Scott T: The Blog
11H Cursors - Part 2
Posted Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 12:57pm by ScottTagged: programming, scummvm
2 comments
After some questioning of my original logic, another look at the disassembly revealed I'd misinterpreted a few bits and pieces wrongly. A short time later, and we get cursors without missing pixels =)
Still no alpha-blending, so the black edges are still visible and the hand isn't see-through, but it makes it a lot easier to navigate through the mansion.
Pointing the Way
Posted Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 11:20am by ScottTagged: games, programming, scummvm
2 comments
In a combination of getting my mind off of study, and giving clone2727 no reason for not posting Riven videos - see the IRC logs (at around [15:00]) for explanation - you can now see where the mouse is located in 11H (and the other GroovieV2 games).
There still needs to be a little bit of work done though. For some reason that I'm yet to determine, some pixels of the cursors are still missing (more obvious in the full-sized images).
Blending is still not supported, although how to apply the blending has been worked out. Currently I'm assuming the cursor will always be over the top of a black background, which works well when it is (like the above) but not so well for when it isn't.
And as much as the above image doesn't show it, they are animated although the transition between hand direction isn't implemented yet.
Beating JPEG
Posted Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 11:03pm by ScottTagged: games, programming, scummvm
2 comments
One of the main sticking points for working on The 11th Hour recently (ignoring lack of time) has been the still frames within ROQ files. Although seemingly trivial within T7G, 11H uses more complex/advanced image compression for both video and stills. The video frames have been working for a while with some very minor glitches however the still frames use JPEG, and it's hard to find a decent documentation source. Never-the-less, some work had been done prior to now by clone2727 (for Mohawk) and jvprat which I obtained last week and then became rather obsessed with fixing =P
From rather simple beginnings, there were some rather critical issues to be fixed first (ie, missing functionality) which rapidly pushed towards a greyscale image.
Fiddling here and there resulted in a vast number of -ish improvements until a breakthrough resulted in the following:
All the AC components of the image seemed fine so after fixing an issue with the DC values, success was reached. Five minutes of tinkering to add JPEG to the 16bpp branch and we have the final image, rendered in RGB.
For those interested in the progress shots, the (semi-permanent) gallery has many ways of not to decode a JPEG.
Decisions (part 2)
Posted Sun, Jun 07, 2009 at 7:17pm by ScottTagged: this-site
2 comments
After all the input in response to my last post (*cough*), I've gone for the slightly easier option of throwing the 5 most recent tweets over on the right column. Still to-do is adding a relative time-stamp similar to what Twitter shows (I have the absolute time stored in the database - just need to display it) and some minor graphical fiddling since it doesn't look "right". It's also on a 1-hour update schedule so as to not upset the delicate balance of cpu-load in a shared-hosting situation so updates to twitter (and this blog rss feed) will be delayed by up to an hour rather than being manually tripped. I also fiddled around with the column contents so all the links are now over on the left, and the lack of white space now makes the site feel "busy". *sigh*
Nothing quite like procrastination...
Decisions
Posted Sat, May 23, 2009 at 11:57pm by ScottTagged: spam, this-site
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I've recently picked myself up a Twitter account, and am currently investigating options to display it on this site somewhere. Current options are either to place it in a box on either left or right column, however I'm contemplating the option to inline with my blog stream as well. Any thoughts on this? Obviously the RSS feed will only show blog updates, however a separate feed with Twitter updates could be added later down the track.
On another note, I've noticed the spam count for comments has basically stopped for the last few months - the only thing I can remember changing was locking comments on one blog post, although these were re-enabled a month ago. Not that I'm complaining =P
Phew... 6 lattes, 2 long blacks, and a hot choc. :)