🎨 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...



👤 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...



✍️ 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 :)



🔊 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 MacOS
Finally hunted down what was causing the illusive double cursor bug. Thank you so much to everyone who sent us screenshots and videos! As soon as we reviewed those videos we realised what was happening - turns out it's the notch, so only on displays with er, a notch! We believe this update will address that particular issue, but we didn't have a notched Mac to actually test it internally. Please let us know if it's fixed!!! Fingers crossed :)


A small but mighty update. Hope you're having a wonderful start into your week!


http://discord.gg/revolutionsoftware

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 ❤️

As always we look forward to hearing your thoughts on this update!

✨ Gameplay: more fixed gamesaves
🎨 Graphics: fun with dust renderers
🎵 Audio: dialogue volume adjustments
🔤 Text: fixed typos thanks to your submissions
⚙️ UI: Cutscene subtitles, and Chess puzzle
🎮 STEAM DECK: more touch control stuff!!!!

A small update just in time for the weekend...



Last update we talked a little bit about areas in the game that could get you stuck if saved in a particularly inopportune time. We're now following up with two more areas that will now feature 100% less getting stuck. Hopefully. We think... Hover over black bars with care!

💎 Night at the Museum
It's all about timing. Unless of course you, or the game, decided the best timing to create a gamesave was the very split second before George gets shot... Then it's all about regretting that terrible choice, because reloading this gamesave would load you in just in time to get shot again and not much else. That's what we in the biz call adeathloop and that's what we in the biz also call abug. So we squashed it.



🗝️ Locked out of the toilet
This one requires a bit of setup. In Syria when Ultar has left to wait for you at his taxi George can not leave the club without leaving the toilet keys on the bar! When you do that, a bespoke animation plays, and it would really appreciate if you let it finish. Because for those who interrupted the animation by Fast Exiting out of the club, that animation was still pending! Not a big deal if you return to let the animation finish before saving or quitting the game. Else you'd get stuck forever...

Pending logic is never saved because the game never expected to be so rudely interrupted. Well it should get used to it, cause Fast Exits are here to stay! This should now be adjusted in past, and future gamesaves!




⌛ Fun with Dust Renderers
This is an environment you briefly experience in Spain when you descend into an ancient well - and if you know anything about descending into ancient wells it's how dusty it can be. That's why this animation was so befittingly labelled "Dust".
Though, we wouldn't blame you if you never noticed that it was supposed to be dust at all...

Here it is in Original:
Here it was in Reforged: (can't tell? neither could we...)
Here it is in Reforged now - new and improved flavour:
Steam Updates only support gifs 5MB and under, so maybe you should check it out for yourselves, but we can really tell the difference, and we think it's so pretty :)



✌️ V-Sync enabled by default
Smoother and better behaved on devices with high refresh rates!



🚑Under Pressure
In Update #1 we briefly touched on the light map! While this is not technically related, it's still affecting the overall feel of vibrancy in the game. This time just a little colour adjustment on the blood pressure gauge in the Hospital. We debated even mentioning it, but are curious if you'd notice the difference?




🔉 More Adjusted Audio Levels
We have already turned the default music volume down and adjusted the master levels!
This time we've also revisited dialogue volumes in one of the final impactful cutscenes. Hopefully that's now a lot more enjoyable.

This is just a continuation of our initial improvements. Please read Update #1 for details on audio feedback!




✍️ More Typos and Errors
Thank you all for submitting us typos, mis-translations, and copy and paste errors in various languages of the game. It truly helps us, and we were able to put quite a lot of them in :)
Was that all of them, or are there more?!

As stated previously, text takes its lead from the speech files, so in the few cases where the original voice lines have more complex circumstances that aren't quite typos, we're taking the side of the voice lines...



♞ Check Mate
As in, check, Mate, if the UI will be in the way of the Chess puzzle... Which, technically it probably didn't if you knew which moves to make, but if you were tying your luck with the top row you would inevitably open the top bar menu, hiding the very area you were tying to interact with! We can't believe this hasn't been complained about more, but if you had an unnecessarily difficult time with that puzzle, we are so sorry, and after this update it will never ever happen again. Hopefully. We think...



💬 Subtitles in Cutscenes
In Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged, you get to style your subtitles! For some reason
though, the cutscenes would always show the default colour and font. This has now been addressed!

Turns out some of the times Speaker Names weren't properly displaying in the subtitles either! Tricky because it wasn't missing all of the time, or consistently for specific characters, but happened seemingly random? We took a swing at it and hope this is now fixed as well :)



🎮 Tiny Controller Improvement
The Controls Help menu is now ironically easier to navigate with a controller.



Steam Deck! Steam Deck!
Thank you so much for all the wonderful comments about our touch controls! We got so many messages, and so much helpful feedback.

This update includes even more extra effort we put into the touch controls of this game, so that if you wanted to, you could complete the entire game using only touch inputs! And as last time, we invite you to do just that and let us know how it feels! That way we can make them even better!

Some things we refined:

👇 More improvements to dragging and dropping items
🎯 Better interaction with a moving target


👇 Dragging & Dropping
The main "problem" with touch is that once you select what you want to interact with, your grubby little finger is in the way!!!! The most classic solution, and the one we also opted for, is raising the object above your finger by an offset to let you continue to see what you're doing, as you're dragging and dropping. Groovy! Less groovy if that invisible offset remains applied from then forth, making you feel like you're missing everything you want to interact with. That would be crazy making... 🙃
Hopefully much less crazy making now!!!!!


🎯 Moving target
Or more accurately; moving hotspot.
Most of Broken Sword is pretty stationary, and so are the hotspots. However some locations have moving environments, and/or moving interactable characters. In both instances the hotspots would be dynamic.

To make it easier to interact with characters as they are moving about, we make those hotspots "sticky" as soon as you engage with them. Sticky means the game thinks you're still pressing, even if you're not physically pressing.

This actually competed with a different feature; exploring your environments by sliding your finger over the screen. Now you had this character moving around the environment like some sort of beacon!!!!!
That should not be happening anymore.

What also shouldn't be happening anymore is the UI de-spawning because the character you tried to engage with has moved since you first tapped on them. The little action pop up box should now follow the character around!

We might continue to refine touch controls more, depending on your feedback, so let us know what you think :)



http://discord.gg/revolutionsoftware

That's the best place to engage with us directly, and be part of our community!
We always try to be here for you, and read as many messages as possible.

Be it to collect your feedback, documenting the bugs, or troubleshooting issues you might be experiencing, we always try to be there for you, and read as many messages as possible.

Join our wonderful community of adventure gamers, and come say hi!

Thank you for playing Broken Sword, and we hope you know how much we appreciate all of you.
As always we look forward to hearing your thoughts on this update!