Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy Remaster Receives Significant Update

The 2017 remaster of the classic game, Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, originally released in 2003, has received a significant update. These improvements were in beta for some time, and the extensive list of changes marks a substantial upgrade for the title.

Key highlights from the comprehensive changelog include:

• Projected soft shadows and character lighting have been completely revised.
• Various levels have seen improvements to address visual and logical issues.
• New save statues have been added at several points throughout the game.
• The player camera has received enhancements.
• Textures for numerous characters have been improved.
• A revamped game-over checkpoint system is now in place.

A notable improvement involves the character textures:

Many in-game characters now utilize their actual, original-quality textures, which were previously only available in promotional or press materials. Some of these textures were recovered through dedicated investigation by community members, such as @lordquacksmith, who successfully contacted the original individuals responsible for them.

Main game

• An insidious bug that occasionally corrupted the player’s position has been fixed.

• Sphinx’s Shield of Osiris animation now moves correctly when the left stick is used, fixing a previous bug.

• Shadows now fade out gracefully when they extend too far from their casting sources.

• The 3-point lighting system’s style has been adjusted to better reflect its original design.

• Unused textures have been removed.

• Asynchronous file loading has been improved, resolving potential threading crashes.

• CPU skinning code has been optimized for faster performance, with improvements to vertex bone influence blending for better efficiency.

• Frame pacing has been enhanced, reducing excessive input polling.

• A new Steam capsule/banner featuring a red rock background has been added.

• Sphinx’s head no longer spins randomly in the air during high jump-dives.

• Detail mapping texturing has been introduced for objects, enhancing their appearance up close.

• A stochastic terrain shader has been applied to sandy Heliopolis beaches and underwater sand textures to minimize repetitive tiling.

• The game now supports Unicode paths on Windows for saving and loading, resolving issues when Windows accounts use non-English characters.

• Ketta and Shetta’s voodoo dance animations have been adjusted to prevent unnatural 360-degree neck turns.

• Certain textures in the Monster Shop level are now 1-bit alpha tested to prevent flickering alpha-blending sorting artifacts.

• Abydos Canal banners are now 1-bit alpha-tested to resolve alpha-blending sorting issues.

• A softlock occurring in the Abydos monster shop trader dialog when approaching from the left has been fixed, as reported by @Sat and the speedrunning community.

• Potential post-shader compilation crashes with AMD Windows drivers have been addressed.

• The three-point character lighting has been visually improved, with further research and development progress.

• A fade-out effect for lightstreaks at glancing angles, used for torches and glow effects, has been reinstated.

• Projected shadows are now harsher for environments and softer for character self-shadows.

• Detail mapping now covers a greater distance before fading out.

• Inverted white shadows in the backface culling code have been corrected.

• Shader files have been cleaned up and optimized.

• The TR_SmallLight trigger no longer outputs pure black, restoring firefly lights in areas like the Heliopolis Wall Room 1 map.

• Random shading issues in portal impostors, caused by incorrect three-point lighting uniform values, have been resolved.

• Projected shadow camera positions now use linear interpolation, ensuring smooth blending without sudden orientation changes when entering new submaps.

• A second save spot has been added to the middle of Wall Section II, before a challenging jumping platform section. Portal Z-distances for entrances have been expanded, eliminating 2D stand-ins or black planes.

• A second save monkey statue has been placed in the middle of the Heliopolis Dungeon, near the third column with movable bridges, to reduce backtracking and encourage saving.

• Wobbly floor textures near the Heliopolis Dungeon skeleton room exit and distorted UV maps on green worm background walls have been corrected.

• A bug preventing the left green worm in Heliopolis Dungeon from appearing after reloading a save (if the handle was pulled but the worm wasn’t killed) has been fixed.

• Further improvements to Heliopolis Dungeon include fixes for UV geometry issues (e.g., near the right worm wall, skeleton fight exit floor, stone blocks, stone eye, hieroglyph square) and enhanced portal distances.

• The Uruk intro has received improvements, addressing UV geometry issues (e.g., rock terrace triangle, broken eagle seal, stone lip section) and increasing the spawn distance for gameplay objects, portals, trees, and torches.

• The count/timer in the pairs minigame, which was obscured by the item rotator background, has been repositioned to the right for better visibility.

• 3D monster portrait lighting in the Book of Sphinx has been adjusted to reduce overblown or white appearances.

• Players can now disable Discord/Steam rich presence integration via the INI config file ([Debug] RichPresence=0) to address potential performance issues or for privacy, as requested by @nas.

