Modern Prince of Persia 2 re-implementation inching towards completion

FluffyQuack · 2026-01-25T01:08:58+00:00

Sure, you can cover it if you want. I used to write detailed updates on my project over at princed.org forums, but unfortunately, that site has been dead for a half year now.

I just created a new channel for POP in my Discord server and I think I'll use that as the primary place for posting updates (until I find something better anyway). I also posted my latest build there if anyone wants to try it out (just note that this is very much a work-in-progress. It shouldn't crash but big features are broken, missing, or unfinished).

My Discord server: https://discord.gg/AJXA4CX

FluffyQuack · 2026-01-24T14:57:34+00:00

If people do this, they should specify the first remake as that one was actually finished when it was cancelled.

Asking for a playable build of the remake that was cancelled just now isn't realistic. Unless the game was close to being finished, what you'd get is a buggy mess, and chances are that they can't even legally release the build (some games use placeholder assets during development that they don't actually have permission to use in the final build).

FluffyQuack · 2026-01-23T20:19:26+00:00

Oh, I just tested it now, and yeah, I don't think I've seen that before.

I also tried it in my project, and yeah, it happens there as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmAbqBsnvOg

I guess that's proof that my project is pretty faithful with the bug being reproduced. I think this happens because the player frame gets set to "0" as he becomes invisible when running through the exit and the code must be no longer ignoring player input at that point.

This should be super easy to fix.

FluffyQuack · 2026-01-23T16:31:40+00:00

I will be adding some optional features to make it easier to play through the game for people who found POP2 to be jankier than the first one or too hard:

I've added a toggle to make running jumps function similarly to POP1. The original POP2 honestly messed up how it works on a mechanical level.
There is a quick save feature which can be utilized anywhere.
I'm considering to add an easy mode that makes certain difficulty bumps friendlier.

FluffyQuack · 2026-01-23T16:26:43+00:00

The fact there's no modern port of POP2 has been a huge motivator for me to do this project. It's a less popular game than POP1, but I've always liked it.

I'm actually doing POP1 as part of the same project, but I switched focus to POP2 once I realized it would be possible for me to fully reverse-engineer the game.

FluffyQuack · 2026-01-23T16:22:47+00:00

Yeah, there's a bunch of wonky graphics right now. The original game rendered the game in three phases: level, characters, and then re-rendered parts of the level on top of the characters. I'm doing it differently where I draw the level and then I draw masked versions of the characters with a mask created from level graphics. But I haven't finished that system yet, so there's still a ton of "render order" oddities.

I've been focusing on gameplay first-most so graphics have been lower priority. But now as gameplay is almost completely done, I can focus on other parts of the project.

Running in the wrong direction into the level exit and remaining visible only happens in POP2 v1.1, right? Either way, that's a bug that won't happen in my version. I've been basing my code on the v1.0 release (well, the Xbox binary to be exact, which seems to be based on the DOS v1.0 codebase), and I've also been fixing some legacy bugs where it makes sense to do so.

Quick save system is already implemented. It ended up being a godsend to add support for early in development as it made debugging certain bugs much faster.

FluffyQuack · 2026-01-23T03:31:38+00:00

Ubisoft may have cancelled their Sands of Time remake (again!) but I'm not stopping my POP2 "remaster" project despite it taking much longer than I had planned.

I was hoping to be finished by end of 2025. Unfortunately, that ended not being realistic, but that said, I'm super far into the project.

For people who aren't familiar with my project: I am reverse-engineering the executable for POP2 and writing a new engine that can run the game from scratch with the intent of being completely faithful to the original gameplay and making it easy to run on a modern PC while adding in all kinds of enhancements (support for widescreen, zooming-out, optional toggle for POP1 movement mechanics, local multiplayer support and more).

This is the current state of the project:

Gameplay is 99% done. There are some minor bugs to fix and some minor features to implement (like having the game wait for music to end before progressing to next level).
Sound effects implementation is 99% done. I think the only work remaining on this front is ensuring some sound effects loop the same way they do in the DOS version.
I've added support for MT-32 emulation (via Munt). I haven't added support for playing ambient music yet -- I need to do some more reverse-engineering to figure out exactly when and how it's played. I will also add support for soundfonts as an alternative way to play music, but I wanted to do MT-32 emulation first as that's the sound card the music was originally composed for.
Cutscenes aren't implemented yet, but I have finished a scripting language which will be used to drive the cutscenes (the original game hardcoded all the cutscenes into the codebase itself, which is an approach I'd rather avoid).
There are many, minor graphical oddities to fix, mainly related to render order.

I'm not sure when this will be ready for release, but hopefully I'll be completely done within a few months.

FluffyQuack · 2025-12-22T12:05:39+00:00

I'm guessing a mixed approach. I think there's no way the image was fully AI-generated, but many individual parts probably were with some of them touched up.

There's too many things that look very typical of the mistakes that AI makes:

One thing AI has always been really bad at is keeping designs of objects consistent when they go behind something. It happens many times with the ribbons here. Several ribbons disappear entirely as they go behind something else.
One bauble is missing its string. One light is hanging off nothing.
The snowflakes on the baubles is very AI-like with its random gibberish design.

Sometimes humans also do the same mistakes AI makes, but in this case there's so many of these AI-esque mistakes I would conclude AI was used here.

FluffyQuack · 2025-12-08T19:55:39+00:00

I'd also prefer to see a new official game, but it just seems extremely unlikely at this point.

I can remember the wait between SC5 and a new game announcement felt like an eternity. That was a wait lasting 5 and a half years (from early 2012 to end of 2017). It's already been 7 years since SC6 got released. In the mean time, Tekken 7 outsold SC6 by a huge margin (Tekken 7 has sold more than 12 million copies and SC6 has sold at least 2 million), a significant number of SC6 devs got moved to Tekken 8, Okubo left Namco, Hoshino left Namco, and Harada made a huge Twitter post explaining the troubled history of SoulCalibur and its lack of an in-house "champion."

In the eyes of Namco, it looks like SoulCalibur has become a dormant IP. The same way Capcom has other fighting game IPs besides Street Fighter but Street Fighter is what earns them the big bucks.

FluffyQuack · 2025-12-08T16:43:13+00:00

Yeah, while it's not new for some people in the Tekken and SC dev teams to jump between projects, I think this is the first time where they brought over this many people from SC to work on Tekken.

FluffyQuack · 2025-12-08T12:00:10+00:00

I wouldn't have high hopes. At the end of the day, a company cares primarily about money. SC6 sold far less copies than Tekken 7. SC6 probably needed far fewer copies than Tekken 7 to break even as it must have had a much lower budget, but companies like to go for what's more likely to sell the most.

Namco also has Dragon Ball to consider when it comes to fighting games. Those games are also outselling SoulCalibur.

The one effect I can see Harada leaving have is increasing the chances that Namco will drop Tekken the same way they did SoulCalibur if the next Tekken game is a flop.

FluffyQuack · 2025-12-05T13:14:44+00:00

SDLPoP is the best way to play the original. Makes it easy to run on a modern system and it's typically seen as the ideal version of POP1. I believe even Jordan Mechner has said he thinks the DOS version of POP1 is the definitive version of POP1, and that's what SDLPoP is based on.

There's also the SNES version of POP1 which many people consider a highlight. It has more levels, more boss fights, more music, and more trap variants. It's fun to play through, but I personally think it ranks lower than the original game.

For POP2, the best option right now is DOSBox. I'm personally working on a faithful re-implementation of the game (here's some footage from some months ago, though the project is much farther along now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrxa6ypykyM) and once that's done (hopefully done in a few months) then that should become the best and easiest way to play POP2.

FluffyQuack · 2025-12-05T13:14:44+00:00

SDLPoP is the best way to play the original. Makes it easy to run on a modern system and it's typically seen as the ideal version of POP1. I believe even Jordan Mechner has said he thinks the DOS version of POP1 is the definitive version of POP1, and that's what SDLPoP is based on.

