Notes about ScummVM's Gob engine
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 ;).
Just a quick overview of the latest developments for people interested in Fascination (I know you’re out there, you’ve been bothering me for some time now 😉 ).
Well, here’s my final follow-up to the dithering stuff.
I actually grew a bit weary of fiddling with it, so pardon me that this post won’t be long. This will also be my last one about this, too… Continue reading “Shallow Beauty”
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.
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”
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”
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…