• The German description for the Harvest Moon achievement has been corrected; it previously used a word for jewel/gem.

• Shadows now correctly appear on the Luxor palace marble floor, which was previously rendered in the translucent pass.

• French descriptions for certain achievements have been updated to align with in-game translations.

• UV coordinate issues in the fortune teller cutscene’s dreamy wall representation have been resolved. Missing chunks in the right sky mesh have been added, wall stone textures are now higher definition, and radial blur has been applied to lost temple and Wall Section II screen grab overlays to prevent pixelation.

• The shadowmap sampling shader has been optimized to reduce wasteful sampling and enhance character shadow quality.

• Multisampling antialiasing is now disabled when drawing particles and swooshes, potentially improving fillrate.

• Item rotator menu text lines no longer overflow or are unclipped when scrolling, as seen in the Cursed Palace stone picker.

• Overrides have been added for low-res planetarium floor symbols and the pixelated golden arc textures.

• The flashing blue eyes of movable Hands of Amun statues in Wall Entrance 3, when soft particles are enabled and viewed head-on, have been fixed.

• Cursed Palace dark sand, other sands, and the Impulse Planetarium marble floor are now marked as terrain to reduce repetitive tiling and prevent ugly underwater patterns in the planetarium puzzles.

• A significant, long-standing collision hole in Uruk Canyon lava entrances, where visual and collision meshes were misaligned, has been fixed. This issue, reported by @lordquacksmith, allowed players to bypass sections without jumping.

• UV unwrapping issues in the Uruk Canyon burnable fence entrance have been corrected, along with the second layer of the main hub ground. View ranges for lamps, dart targets, tree monsters, Ka Ankh bases, and portal 2D impostor distances have been expanded. Low-resolution animated lava textures have also been improved.

• Multiple concurrent game instances are now permitted on Windows when -dev mode is enabled.

• Numerous new HD texture overrides have been added for characters and props in the Abydos Council chambers.

• Blocky vertex coloring glitches in Abydos Council Chamber skyboxes, which caused vertical fringes in sunflares, have been fixed by manual triangulation. Godrays’ Z-order has been improved to prevent flickering.

• Matrix/vector math functions are now being optimized with SIMD intrinsics for parallel and faster operations.

• SSE2 SIMD intrinsics have been added to parallelize common vector and matrix math operations on x86/x64 computers and consoles.

• The glitchy lava (UV map) circling the Eye of Ra castle pit in the final Mummy puzzle has been improved, 21 years after the original release.

• Action mapping keys have been reorganized.

• A softlock that occurred when Sphinx attempted a high dive into shallow water or obstacles has been fixed. Sphinx now performs a roll upon landing, potentially taking damage or dying, instead of getting stuck.

• The glitchy Sphinx head animation during a surface dive from swimming mode, caused by headtracking targets leading to neck contortions, has been resolved.

• The water edge in the water shader now subtly fades out.

• OpenAL extension function pointers are now verified to ensure they are not corrupted or NULL, addressing potential issues with certain software like the box86 translator.

• Efforts have been made to encourage the MSVC compiler to generate optimized vectorized XMM code using the __vectorcall calling convention.

• A previous workaround for incorrectly drawn water spray mesh particles has been improved, now using a better heuristic to identify and render missing discontinuities between triangle strips.

• Default values have been added for previously undefined uniforms in the translucent shader, fixing color blinking and fade issues when drawing 3D and 2D debug lines.

• Limitations for single-strip particle instance entities, such as water jets/spray meshes that caused glitchy polygons, have been fixed by generating degenerate triangles to emulate multiple triangle strips.

• Translucent elements now fade out against solid geometry, and a Fresnel-style fade out has been added at glancing angles to conceal flat crossing planes.

• Sprite and text rendering have been optimized, with most paragraphs now drawn in a single drawcall for faster performance.

• The gap between the door and wall in Tut’s bedroom has been fixed.

• Misaligned parts of the Mummy Sewer connector and hub submaps, including a visible seam near the one-way gate, have been corrected. Stretched UVs in gargoyle windows in the water reservoir area have also been fixed.

• HD textures have been added for low-resolution areas of Luxor Palace (including Tut’s bed in the intro) and Mummy Sewer.

• Holes in the Uruk intro castle lava bridge walls have been fixed, pillars near the elevator hole are no longer floating, an eagle wall texture in the ceiling has been corrected, and broken UVs and geometry holes have been addressed.

