Gobsmacked

In the previous post, I wrote that I’ll try to give some news about Fascination progress before the summer. I tried

More seriously, the good news came very recently: in less than two weeks, with the impressive help of SylvainTV, all the versions of Fascination became playable and completable, or at least all the ones I possess.

The main thing missing currently, only used by PC versions of the game, is the AdLib player (and IMHO, the SoundBlaster sounds a lot better). There’s a wrong delay (too short) between rooms in several places of most versions. This seems to be caused by the delay required at the time to load from the floppies, and it’s easily patchable.

Last detail, the (rare) CD version still requires a tool for the STK extraction. joostp is cleaning it up, and will commit it when it’ll be in a good state.

Maybe it’s a good time now to grab your originals and send us some feedback on the game, specially if you find some of those too short delays!

Finally, the support of Fascination is showing some interesting progress! These last two weeks, the window behavior has been fixed, the hotspots correctly handled in them, and it’s now even possible to play through some levels. DrMcCoy even added a save/load function that works perfectly! There are still a lot of glitches in the floppy versions (almost none in the CD version) and it’s not completable for various reasons, depending on the platform and language concerned.

Here are some screenshots of the CD version.

Stay tuned for further news! I promise I’ll try to give some before this summer

Hey, here’s another small video, this time with Mike walking in-game (without pathfinding) and talking to Hank in the diner. Also a nice showcase for most of the remaining graphical glitches (highlighted in the annotations) :

Instead of continuing working, I’ll rather goof and play around with video capturing . So you can now gaze at some working Mike walking animations:

Just a minor update: Thanks to sev, who pointed me to the right place in the wine sources, I managed to solve the cursor inconvenience .

The problem was, of course, my own damn fault; I misunderstood the nature of cursor resources. They’re not, as I assumed, plain cursors, one by one each taking up a resource entry. Instead, there are cursor groups, each capable of possessing a variable amount of cursor images. That isn’t even a quirk of NE files, it’s like that in PE files as we well, so my complaining about the executables being in that old format doesn’t apply either. Mea culpa.

In the previous post, I mentioned an inconvenience with the cursors. Here’s the gist of it:

In Dark Seed II, the cursors are embedded into the resource part of the Windows 3.x (NE, “New Executable”) executable dark0001.exe. Specs are available on the Microsoft website, but they don’t quite match the executable, which claims that each cursor is only 32 byte big. read more »

Just on time for this blog’s first anniversary (quite scary, especially considering that there weren’t that many posts ^^) and ChristSquidmas, I come to you with a status update.

So, what have I been doing the past months? Apart from some RL stuff I’d rather not talk about, and playing Dominion (seriously, check that out, it’s really great), I didn’t do much concerning gob. Sorry. Instead, I started a new ScummVM engine, for Dark Seed II. read more »

During these last months, some titles have been added to the list of Gob-based games: Adi2, Adi4 (Addy4 in Deutsch), Adibou 2 and Playtoons games were identified as using the same engine, with various modifications of course. Documentation on the Adi educational games can be found in this wiki page.

Let’s focus on the Playtoons games! They can be separate in three categories:

- Playtoons (5 titles) contain an interactive story, an intro of some other stories available and  a construction kit. A bundle exists : it contains Playtoons 1, 3 and 5.

- Playtoons Construction Kits (3 titles) contain an intro of the 5 stories and a construction kit

- Bambou is… Bambou! It’s some kind of Limited Edition of Playtoons developed by a subsidiary of Coktel (CUC Software International) and as far as I know only released in French (nevertheless we are still searching for localized versions). It contain no construction kit.

So far, the interactive stories are fully playable (when available), with some non-blocking issues (imperfect animated icons behavior, incorrect video behavior when skipped, text not showing in some part of the Playtoons titles), and Bambou is the less imperfect of all those titles.

Hereafter are some screenshots from ScummVM. Hopefully the story modes will be fixed soon, … the construction kit will be “a bit“ harder/longer. Adi 2 too, by the way

If you want some other Playtoons screenshoots, just ask: DrMcCoy and I already bought all the French titles, 3 Deutsch titles and 2 English ones. Spanish and italian titles exist too but are either not for sell or far too expensive.

To give some other (old) news, Fascination plays now until the first screen, which is more or less playable but not achievable due to the missing implementation of the unique window system used. So it’s not hopeless, even if there was no progress during this last 2 months.

One last word concerning  Myst/Riven in general and clone2727 in particular: clone2727 thinks that nobody (except me) is interested in his splendid in-game videos. Show him he’s wrong! Show him you care and add a video request here!

Recently, I completely revamped the save system in the gob engine. To explain why that was necessary and what that means for old saves, I have to start with how script variables are handled, how saving works in the original games and how the old save system worked. read more »

For anyone following #scummvm, this is old news: Strangerke, who’s been in contact with the original Coktel Vision developers, has found out the real name of their engine. “DEV”.

Now, I happen to think that this is a bloody stupid name (no offence to the original team meant, of course). People around me seem to agree.

Also, I’ve gotten used to “gob” and this blog’s name wouldn’t work with “DEV” . Therefore, the engine in ScummVM will keep being called “gob”. For now, anyway .