.com/speakers
🛩️ CONGRATULATIONS ROLF SAXON
He made that mission possible!!!!!!!!
Huge congratulations to Rolf Saxon whose character William Donloe from the iconic first ever Mission: Impossible film made a comeback in the newly released Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning! Please go see it, and let him feel the love of the Broken Sword community, who will forever be grateful to him for giving George Stobbart his voice.
💖 Overwhelmingly Positive: 😱
Overnight Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged earned its 500th review! As over 95% of those reviews are positive, this meets the criteria for 'Overwhelmingly Positive' - the highest user rating a game can receive on Steam 💖
On top of that, and to prevent misuse, awarded game keys are not counted for this metric, meaning that these reviews had to be additional to the ones left by of our biggest supporters from Kickstarter & PledgeManager, who would have received keys from us!
That said, outside of this badge of honour, we want to express our thanks to everyone who takes the time to review games, in general. It is one of the best ways to support indie games, and they can lead, and in our case us has actively led to, really amazing opportunities.
JOIN US ON DISCORD
discord.gg/revolutionsoftware
And as always, please join us on Discord if you haven't yet!
We always love reading from all of you, and one of the best ways to get in touch with us directly is through Discord!
Whether your reason for joining is to let us know about issues with our games, finding community with fellow adventure gamers, or simply to say hi - we'd love to meet you ❤️
Hope you enjoy this update, and can't wait to read all of your thoughts :)
Love from us all at Revolution
HOTFIX
🔥 Achievements are achievable again (sorry!)
🔥 Polish got some extra polish (polished Polish?)