• Rock UVs and a missing second layer in the rock wall corner after the Horus climb in the Uruk intro have been fixed.

• Poor visibility of sublevel pieces in the Uruk intro’s lava section after the Horus climb has been improved.

• Bad UV mapping in a cave wall near a torch in the Uruk intro, which caused seams, has been fixed by adding a third layer and hard rock textures to break up tiling.

• Two holes/missing wall chunks in Heliopolis Wall Section II, above a door, have been fixed, along with a seam in a spike crusher stone building. Colors were matched and geometry reconstructed, as reported by @SphinxLuvDuvWuv.

• The high dive animation now includes a fell-through-the-map check. Sphinx will respawn after falling approximately 1 kilometer, preventing softlocks from falling indefinitely into the void.

• The amount of damage Sphinx receives is now user-configurable via the [Gameplay] DamageMult=2.5 setting in the Sphinx.ini file.

• HD textures have been added to the Abydos Sewer map, including the eagle head decoration and low-res water. Dirt textures now use stochastic tiling for a less regular appearance.

• Star particles no longer appear instead of smoke in idle electric Mummy rotating trap machines.

• Generic Blowpipe gyro-aim support has been implemented on PC, mirroring the Nintendo Switch functionality. It works with DualShock 4 and similar gamepads when trigger buttons are held.

• The blowpipe tutorial text has been updated to include gyro-aim usage instructions.

• Occasional brown tinting of button prompts in the Horus tutorial after opening the Book of Sphinx has been fixed.

• Rare NULL pointer dereferences in rope trigger physics that could crash the game have been resolved.

• The Item update debug window has been reworked, with XZ coordinate columns padded for visibility and headers aligned.

• A bug causing pit doors to disappear in the Mummy Castle map, allowing players to skip half the game, has been fixed. This was reported by @monopoli and the speedrunning community.

• Incorrect looping and jarring jumps in sounds like SFX_AMB_WIND_STORM have been fixed. Issues with multi-sampled sounds being deleted mid-playback were also resolved, with assistance from @jmarti856.

• Startup crashes on the AMD OpenGL driver (version 31.0.12027.9001 / 22.20) have been fixed by using signed shader uniforms, preventing NULL pointer dereferences and crashes after the copyright screen.

• The Mummy ability bar has been made 20% larger, improving visibility for abilities like the electric one, as suggested by @AshhawkBurning.

• Several level geometry defects in the Heliopolis exterior have been fixed:

  • A hole in the ground next to the eagle gate from the Great Obelisk to the Squirt pen.
  • Nearby rocky geometry has received patched-together third-layer texturing and UV fixes to be less distracting.
  • The door to the desert ground at the back of the gate now closely matches the door shape.
  • A small sandy wall next to Wall Entrance III, which was a badly triangulated quad, has been properly triangulated.

• The misaligned Luxor Pyramid cage elevator puzzle pillar base has been fixed to match its hole, as reported by @SphinxLuvDuvWuv.

  • Holes in the back of geometry, originally meant to sit flush against the wall, have been capped off.
  • Buggy ground quads on the second level of the main room are now correctly triangulated, eliminating wedge-shaped vertex color smudges.

• Efforts have been made to eliminate the camera’s snap-back issue, where it would point sideways in Sphinx’s direction of movement and suddenly recenter upon stopping.

  • The camera now recenters very slowly when the player’s speed decreases.

• The initial version of camera code has been implemented to prevent it from getting stuck on walls when the joystick is moved. The camera now elevates to look down on the player during extreme closeups.

• The updated Korean translation has been finalized, including a custom HD Hangul font for the front-end and memory card dialog, addressing missing glyphs and low resolution issues.

• The top wooden decorative bar in the Korean pause dialog, which was too low and showed a parchment cutout, has been fixed.

• The French translation has been improved to use “Charger Partie” instead of “Charger“, aligning it with the “Nouvelle Partie” option.

• A revamped game-over checkpoint system has been implemented. Upon death, players are now returned to the entrance of the last entered level, rather than simply reloading the last save.

• Broken fade-in transitions between certain levels after teleporting (e.g., South Beach to Sun Shrine interior, Heliopolis Point to Palace area) have been fixed.

• Min/max field-of-view limits have been adjusted from 20/110 to 14/114 degrees, allowing players to revert to the default 64 degrees, given the 10-unit increment setting.

