What is new

Rendering

The picture

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• Added A Vulkan renderer built for current hardware Written against Vulkan 1.3, with features chosen from what the device reports rather than from assumptions about a vendor. Raster mode is the baseline and always works.
• Added Ray traced shadows, occlusion and lighting Available at the higher quality settings on hardware that supports it, and switched off cleanly on hardware that does not. Light fittings and self lit surfaces are kept out of the acceleration structure so they read as sources instead of blockers.
• Changed Scenes are relit for modern range The original lightmaps are used as evidence rather than as the final picture. Each scene gets a light rig derived from the artists' own placement, then corrected by hand in a file the converter is not allowed to overwrite.
• Changed Any resolution, any aspect ratio Ultrawide displays, high DPI, independent interface scaling and a configurable field of view. The 1999 build was fixed at 640 by 480.

Artwork

The assets

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• Added Restored textures at up to 4K Colour maps rebuilt at modern resolution, each one compared against the original for aspect ratio, transparency and colour before it is accepted. Anything that fails is refused and reported rather than quietly shipped.
• Added Material channels the game never had Normal, roughness, metalness, height and emissive maps are derived for surfaces that only ever had a flat colour texture, so lighting has something to work with.
• Added Modernised characters The cast is rebuilt on a modern rig while keeping the original animation, so a walk, a turn and a gesture still land on the exact frames the scripts expect.
• Changed The enhanced layer is optional The restored artwork is a separate download from the engine, and reaches the game as content packs that sit beside the executable. Leave out the material pack and the picture degrades instead of breaking. Leave out both and you are playing on the 1999 art.

Under the hood

Pipeline and performance

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• Added An importer that reads your own installation It validates the install, extracts every entry from the eight archives, converts textures to PNG, models to glTF and video to MP4, and writes manifests recording the source hash, the converter version and the exact command used. The installation is never modified.
• Added Content packs instead of forty thousand files Everything enhanced is encoded to block compressed textures and packed into two files that sit beside the executable. Entries are aligned so a texture is handed to the graphics device without being decoded or copied first.
• Changed Loading is roughly seven times faster Time to the first frame of a scene went from 11.7 seconds to 1.6. Texture memory across two rooms went from 3,517 MB to 933 MB, mostly by moving the decode offline.
• Added A clean install root A single executable, native libraries tucked under libs/ and content under content/, rather than a folder full of loose libraries.

Left alone

What has deliberately not changed

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A remake that quietly rewrites a puzzle is a different game. These are held fixed:

• The story, the dialogue and the order in which things happen.
• Every puzzle and its solution, including the ones with a reputation.
• The scripts, their conditions and their side effects, run by a virtual machine for the original language rather than reimplemented by hand.
• What an action does. Only the way you reach it is modernised, and no action fires because the engine guessed.
• Scene composition, actor placement and camera bounds, decided the way the original decided them, against the current state of the story.
• Animation timing, so scripted scenes still land on their frames.