Scott T: The Blog

"P" is for Progress

Posted Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 9:45pm by Scott
Tagged: games, programming
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Thought I'd do some commentary on what's happened since those screenshots last Wednesday. I was initially going to title it "F is for Frustrating" but thought I'd let the images do the talking, but since then I think I've gotten things under control. Firstly, it turns out the massive slowdowns was due to the inefficient method of LZSS decompression I'd used. After switching that over, the frames flew along quite nicely. I had also decided to tidy up the code by a rewrite using XNA which is where the graphical glitches came in. For the most part they were just logic issues ("<" rather than ">" and so on) but after some tweaking, I was getting more and more frequent crashes!

I'm not completely sure where these were coming but after re-rewriting back to the trusty ol' SdlDotNet (and some complaining about going round in circles) I appear to now have a very stable executable :D In other areas, basic load/save functions exist although names don't work yet. Mouse interaction works although I'm not sure when to remove some of the hotspots which can lead to glitches when clicked on. Also, although puzzles work (see below - the lighter squares represent a hotspot) the transparencies relating to piece movements currently don't.

Spookypeanut hasn't been idle either with t7gre either with decoding of the script file formats allowing much of this progress to occur. The ScummVM Groovie engine that he started on has also gained much of this same functionality thanks to the work of jvprat :)

Hopefully more progress follows soon.


Wordless Wednesday (Just)

Posted Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 11:58pm by Scott
Tagged: games, programming
2 comments

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:s !!!


Pushing for Performance

Posted Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 1:10am by Scott
Tagged: games, programming, ssc
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After the recent work by spookypeanut on the Groovie engine for ScummVM, I spent a little bit of time trying to overcome these performance issues using the SdlDotNet implementation. Unfortunately, it seems things aren't much better than last time although I managed to break things in the process. Initially, I wasn't incrementing the surface pointer correctly followed by incorrect colour assignments. I got there in the end although there's still some minor opcode fill issues for the VDX files as shown on the 4th shot below - notice the rather jagged bottom of the "photo" in the book?

[[img|/images/gallery/4/77_med.jpg]][[img|/images/gallery/4/78_med.jpg]][[img|/images/gallery/4/79_med.jpg]][[img|/images/gallery/4/80_med.jpg]]

I might trial using pointers with the XNA framework next to see if that makes any noticeable difference. I've also noticed many searches for T7G and Vista coming via my blog - to those who read this, you can try out dosbox or the windows patch although neither were particularly stable for me.

I've also been working on V3 of this website as rather than uni work. Things are mostly ready in the front-end (excluding image gallery) and I'll update this site once I finalise it. The back-end will need more work for a few of the less commonly changed settings but I don't want to delay the upgrade. I'm working on a new theme for it as well but short on ideas - the progress so far is still looking a little drab.

Enjoy your weekend everyone :)


The 7th Guest for Vista: An Update

Posted Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 8:36pm by Scott
Tagged: games, programming
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Unfortunately I haven't done a lot on this project recently as I've hit a bit of a stand still. The performance issues haven't really been looked at, primarily because it isn't my number 1 concern for the project yet, but rather trying to work out how the Groovie engine actually functions.

To try and achieve this, I fired up Notepad++ (Portable version) with the hex-editor plug-in to try and nut out the format. While I don't have much to report, I thought I'd note down what I've found so far. So far I've only really looked into script.grv. And even then, only at the bottom part of it where a heap of .grv files are listed.

Example section of script.grv

 3F jh.grv \n    2C AB 17 08 2D 00 00 00 44 00 00 45 00 00 \n    1A 02 01 B0 02 3E 17 00 15 0B 3E \n    1A 02 01 B1 0B 3E 15 AB 17 \n

Each .grv file block seems to begin with 3F followed by the file name (with terminating null) followed by 2C AB ... 45 00 00. This appears to terminate the "header". The following bytes (1A 02 01) seem to represent a property block with the property type being represented by the B0/B1/B2 byte. The next 2 bytes indicate where in the file the next block (either 1A or 3F depending on which is next) starts. The rest of the info is currently unknown although the offset within the file of the next 3F block seems to be repeatedly mentioned as well.

I'll be sure to post when I work out anything else.


Apache and Vista's Symlinks

Posted Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 2:26pm by Scott
Tagged: programming, ssc, vista
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For those not in the know, Vista does support a form of symbolic link (also known as a symlink). While these seem to be used all the time in *nix systems, this is one of the first Windows based systems with them, however they seem to not be flawless.

Now to the point of this post - I'm currently dabbling around with V3 of SSC and had created a symlink from my workspace (C:\Users\<blah>\workspace\SSC\trunk) into Apache's wwwroot for simplicity (c:\wwwroot) of debugging. While this worked perfectly initially, the .htaccess file worked wasn't being parsed :s

I'm not certain of where the problem lies in this instance but it seems that the <DirectoryMatch> directive for the wwwroot wasn't catching the SSC symlink but then again, neither was adding it's true path (the "c:\users\...") one. Unfortunately it seemed the only way around this that I could find quickly was to remove the initial security added in the default install.

Is there anyone else who has been bitten by this and found a better solution?


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