• An improved scan mode has been added, allowing faster movement and no-clip functionality in both vertical and horizontal directions by holding a button:

  • This also works in smooth cam mode, which provides steadicam-style handling for recording footage.
  • Pressing Shift keys, L1/LB, or Circle/B on a gamepad enables faster vertical movement.
  • Pressing Shift keys, R1/RB, or Circle/B on a gamepad enables faster horizontal movement.
  • Player visibility can be toggled by pressing the Square/X button or Tab on the keyboard.

• The NTSC value for maximum fall speed is now used instead of the PAL value, aligning with the default 60 Hz framerate.

• NaN propagation across physics, gravity, friction, and weight code is now prevented by validating floating-point values, aiming to avoid complex bugs and despawns.

• Bottom and top elevation in smooth cam submode (of scan mode) are now clamped to prevent glitching at extremes.

• A breakable wall bypass in the Uruk Temple, which allowed players to break the wall with a sword/slam jump instead of a beetle/burble explosion, has been fixed. This bug was reported by @lordquacksmith.

• The game will no longer intentionally crash on important audio errors.

• View range/spawn radii have been updated and enlarged in _hl_ws1 (Heliopolis Wall Section I).

• View range/spawn radii have been updated and enlarged in _hl_ws2 (Heliopolis Wall Section II).

• View range/spawn radii have been updated and enlarged in _lu_pala (Luxor Palace, Tut level).

• View range/spawn radii have been updated and enlarged in _ab_cncl (Abydos Council Chambers), primarily for the interior.

• View range/spawn radii have been updated and enlarged in _mu_htrn (Mummy Hang Train). The intro door no longer visibly despawns when exiting the final treasure room.

• HD texture overrides have been added for _mu_htrn (Mummy Hang Train) environmental textures, as well as textures for the Abydos juggler and lady, Sorkon/Ishka, Pairs and Simon minigames, Urukite chieftain, and more.

• Improved textures from a DVD, discovered by @lordquacksmith through old CGI TV ad artist contacts, have been added. These include original-quality monster textures (e.g., QU10/12/13, HU03, HU15) and higher-quality versions for others (e.g., QU02, QU04), moving beyond 8-bit/256 color indexing.

• Modders can now customize sinking particle effects for different surface types (e.g., green glow for acid instead of fire) via the Surfaces XLS spreadsheet’s “Particle System” column. This was suggested by @jmarti856.

• The water shader has been adjusted to maintain a darker ocean appearance without negatively impacting gameplay elements like the mu_roto (Mummy RotoHub) pink portal or the mu_htrn (Mummy Hang Train) second level entrance.

• HD texture overrides for the Uruk castle terrain (also seen in the main menu background) and the Heliopolis cursed palace/entrance have been marked as terrain to conceal tiling.

• Projected shadows now tastefully fade out in world-coordinates as shadowed pixels move farther from the casting character.

• HD versions of Urukite Captain textures, found on the production asset disc, have been added.

• HT_GameScript_Macro_UnPossess has been implemented, allowing players to be de-possessed in Sakkara when going out of bounds via gamescripting in barriers and collisions.

• A crash occurring on badly-exported maps, where an enemy trigger referenced a non-existent hashcode, has been fixed. A debug print has also been added.

• The smooth scan rotation, which was buggy and unwieldy when moving and turning simultaneously, has been fixed. Smooth scan now ensures shadows appear correctly even when recording steadicam-style footage.

  • The analog right trigger (R2/RT) now modulates the speed range, offering more steadicam control for smooth-scan video capture.
  • Players now have two methods for speed control: R1 maintains full-speed horizontal movement, L1 maintains full-speed vertical movement, and holding R2 incrementally adjusts speed for both.

• A bug causing items like coconuts to appear as ability items instead of quest items on 64-bit systems has been fixed, as reported by @jmarti856.

• Respawning breakable statues in the second and third parts of the walls minigame, which could lead to players getting stuck with incorrect scores, have been fixed. Statues are now marked to be seen from afar and not suspended.

  • The gamescript for distance triggers that open doors has been adjusted to require “greater than or equal to 4” statues instead of “equal to 4,” ensuring completion even if statues glitch and players have more than the required amount.
  • A misaligned archway in the inner door wall of the easiest level, which was off-center and had a visible seam, has been fixed. This was found by @NostalgiaN8 and @pej.

• Previous workarounds for incorrect particle mesh display have been removed. The issue is now correctly fixed by converting final rotations to quaternions and relaying them to the renderer instead of Euler angles.

  • This resolves water jet particle issues across all levels without level-specific workarounds.

