Still memory-heavy in the end though, even if they run reasonably fast.

Game engines I've written in Java vs C/C++ are night and day in terms of their memory footprint, for what would be obvious reasons to you. (To non-programmers, look up garbage collection in programming). Yeah, when I hear commercial game developers touting the strengths of Unity and balk at the performance concerns, I just can't believe it. Anything I ever run in Unity runs worse than *anything* written without a behemoth framework, .NET and managed code, and C#. The price you pay for convenience I suppose. The latest case-in-point was the Underworld Ascendant team.

The JVM from today is quite different from the one from 10-20 years ago. And we have more cores, so garbage collecting shouldn't lock it up. Yes, there are downsides also, but there also are advantages (mainly that you don't have to worry about object ownership: in C/C++ it's a constant worry who allocates a chunk and who deallocates it. Nowadays though smart pointers mostly solve this).

I tried it and I still prefer playing it in DOSBox but from what I have played, this is the closest to an engine port someone has achieved for this game. It is near close to the real deal, and I imagine that once the creator does more work it will be perfect.

Apparently not. I can accept anything (any bugs i mean) but the wide screen mode made of streched 4:3 normal mode is blasphemous: it's against gamer's logic, it's against Tchernobog!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHcUJyoFFNI

please let me know if it's fake, but it's unplayable for me in this state

Sadly it is true, but if you use the 4:3 equivalent for your resolution it should look fine. My case in 1080p, 1440x1080.

Probably he stretches the viewport and the textures/levels are designed for 4:3.

The main goal is to fix as many bugs as possible till the port is fully playable. Non-crucial stuff like widescreen support, voxels, and better renderer will come later.

So you're the dev behind the port. Welcome and nice job.

No, but I know him and what he's up to right now.
Just wanted to let you know that he's working hard on improving his port, and there are still a lot of things to be fixed and added, so some things that are less important may take a while to be implemented.

The point is it needs to be done, and as the adage goes "Ain't no such thing as a free lunch..."

The headaches of pointer deallocation?... Kids these days... <shakes head>

Not of pointer deallocation, but ownership. And trust me, I've written lots of C/C++ code in my life. The problems that arise is when buffers are passed around between threads/objects etc. Who owns it? Who should deallocate? It can lead to lots of interesting problems.

I tried the latest build last night and the sound problems are gone. (I saw some graphical glitching at the start of Cryptic Passage though.) There's now a nice launcher too.