Unofficial fan project
Gabriel Knight 3,
rebuilt for modern machines
GK3Reborn is a new, open source engine for Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. It reads the game you already own, converts its 1999 data into modern formats and plays it back with a Vulkan renderer, restored artwork at up to 4K, ray traced lighting, spatial audio and an interface that gets out of your way.
Free and GPL licensed. A legally owned copy of Gabriel Knight 3 is required, from Steam or GOG.
The project
A rebuild, not a wrapper
Gabriel Knight 3 shipped in 1999 with an engine that no longer fits the machines people own. GK3Reborn starts again in C# on .NET 10, with a Vulkan renderer written for today's hardware, and keeps the part that matters: the story, the puzzles, the scripts and the scenes exactly as the original team authored them.
Nothing here replaces the game. An offline pipeline reads your own installation, validates it, converts the archives, cinematics, models, scenes and textures into open formats, and never writes a single byte back to it. The result runs beside the engine, so upgrading the art or reverting to the 1999 originals is a matter of which files are present.
The whole thing is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. The source carries no game assets, and never will.
At a glance
Goals
What the project is trying to do
Every part of the original is accounted for before any of it is modernised. Presentation is rebuilt, behaviour is preserved, and nothing is quietly cut down to make the job smaller.
The complete game
All three days, every timeblock, cinematic, puzzle, Sidney function, inventory flow and ending, completable from start to finish. There is no reduced scope release.
A 2026 picture
Arbitrary resolutions, ultrawide displays, independent interface scaling, a configurable field of view, HDR where the display supports it, and ray traced shadows, reflections and lighting selected from what the device actually reports.
Restored artwork
Textures, material channels and characters rebuilt at modern resolution, checked against the originals they replace, and shipped as an optional layer you can remove.
An interface that helps
Left click looks at things, the obvious action happens without a hunt through verbs, and a chooser appears only when several actions genuinely make sense. What an action does never changes, only how you reach it.
Sound with a direction
Headphones and HRTF, stereo, 2.1, 5.1 and 7.1. Gabriel is routed to the centre, other voices are placed in the room, and a single option centres everyone if you prefer it that way.
Windows and Linux
Windows x64 is the release target, Linux x64 was designed in from the first commit rather than bolted on later. Both builds keep the install root clean.
Added and changed
The short version
The engine is new from the ground up, so almost everything under the hood has changed. These are the differences you can see and hear while playing.
Read the full list- Added Vulkan renderer with optional ray tracing Scene lighting is rebuilt from the artists' own rigs, with ray traced shadows and ambient occlusion at the higher quality settings and a clean fall back to raster on cards without it.
- Added Enhanced art at up to 4K Restored colour maps with generated normal, roughness, metalness and height channels, packed into block compressed form so a 2K texture set costs less memory than the 1999 one did. It is a separate download, and the game runs without it.
- Changed A pointer first interface No verb wheel to fight. Left click inspects, the sensible default action runs on its own, and a compact icon and text chooser appears only where a thing really has several uses.
- Changed Walking that respects your time Click the floor to go there, and double click to make the walk in front of an action run at twice the pace, because the 1999 walking speed is slow to sit through.
- Added Modern video and audio paths The Bink and Indeo cinematics are converted to H.264 with their exact frame size, rate and duration preserved, and the mixer places voices and effects in three dimensions.
- Changed Loading that does not make you wait Time to the first frame of a scene went from 11.7 seconds to 1.6, and texture memory for two rooms went from 3,517 MB to 933 MB.
Restoration
The same room, a great deal more of it
Each panel below shows an original 1999 texture on the left, at the size the game shipped it, and the restored version on the right. Every candidate is checked against the original for aspect ratio, transparency and colour before it is allowed anywhere near the game.
Screenshots
The engine in motion
Rennes le Chateau and everything after it, running under the new renderer.
The gallery is being filled in.
Screenshots of the new renderer will appear here as the scenes are signed off.
Get it
Two downloads and a folder
Take the engine archive for your platform, and the separate content download that carries the
restored artwork. Unpack both into the same folder, create a Data folder next to the
executable and copy the eight .brn archives from your Gabriel Knight 3 installation
into it, then run it.
The content packs are optional. Without them the game runs on the original 1999 artwork, which is a fair way to see what the restoration is doing.
You need to own the game
GK3Reborn contains no artwork, audio, video or text from Gabriel Knight 3. It reads the data from an installation you own, and it will not start without one.
The game is sold in both of these places: