Monday, May 12, 2008

(almost) Glitchless Boozooks

Someday I am going to translate that long letter of mine from Russian to English and tell the world true story of gob engine in ScummVM.

It used to be called dso module, and we are still not sure how it was called originally. In these days DrMcCoy drives most of the effort, he is our expert in this engine, dealing with its both graphical and code-wise weirdness.

Gob3 support was lightning fast because there are not much changes between those generations of the engine, but Woodruff made Sven stuck. Plainly stuck for several months. He could not dare to decipher hundreds of cryptic routines which deal with VMD movies playback, and since Woodruff is all about running those VMDs all over the screen, the progress was just zero.

However, recently there happened to be a breakthrough. He decided to ignore most of that code after he found out that it deals mostly with caching, as original game was intended to run directly from CD-ROM. After ignoring that and adding like 700 lines of code, he finally figured out most of the differences and is routinely moves forward since that. Among the things which were implemented recently are scrolling, text positioning, proper hotspots, sound in object videos and saving/loading.

As a side effect, The Last Dynasty intro is now playable, so it was added to detector. It may happen that we will see Woodruff completable (albeit with glitches) in nearest time.

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