[Scummvm-devel] Detecting patched games / SCI bug reports

[M. Kiewitz]

> Fair enough on the fan-games! But I am not sure how you
> come to the "most of those" conclusion: Looking at random
> non-assigned SCI bugs, and excluding fan-made ones (and even
> demos), most of them seem to be uncommented, or have at most
> comments by the submitter or by somebody who says "me too"
> :). 
> 
> Anyway, here is a more extensive list of examples. Of
> course, the numbers of bugs that were addressed, or even
> fixed, is also huge, and the SCI folks are doing a truly
> heroic task right now. They just could need more helping
> hands, I'd say.

The problem with sci is that it's getting more and more complicated to fix tiny things. First you need to find out, if it's really just occuring in ScummVM SCI, you then need to go through sierra sci to find out what's going wrong. If our implementation is really incorrect, you can't fix it immediately. You need to go through all sorts of other interpreter versions just to figure out, when it was changed. Helping hands are nice, but we are now at a state, where it's getting really difficult to fix most of the bugs w/o introducing regressions. For example - just fixing the "I'm melting" sound issue in sq1 required me to go to several "special" places in multiple other games, just to find out how sierra sci behaves in those other cases.

Still getting help on some things like bisecting a known regression would be nice.

Just to quickly comment on those bugs:

> #3034465: ECOQUEST2: Audio Irregularities

I already know that some games even play too many notes on the sierra logo. Anyway, that's a type of bug that isn't important at all. And replying with "I know of some other similar issue" doesn't help anyone.

> #3034974: SCI: Music out of tune after loading a save

this is some issue that may get solved by a bigger change when seeking music that is to not send out all stuff directly to the device, but instead remembering last notes etc. and then just send the latest stuff to the midi device/driver. This would actually solve our current "fast-forward" on real mt32 problem, but it's hard to implement. Again replying with "may get solved by xxx" won't help the user at all

> #3034714: KQ5CD: ScummVM freezes in dark forest

is supposingly quite complicated to solve, still not gamebreaking.

> #3036756: QFG1 VGA: Combat buttons work only sometimes

first time i thought the user reporting this wasn't using the mouse properly or thinking that it's some hack and slash, where you just need to press the mouse button fast enough. I had no issues at all playing through qfg1vga as thief. Of course i didn't fight that much, but i also know that you can't "just" fight 2 goblins at the start, because your character is just too weak. Still it's now definitely not working at all anymore, which means it is definitely a regression and also a bisecting job.

> #3037012: LSL2: Long cutscene
> #3037036: LSL2: Crash at the airport

wanted to play through lsl2 by myself. The saves don't work and I wanted to go through that game by myself. I haven't done that for years and it's the only larry game left playing through (i even got lsl 2 early, which is quite rare, so the playthrough is required anyway).

> #3037112: ECOQUEST2: Text vanishes too quickly for shaman
> puzzle

had no time to look at it yet. Although i guess its another script speed issue, which will need patching. I'm currently patching another EQ2 issue.

> #3037126: ECOQUEST2: Graphical fade-outs act oddly

was able to reproduce this, but i don't fully understand why it's working (supposingly) differently in sierra sci. The game draws another picture, so it also sets the new palette. This new palette doesn't include most of the previous colors, so some pixels are turned to black instantly. And then it's transitioning to the new picture. Still I would need to confirm this in sierra sci, because i really don't understand why it would work in there. Maybe it's actually happening that way in sierra sci, but sierra sci does transitions much faster than we do. Again, writing this whole technical mumbo jumbo to the user won't help him a bit and also the actual bug (if it's even a bug) is not really important at all.

> #3037160: KQ4SCI: Stuck on door

afaik kq4 early. Saved game doesn't work on my version (one of the kq4 lates). Should receive early this week probably, tester may still have a different early version, in that case i have to play through it by myself.

That's the problem with having 6-7 different versions of a game, just counting the versions available on one single platform. :(

> #3037665: SQ5: Frozen Script

had no issues with the game at all, the reporting user says by himself "couldn't reproduce it". I also guess he has 1.03, which i dont have. Still, even if someone would be able to reproduce it once it would be a pain to figure out and still it could actually be a bug in the original game (which should get patched as well, but would raise the difficulty curve even more).

> #3038228: MOTHERGOOSE: Crash at the castle

this is now reported as sci1.1 as well. Before it was sci1 which i dont have (yet).

> #3038752: JONES: EGA & VGA music issues

that's one of the bugs for walter. Still I don't want to assign those, because i think its extremly impolite, especially because those people are currently on holiday. I wouldn't do that even if they were paid.

Regards