[Scummvm-devel] ScummVM 0.12.0: Missing builds

[Neil Millstone]

Max Horn wrote:
>
> Am 02.09.2008 um 22:32 schrieb Neil Millstone:
>>
>> Hi Max,
>
> Hi Neil!
>
Hi Max,
>>
>>
>> I would say that six weeks isn't really enough.  It took me quite a 
>> while to get a build I was happy releasing as a beta, as there were 
>> many changes and many thing broken.  Except during release time, I 
>> usually play only the Lucasarts games, so there were problems with 
>> the rest of the code that hadn't been noticed.
>>
>> After I released my first beta on Aug 12th, there were a few rounds 
>> of changes, but lots was discovered late on.  There's just too much 
>> to test, and I can't play hundreds of hours of games on my own.
>
> Certainly not! Looking at the forums, part of the problem seems to be 
> that there are many eager DS users who jump immediately on your betas; 
> but when it comes to reporting issues, there seems to be little 
> feedback (at least on the forums; maybe you get more feedback via 
> email) ?
Yes, you're quite right.  Isn't this always the case though?  Ordinary 
users just aren't good at reporting bugs in a useful way for any piece 
of software.  I suppose that if they were, Windows would be far less buggy!
> [...]
>> My current issue is that Inherit the Earth is now about 100Kb over 
>> the available memory.  This seems to be mostly code size gained since 
>> 0.11.0.  While we can't really prevent the binary from growing, I 
>> can't imagine that I'll be able to get this game working if the same 
>> happens next time.  If anyone knows how I can save 100Kb in this 
>> game, please let me know!
>
> To repeat what Filipppos wrote: This is the first time I hear about 
> this :(. Well, I assume you found out about this only recently, else 
> I'd now start with my "we need to communicate more and better" jingle 
> *g*. Anyway, now that we know, the SAGA folks can also look into the 
> issue; given that they know the engine best, they might be able to help.
>

Yes, I only discovered this in the past few days.  I found a fix which 
reduces the peak memory usage by changing how sound resources are loaded 
so that the data is not stored in memory twice, as it is now.  I'll send 
the patch for this to filippos so he can check it doesn't break 
anything.  The game seems to work fine with the patch.  The problem is, 
I'm now still about 100kb from the end of memory, which is not a good 
place to be for next time round, when the code binary size will have grown.

The thing is, I tend to assume that the engine authors may not be 
interested in fixing bugs which only show up for low-memory/low-CPU 
devices.  For an example, see the discussion on the thousands of fopen 
calls for Kyra. That was fixed in the end, but the team's initial 
response was to handle it in the backend, even though other ports were 
affected.

The DS has 4Mb of RAM.  After the code and global data has been 
allocated, there's anything between 1.9 and 2.3Mb of memory available 
for the game to allocate.  That's not very much.

Regards,

- Neil