Revision brings a range of improvements to how the game functions behind-the-scenes. These range from surface flavour to the very bones of the Unreal Engine. We didn’t just want to make Deus Ex more pleasant to look at; we wanted to improve how it functions.
Our work ‘under the hood’ is perhaps the most extensive, and it’s mostly thanks to Björn Ehrby and Sebastian Kaufel that we could deliver Revision in it’s most functional and bug-free form.
“What I mainly do for Revision is to keep track of everything and everyone, coordinating the whole project to make sure things get done. In addition to my managerial role, I also keep track of and fix bugs, something that I’ve been doing since I joined Haris back in 2008.
At first, my involvement started with fixing the placement and properties of items in the game environments. Over time I got more familiar with the game editor, and my contributions got more comlex. Working alongside Haris, I often address potentially game-breaking issues such as BSP errors, which occur when the Unreal editor simply can’t cope with some part of the game’s world geometry.
More recently, I’ve been looking into ways to improve on our editing tools to ensure the game’s environments are ever more stable and bug-free.”
Slicker Presentation
Revision includes a range of little touches that bring the whole experience together. These include:
- Per-chapter loading screens
- Soundtrack mode toggle from the game menu
- FoV selector to handle a range of displays
- UI Scaling modes to handle a range of displays
- 2x scale datavault images for larger displays
The UI scaling modes are designed to fit a range of displays; by default, the UI is scaled to 1x on all displays. This is the cleanest presentation, keeping the menus crisp and the HUD out of the way. However, at very high resolutions, this can leave the UI too small to see, so we include a “Dynamic” mode, where the UI is scaled as large as possible for a given resolution. For unconventional resolutions, a “Relaxed” mode is also included. This final mode behaves much like the Dynamic setting, but as the name implies, with relaxed guides for scaling the interface up or down. Finally, we have added a HiDPI scaling mode in v1.0.1, which locks the UI to 2x scale. This mode may be helpful for small displays with high resolutions, such as “Retina” displays.
A Smorgasbord of Fixes
Sebastian’s work covers a range of various fixes for issues that have appeared in the process of making Deus Ex function smoothly on modern PCs. His contributions include:
- Ensuring that player footstep sounds are both accurate and account for decorations, not just world geometry
- Addressing an issue where saved games couldn’t be created on very large hard drives
- Creating a customized game launcher for Revision
- Generally addressing a wide range of weird bugs