Another two weeks, and another milestone has been reached with the Hopkins FBI engine. The first play-through of the full Linux game has now been completed! All the blocking bugs have been resolved, and I've been able to finish the game.
That's not to say there aren't still some various graphical errors and things that still need to be tackled. Only just last night, for example, I fixed a particularly nasty series of graphical glitches with a lift scene that turned out to be a simple case of not clearing a flag when the animation manager class is created. So much grief trying to track down what looked like massive frame refresh issues or bugs in the animation player code. Thank goodness I was able to play the original inside gdb and easily set breakpoints to find out what values were set in the screen buffers, and when.
One of the biggest remaining graphical issues occurs near the end of the game. I'm not going to spoil anything, but you end up controlling multiple characters. There are currently issues with the icons for changing character not appearing all the time and, likewise, the chacters not always appearing on screen when your player character is in the same scene as them. I'm likely going to look into fixing them next.
After that it will be time to begin a more detailed play through to see if any noticeable differences can be seen between the original running in Linux against our game engine.. identifying and fixing any remaining minor issues as they occur. There may even be some further chance to fix issues in the original. For example, certain special scenes when you can access your inventory via the icon in the top left corner, the original doesn't let you use the 'I' key like you can in most other scenes in the game. That particular problem made me think there was something wrong with the ScummVM engine, before I realised you couldn't do it in the original, either. :)
Apart from that, we still need to start looking into supporting the PC version, since it's a lot more common than the Linux version. Hopefully we can get the sound decoder issues sorted out, and start testing that version in earnest as well.
Speaking of the PC version, I've mentioned previously that whilst I had the game, I'd never previously gotten around to playing it. And playing it now as the ScummVM engine was developed, how bizarre I found the game. What starts as what seems to be a straightforward cop-style investigation game rapidly becomes more and more bizarre. That was brought home when I was watching a play through of the PC version from Youtube, which I was using to check how the graphics are meant to look. It seems like the original PC version, in an underwater base you have to explore, they grafted on a clone of Wolfenstein 3D!
That's right. Whereas in the Linux version you are just shown a map and can select from various destinations, it looks like the PC version forces the player into a first person shooter and makes them battle their way from area to area. I've gotta say that whilst overall the game is fairly good, it's no longer just merely weird.. it's down-right freaky. :) Needless to say, there's every likelihood that we won't be implementing it. We'll likely just use the existing Linux version code, and provide a similiar map image as the Linux version.
And of course, there'll still be various cleanups to do. There's various memory leaks identified by Valgrind that we'll need to look into. And there's also general code cleanup, which both Strangerke and myself have made somewhat of a start on.
DreamMaster.
That's not to say there aren't still some various graphical errors and things that still need to be tackled. Only just last night, for example, I fixed a particularly nasty series of graphical glitches with a lift scene that turned out to be a simple case of not clearing a flag when the animation manager class is created. So much grief trying to track down what looked like massive frame refresh issues or bugs in the animation player code. Thank goodness I was able to play the original inside gdb and easily set breakpoints to find out what values were set in the screen buffers, and when.
One of the biggest remaining graphical issues occurs near the end of the game. I'm not going to spoil anything, but you end up controlling multiple characters. There are currently issues with the icons for changing character not appearing all the time and, likewise, the chacters not always appearing on screen when your player character is in the same scene as them. I'm likely going to look into fixing them next.
After that it will be time to begin a more detailed play through to see if any noticeable differences can be seen between the original running in Linux against our game engine.. identifying and fixing any remaining minor issues as they occur. There may even be some further chance to fix issues in the original. For example, certain special scenes when you can access your inventory via the icon in the top left corner, the original doesn't let you use the 'I' key like you can in most other scenes in the game. That particular problem made me think there was something wrong with the ScummVM engine, before I realised you couldn't do it in the original, either. :)
Apart from that, we still need to start looking into supporting the PC version, since it's a lot more common than the Linux version. Hopefully we can get the sound decoder issues sorted out, and start testing that version in earnest as well.
Speaking of the PC version, I've mentioned previously that whilst I had the game, I'd never previously gotten around to playing it. And playing it now as the ScummVM engine was developed, how bizarre I found the game. What starts as what seems to be a straightforward cop-style investigation game rapidly becomes more and more bizarre. That was brought home when I was watching a play through of the PC version from Youtube, which I was using to check how the graphics are meant to look. It seems like the original PC version, in an underwater base you have to explore, they grafted on a clone of Wolfenstein 3D!
That's right. Whereas in the Linux version you are just shown a map and can select from various destinations, it looks like the PC version forces the player into a first person shooter and makes them battle their way from area to area. I've gotta say that whilst overall the game is fairly good, it's no longer just merely weird.. it's down-right freaky. :) Needless to say, there's every likelihood that we won't be implementing it. We'll likely just use the existing Linux version code, and provide a similiar map image as the Linux version.
And of course, there'll still be various cleanups to do. There's various memory leaks identified by Valgrind that we'll need to look into. And there's also general code cleanup, which both Strangerke and myself have made somewhat of a start on.
DreamMaster.
