WIDESCREEN, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT
Originally releasing in 1997, and remastered in 2010, Broken Sword 2's "original resolution" was a choice reserved for people with immaculate eyesight who hadn't upgraded to a 4k display yet.
To avoid eye strain you were given a choice of these generous alternatives:
📏 AUGMENTED:
Before: slightly bigger but still on the smaller side of windowed..
fun fact: this resolution was based on an old iPad format since Broken Sword 2 (and 1) was originally remastered for the first iOS devices.
New and improved flavour: Augmented is now a bit bigger, and way more size appropriate for your display!
🤸🏼♀️ FULL SCREEN:
Before: w i d e - once 16:9 took over as an aspect ratio for the average monitor, everyone was just so wide. Screens have since gotten even wider, and some of you were experiencing cropping issues. Not ideal (which is British for "absolutely horrifying"), but the best we could do at the time! Well, that time is OVER!!! You deserve better!!!!!!
New and improved flavour: The original game has a lot a scenes with very long background artwork that was intended to make streets and locations that George and Nico are walking around in, feel more continuous. This means we're in a unique position as devs of 90s adventure games, to offer a new full screen experience, that in most places can actually cater to new aspect ratios. WITHIN REASON!!! Some areas do include original artwork that was made to size exactly, especially in enclosed locations, and for those areas we included very tasteful (standard black) sidebars.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Just as the prophecy foretold!!!!
Some of you already noticed that we sneakily added achievements a few weeks ago while testing commenced!! Well testing commenced, and we smashed it!!!!
Enjoy 27 carefully picked achievements, with such bangers as;
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RECOMPRESSED FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE
🤏 FILE SIZE REDUCED BY ABOUT 40%
"How do they do it?" - Glad you asked, cause apparently THERE IS A SPREADSHEET?!
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This is going to be real nerdy, so please scroll past this section if you're just here for the bants. More for you further down!!! Promise!!!!
Still here? I'm so glad, let's dissect..
COLUMNS
The columns are all the different assets in the game
🍱 Game Cluster:
Clusters are bunched together by locations, for example "Paris Cluster" or "Definitely-not-haunted-museum Cluster". These contain zipped location graphics and animations in the game's original archive format.
🔤 Fonts:
Any font that is displayed in the game, of which there are about 3, each in 3-8 different sizes, give or take!
📖 Comic:
New to the remaster is an in-game digital comic, made accessible from the (brand spanking new) menu after reaching a certain point in the story.
🧔 Face Panels:
The close up facial expressions on characters in dialogues. They get their own thing, in case you were wondering!!
📜 Menu Textures:
When we remastered the game, we absolutely rehauled the entire menu; background, images, widgets, you name it, it’s new!!
🎞️ Movies:
Not only have all movies been recompressed using a more efficient way, but the big one was the Intro Movie, you see.. the intro movie is special, as it’s the only video file that contains localised graphics! Previously that meant we had to provide a separate movie file for each language!!!!! 7 different rendered movies. Crazy!!! Now we have 1 rendered movie, and we draw graphics over the localised bits. And it means the graphics are actually sharper with higher resolutions! And it saves tons of space!!!! But we're getting ahead of ourselves here, this stuff should be explained in 'rows'!
💬 Speech:
"HUGE amount of speech in the game, yeah -” says Andy, the programming wizard behind this recompression “and in 5 languages…”
🎶 Music:
Background music, Cues, Menu Music, Credits, ominous piano music - it's all there
❔ Other:
Everything else!!! Assets that weren’t touched at all like script logic, stuff in the original game that remains exactly as it was, etc.
ROWS
The rows are the techniques we use to compress or repackage the data. Many of these are only applicable to one type of data, so you usually see one column benefit greatly at a time.
BASELINE:
Size of the assets prior to the update
🔪 cull:
Roughly translates to “delete shit” - Not super fruitful, but we shed a few bits in the Menu Textures that weren’t referenced, as a side effect of the overall menu spruce up.
📦 zstd:
A general purpose compression format which helped us further condense down Game Clusters, and the Comic.
🖼️ webp:
This is an image specific compression format, like .jpeg or .png and impacted Game Clusters, Fonts, Face Panels, and Menu Textures
🎼 opus:
A compression format for audio. This one affected Game Clusters (due to the stored sound effects), Speech, and Music. By far the biggest impact with 407.70 MB chopped off the game size
✂️ vp9 + combine:
Rolls off the tongue doesn't it? Vp9 is a new compression format that saved us ton of bits here, and "combine" as in 'we recompressed the intro movie, and combined all language variants previously saved as 7 different intro movies, into one movie with overlaying images for the bits that needed localising', but that's a mouthful, so "combine" it is.
🤓 NERDY STUFF OVER BACK TO BANTS 🙅
Picture of Charles as a palate cleanser:
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📜 MENU AND UI REFRESH
1) No more tiny UI!
2) Layout and sizing of buttons now more appropriate
3) Back button is now consistent! No more different buttons that all mean the same thing! Only one.
