Thanks for the heads-up, the GOG version is a no-brainer , you get the old version as a bonus. Two birds with one stone 😉

Indeed! I've owned it on GoG since they first released it.

Had a go last night and they have done a pretty good job. There are some issues here and there, but I expect them to fix it and honestly they haven't annoyed me yet, just saw them mentioned.
They reworked the engine for multi-threading, but it still runs pretty slowly on higher resolutions, unless you got a fast Intel CPU I suppose.

Running at 1360x1024 on my Phenom II x6 1090T and it's hitting 60fps, so I'm happy with that. 1080p is completely out of the question, but I think 1680x1050 should be doable with a little overclocking. Hilarious that I may have to overclock to play a game from 1999 🤣 .

I do get severe gfx glitches on 1920x1200 , the game is unplayable. Framerate is from 20 to 40fps on my 2600/GTX660ti pc.
The game is buggy atm, it produces some SERIOUS cpu load when it starts and my screen goes on standby mode for 1sec when it does this (wth is that? 🤣) . I am waiting for an update to really play this.

Just play it on a lower resolution. You should be able to do 1680x1050 with around 60fps!

Keropi, looks like they've updated the Steam version a few times already, fixing bugs and such.
Unfortunately, GoG is usually really slow at updating new releases. We should have the latest update come Monday.

Yeah I noticed that on the forums... there are already 3-4 patches via steam. Quite annoying if you ask me...
Let's hope tomorrow things get patched 😁

finally, the latest patch is available on GOG...

Yeah, quite a few fixes, although I didn't really see any performance gains like a lot of people have suggested.

Just tried the patch, it's indeed better on my system but not that great.
1680x1050 is not a solid 60fps, once the scene gets complex it can drop as low as 35fps or so.
720p is almost 60fps but there are hiccups... the game really needs more optimization.

They are trying to make it take advantage of multiple cores/threads. The original performed worse on the same resolutions if you applied a certain mod, so there is progress.

They've also greatly increased the view distance, but have disabled DoF (depth of field) entirely until they find a way to make it work properly on higher resolutions.

I just find it hilarious that such an old game gets new versions. It's something you don't see often (not counting the id software open sourcing)

They had a lackluster and eventually failed Kickstarter around May this year for an HD remake of the game. However, it looks like they didn't give up and are updating the game as it is, trying to show it to as many people as possible.

It's dirt cheap or just plain free if you bought the original on GoG and it's an amazing game overall 😀.

Downloaded this new version from GOG, got to say it rocks.

- 16:9 and higher res support
- Sane control presets for WASD

I run multimonitor and found that I needed to switch back to a single monitor to play the game, otherwise the taskbar flashes on top of the game randomly.

My only question is, does this game perform better or worse on period-correct and retro single core machines? I'm not sure, but I don't think the software texture filtering was in the original version.

Yeah, there wasn't any bilinear filtering in the original, I kinda prefer it that way to be honest. There's also a control scheme for XBOX controllers by default and I gotta say, it totally rocks! Certainly not a bad alternative when you want to just chill out. 😀

As for how well it works on period-correct hardware, I doubt it will run on Win98 due to dependencies on certain libraries. I'll try it on a Northwood 3.0 (actually 3120Mhz due to overclocking) in Windows XP and reply with some more details. I expect it to be fully playable at 640x480 and somewhat playable (25-30fps) at 800x600.

Just tried it. Unfortunately, 640x480 is not completely smooth on that Northwood, although it is mostly ok. I tried 512x384 too and it still wasn't 60fps all the time. Haven't tried the original on this particular system, but it should have been running at 60fps, so they definitely managed to make the game even more demanding.

800x600 is out of the question, sub 20fps most of the time. Something that most people haven't noticed is that they removed Depth of Field in 1.1, which had a huge impact on the visuals of the original and made everything in the distance appear smoothly. Unfortunately, they said that DoF had to be reworked for higher resolutions and they're working on it and as a result things tend to pop up a lot.

I had the chance to try the original release of the game on a Pentium III 866MHz a few days ago. With everything maxed out (that means 512x384 btw 😜), the game was hovering at 30fps, which sounded about right as I had tried it years ago on a PIII 1GHz and noticed similar performance. If and when I finally build a Tualatin 1.4 machine, I'll make sure to try it out there as well and see what kind of performance I'll be getting. 😊

That's a shame but not too surprising. Unfortunately it means that gog.com is no longer a good source for someone wanting to play this game on retro hardware. Luckily there are still plenty of copies in the wild.

Well, GoG doesn't aim to please retro hardware gamers.

No no. GoG still provides the original game download as a bonus.

That's fine then. They need to rename it from product_bonus_38603 😀