• Staging allocations in the OpenGL index buffer code have been reduced, with data strides now copied directly to the graphics card for optimal performance.

• The 32-bit and 64-bit Windows .exe files have been made compatible with Windows Vista, addressing compatibility issues reported by @nas.

• Flush-to-zero and denormals-are-zero floating-point modes are now enabled every frame to prevent issues if other libraries alter these settings after startup.

• The 32-bit Windows variant now runs and functions completely under Windows XP, provided OpenGL 3.0+ is supported. This is a best-effort, unofficial support.

• Legacy x87 FPU usage has been disabled on Linux and macOS, with only SSE and SSE2 instructions now emitted.

• The save data folder location/path is now refreshed when loading or saving, addressing potential issues on Windows where a relocated profile could prevent saving.

• Gameplay numbers have been tweaked to prevent Sphinx from accidentally dropping rocks and statues when the throw button is pressed:

  • Previously, rocks could be broken by mistake if the wrong button was pressed in front of a wall, even from too far away.
  • Players now need to be much closer to an NPC or tree compared to a map part for this action to activate.

• The nauseating snap-back camera effect, caused by the code anticipating player position, has been fixed.

  • The camera now only anticipates player movement when moving sideways, not towards or away from the camera.
  • Final movement blending has been reduced to eliminate the final camera bounce.
  • These tweaks and improvements aim to enhance the camera’s overall functionality.

• Stuttering camera movement when controlled via mouse has been softened.

• Potential runtime exploits on Windows have been mitigated to prevent mod exploits, aiming to protect users without disrupting Steam integration and other overlays.

• English grammar issues in Abydos dialog screens and double-space problems for the Monster Inspector have been fixed, as found by @lordquacksmith.

• A small leeway factor has been added to the help window text formatter’s maximum width line, preventing small glyphs like periods or commas from overflowing.

• Steam achievements now function in -mod mode, while still being disabled in -dev mode.

• Visibility radii for torch distances in the Mummy Treasure Chamber have been enlarged, as suggested by @lordquacksmith.

• Environmental HD texture overrides have been added for the Mummy Treasure Chamber, significantly improving its appearance from its previous low-resolution state.

• The V-Sync framerate re-lock code in the loading screen has been moved to occur later, potentially resulting in faster game loading without waits.

• HD texture overrides have been added for Wall Section III and the Simon-says platform. Distances for torches, fences, buttons, glyph pedestals, and Ka Ankhs have been updated for better long-distance visibility.

  • Holes in the fires atop the stairs with the spike puzzle have been fixed.
  • Buggy UV unwrapping in the Simon-says mesh has been fixed.

• Additional HD texture overrides have been added for Luxor Pyramid and the trader NPC for Abydos shop and Heliopolis Point.

  • This includes high-resolution textures for skeletons, elevators, ladders, pullbulls, the Simon-says breakable cat door, the glass window in the ceremony room, and the big-mass amulet in the Luxor pyramid.

• Broken UVs in the Luxor Pyramid pull switch frame bull head have been fixed. One of the initial breakable vases next to the portal god is now marked as intelligent, providing health in addition to Gold Scarabs.

• Further HD texture overrides have been added for the Abydos shop ceiling, the Squirt Herder skin, and the three Urukites encountered by the Mummy in chapters 5 and 6 of the castle.

• Additional HD texture overrides have been added for Wall Section I, including missing HD walls, the Anubis statue, torches, blowpipe target bases, and the wooden walkway support structure.

• Accelerated playback when loading a save slot via the -slot 0/1/2 command-line argument has been fixed.

• Original-quality HD textures for the Knives Cat, Shetta, and the Manta Ray have been added, discovered by @lordquacksmith on the production assets DVD for the Blur Studio CG ad.

• The boot-up screen copyright year has been updated to 2026.

• A small mention and acknowledgment of long-time community members and the community at large have been added to the end of the credits.

• Current multisample antialiasing settings are now adjusted if the driver-forced value differs, addressing potential black screen issues caused by NVIDIA Control Panel’s DSR or enforced antialiasing options.

Soundtrack DLC

• The following Official Soundtrack DLC tracks have been re-encoded as fake stereo instead of mono to prevent issues with certain software (like XLD) that struggle with mixed mono/stereo albums:

  • (56) Bedouin Outpost, (57) Heliopolis Point, and (58) Sun Shrine Island.

Authoring Tools DLC

• Numerous modding improvements have been implemented.