Category: ScummVM

bookmark_borderSome more titles based on the Gob engine

Posted on by Strangerke

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!

bookmark_borderPSA: Real Name of the Gob Engine Found

Posted on by DrMcCoy

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 ;).

bookmark_borderDemos

Posted on by DrMcCoy

Since a few days ago, ScummVM also supports a few BAT- and SCN-based non-interactive demos,
namely for Inca 2, Woodruff, Urban Runner and Playtoons. The interesting thing about them is that, strictly speaking, they’re not Gob-based, but are just either a BAT file that calls a small program for IMD playback; or a small interpreter for a simple SCN script with VMD playback capabilities. Either way, they practically just consist of IMD/VMD videos.
If you find a Coktel Vision demo that doesn’t yet work with the latest daily build of ScummVM, I’d be interested in getting my hands on it. 🙂

Sparked by the resulting demo exchange and discussion in #scummvm, sanguinehearts also set up an unified hosting site for demos (which we’ve been missing) and started uploading all demos already known to the team.
Similar to above, we’d like to get any yet unknown demos for ScummVM-supported games you might have.

bookmark_borderMore Beauties to Dither

Posted on by DrMcCoy

This is just a quick follow-up to the dithering post.

Firstly: Yeah, it’s kinda late. Unfortunately, I have been busy with RL and didn’t have much time to work on Gob.

Secondly: Sorry Seldon, but I didn’t get much out of your posts. As far as I understood, it’ll only lead to a lookup that’s far too complex for my needs. The point is a bit moot now anyways, as you can see below. But thanks all the same! 🙂

The actual reason reason for this blog entry is that I did fiddle with the code a bit, though. In some spare minutes, I’ve asked my coworkers/bosses about my problem and they’ve suggested using a more crude approximation of the distance function, namely
ABS(x1 – x2) + ABS(y1 – y2) + ABS(z1 – z2)
This would remove the need for the costly multiplication. Whether it still looks good is a thing to try out. Which I did, and it does. Continue reading “More Beauties to Dither”

bookmark_borderDithering Beauty

Posted on by DrMcCoy

As a start, I’d like to talk a bit about dithering.
When I found out that Urban Runner’s VMD use the Indeo 3 codec for video frame data, I was a bit crushed: The resulting frames are in true color (in the YUV colorspace) and ScummVM doesn’t (yet?) support a true color mode for game graphics — only paletted 8-bit colors.

So at first, to test the Indeo 3 decoder (copied from the great FFmpeg project), I just wrote the frame to files. The results looked, after fiddling a bit, like that: Continue reading “Dithering Beauty”

bookmark_borderIntroduction

Posted on by DrMcCoy

Well… Apparently, I’ve finally given in to peer pressure and started my own ScummVM-related blog… You can stop smirking like that, clone! ;P

I doubt many people will read this, but it’ll give me a place to vent when I’ve found another stupid (or vile, in many cases) thing in the disassembly of one of the Coktel Vision games. Maybe something I write here will even be educational, interesting and/or funny to some people — not very likely, but we’ll see…