Gabriel Knight 3Reborn

The remake

What is GK3Reborn?

GK3Reborn is a free, open source engine that runs Gabriel Knight 3 on all three major platforms; Windows, Linux and macOS. It uses your original game files, with modern rendering, improved audio and optional high-resolution artwork. If your hardware supports it, you'll also get volumetric fog, raytraced lighting, shadows and reflective surfaces.

Built because I wanted to replay it and got annoyed at the cumbersome UI and thankfully due to the team of of G-Engine, the amount of documentation available about SHEEP, BARN and the inner workings of the game it was in the realm of 'doable' to recreate this. It's a near guarantee this will contain bugs and weird behaviors, post them on github as an issue and it'll be looked at as soon as possible.

So what can you expect from the engine?
- A .net 10 based Silk.Net DX12 and Vulkan backend.
- Original 3d cam, free cam and first person camera option
- Raytraced lightning, shadow and reflective surfaces.
- DLSS support via Streamline (NVIDIA GPUs only) + DLSS5 NR native support, no need for renodx!
- REBARN downloads enabled upscaled videos, 2-4k textures and all the textures required for PBR (rough surfaces, etc.)
- REBARN downloads also changes a few scenes to look 'nicer'. The game had a severe case of 'low poly' in the scenes so those are improved to make the landscape a bit nicer.
- Localization options via the seperate rebarn files, these add subtitles to the videos or use the original dubbed videos upscaled. (french/german)
- Grass is visible as 3d instead of just plain ol' textures
- Cat puzzle can be bypassed but you get a perm. moustache ;)

Did someone scream AI?
Parts and I mean parts! are made with AI. Most textures have only undergone an AI upscale after which most textures have undergone mostly photoshop work, some textures, especially ground textures and such had terrain generation AI involved. Code is primarily my own with AI LLM being used for commenting, unittests and general review and if I'm feeling too lazy to write up boilerplate stuff. It's not vibe slop.

Road ahead
- Working on bug reports first for a while to get the engine into tip top shape.
- Will look into skeletonizing the character models as that would allow for much more fluent animations.
- Nature scenes could still use much more TLC to make them look more outdoorsy. - More textures redone/redrawn (there are 17K textures in total, ~2K have been redone by hand) - "Upscaling" models, but my blender skills suck so not sure how much progress will be made on that.

Whilst the engine is a complete rewrite, it is still the same story and puzzles albeit with more quality of life options available, on today's hardware. Get started.