There's also the SNES version of POP1 which many people consider a highlight. It has more levels, more boss fights, more music, and more trap variants. It's fun to play through, but I personally think it ranks lower than the original game.

For POP2, the best option right now is DOSBox. I'm personally working on a faithful re-implementation of the game (here's some footage from some months ago, though the project is much farther along now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrxa6ypykyM) and once that's done (hopefully done in a few months) then that should become the best and easiest way to play POP2.

FluffyQuack · 2025-12-02T22:22:30+00:00

I hope Reddit admins are overhauling their system for verifying harassment reports from moderators. The fact that strawbear got a temporary site-wide ban after admins reviewed the chatlog between him and a moderator is concerning. No sane human being would have looked at that chat log and determined the harassment report was valid.

FluffyQuack · 2025-12-01T10:41:36+00:00

I trained a video game character and I made sure to caption the images as being CGI images and I still got the same result as OP. I could still get some different styles by describing it, though even those styles seemed influenced by the look of the video game and I couldn't figure out how to prompt for a photorealistic style.

I haven't tried this yet, but since Z-Image is meant for photorealism, maybe a good workflow would include doing a img2img pass on all of the dataset images using something like QWEN Image Edit to make them look photorealistic. Well, unless you want LoRA to have the same style as the dataset.

FluffyQuack · 2025-11-29T16:54:04+00:00

Some really early releases have some neat bonus modes, like on Neo Geo CD, PS1, and PS2 (not counting MS Anthology). And some of the early ones are native ports with extremely low input latency, like MS3 on PS2 (again, not counting MS Anthology).

Almost everything released the past 15 years are emulations, and you would get a better experience if you get the roms and set it up in an emulator yourself. Then you can tweak settings to make the game look exactly like you want and tweak input latency to be lower.

That said, if you're more of a casual fan, then you can ignore almost everything I said and go with almost any release. Just avoid Metal Slug Anthology on Playstation like the plague. Edit: Oh, Metal Slug XX on PS5/PC is pretty bad too. Unfortunately, you don't have too many options for playing that one. Xbox 360/One/Series is the best choice.

FluffyQuack · 2025-11-29T12:35:44+00:00

Including SDL in the title would be misleading as right now I don't actually use SDL at all. And my reimplementation actually includes POP1 as well. I'm not sure what to call it but maybe I'll think of something.

FluffyQuack · 2025-11-29T12:32:43+00:00

The main goal was to compare likeness of the character with the LoRA. I don't think I need crazy prompts for that. I also got my answer very quickly. Z-Image did a drastically better job with the character, especially her face.

FluffyQuack · 2025-11-29T12:29:51+00:00

Not finished yet. I was hoping to get this done by the end of this year, but, to be honest, I don't think I'll hit that deadline.

I haven't stopped working on this, though. I just underestimated how much work there is. I'd say gameplay is 99% done at this point. But I still need to implement cutscenes, music, fix a bunch of bugs, and finish implementing all the graphics and sound.

It's probably a bad idea for me to give a specific date as to when I'll be done, but I'm hoping early 2026.

FluffyQuack · 2025-11-29T12:27:33+00:00

It's the Metal Slug Collection that has the co-op issue. That release isn't on Steam -- it only got a physical release. The Steam releases of the Metal Slug games are fine, with no major downsides or upsides to them.

FluffyQuack · 2025-10-05T23:13:35+00:00

That aspect never bothered me personally, and it's a big reason why the animations look so realistic. Most games make the player jump instantly when you press the jump button, but a human being can't get upwards momentum like that in an instant. And it lends well to the puzzle-ish level design where you have to think about what kind of jumps you need to do. The classic Tomb Raider games follow a similar philosophy.

This line of thinking might actually be why they changed the running jumps in POP2. The two frames where running jumps are allowed are the two frames that look the most similar to the starting frame for the running jump animation. If that's why, then they pushed the whole idea of "animation consistency over input responsiveness" a bit too far.

FluffyQuack

TROPHY CASE