4) Fancy borders in the main menu, amongst tons of other little spruce ups and additions!!
5) Main menu looks new, because it is.
Oh!! And when you click for characters to walk somewhere, you now get the tippy tappy shoe prints until they're done walking there. When they say Quality of Life updates, this is what they mean! We truly live in the future.
💬 DIALOGUE FONT
Higher resolution? Higher Font! No more trying to read tiny tiny letters on an already far away screen and feeling old and frail. You are stunning and in the prime of your life and nothing should make you feel otherwise!
☁️ CLOUDSAVES
Ever looked at the sky and thought "Man I wish my gamesaves lived there" - well do we have news for you!!! It's actually even cooler than it sounds, because these cloudsaves can even travel crossplatform between Windows, macOS, and Linux - given you stay in the Steam ecosphere of course. We're not magic. Well, Andy might be.
🎮 STEAM DECK
From now on Broken Sword 2 is 100% Steam Deck compatible!
We wanted to add beautiful pictures here, but we ran out of time, and the one in the office is a dev kit, which just doesn't look as cool. But if you have a Steam deck and can take artistic pictures of Broken Sword 2 running on it, we'd be over the moon to see!!!!
As a placeholder, please enjoy this Broken Sword 2 gif that was posted to discord:
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and last, but not least;
NEW GAME ICON
It's really pretty, and follows the beautiful stained glass style we went for when we refreshed Broken Sword 5! BEHOLD;
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ENJOY
Hope you enjoy this update, and YES we're already eagerly working on Broken Sword 1. It's next!!!
Thank you all for being so patient with us. It's a delicate process, and a huge task for a team our size. It doesn't mean we don't always do our best! You deserve it, and we love you.
SPECIAL SHOUTOUT;
Next Monday, the 19th of September, Ron Gilbert and his immensely talented team are releasing "Return to Monkey Island" - a game we've been on the edge of our seats about. We love the team, some of them even have some Broken Sword overlap, and we wish them a wonderful launch! A great way to support indie games you love is wishlisting them until they release, and then leaving positive reviews on their Steam page!
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As always;
Be vigilant, but stay kind.
Lots of love from all of us at Revolution
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PUSH UPDATE: VERSION 3.3.0
What a handful of testers can find in a few weeks is nothing compared to what hundreds of you can find in mere days 💖 Finding bugs is a lot easier when you have such a passionate community, and some of the documentation you provided was absolutely god-tier feedback! Thank you all so much!!!
These are the things we fixed in the ~10MB update that just came out;
🍎 MacOS:
The days of background corruption are OVER ( ...fingers crossed)
We unfortunately can't go into detail why this happed, but let's just call it a very esoteric complier bug. It should now be working, and we rely on you being just as vocal as you have been if it doesn't!
💫 Blue Circle Hotspots
Get that classic Broken Sword feel by turning off Hotspots if you want to: More > Show Hotspot
🎵 Music Bug:
This one was at least a little funny; If you set the music volume to 0, closed the game, booted the game again and tried to turn the sound on, the game just crashed. No music for you!! We're here to say yes, music for you. Go on then, you deserve it.
And the award for most dramatic feature goes to 🥁
WIDESCREEN:
As so many of you have been understanding and kind about, this game will never ever be *fully* widescreen supported. All we can do is to allow for a smoother and more enjoyable experience, but your mileage may wary based on many factors.
Additional to that we want to reiterate that wide-screen will be utilised in areas that were designed to be scrollable only. In enclosed spaces, there simply isn't any art on either sides, so your black pillars (the stipes on each side of the screen) will narrow for those.
However reading through your posts and comments, there are a few things we could still improve, and we hope you understand that we truly care about your experience, even if you play on a monitor that could double as a hula-hoop.
✅ Allow widescreen
"One for the purists, really" - Andy
You can now toggle in and out of widescreen: More > Allow Widescreen
🎞️ Opening Scene Chaos:
This is one of the reasons it can get messy when supporting widescreen on a game that never thought you could see this much so soon!!!
George is tied down and seated, but because you could already see some of the clickable things ("hotspots", or "blue circles") you weren't supposed to see, when clicking them a completely different animation was triggered - because the game didn't know you were still in the damn chair.
There are a lot of complicated solutions to this, but Andy in his wisdom just turned off the hotspots you're not allowed to see yet. Good programmers add, great programmers delete, and one of the best programmers is Andy who worked real hard on this!!!!
☑️ Black Pillar Bug:
This one was kind of cute to deal with for us; turns out that while widescreen was supported in general, for monitors that were wider than the tippiest of tops allowed for the game went "I am not good enough, I should just go back to what I know best" and went small again.
We gave it a little pep talk and now it believes in itself. If it can't stretch any further it will now start adding black pillars to it's maximum width rather than giving up all together.
Hope you enjoy your little update, and thank you all tons for the sweet and informative Steam Forum posts you all left for us! Let us know if this solved your issues.
Lots of love from all of us at Revolution