Friday, June 12, 2009

Hell - Sounding better than ever

Alot happened since my last post, this probably means I should update more often. Unfortunatly Im rather the type that adds just-another-thing(tm) before bragging about it.

When I did the last post I was very motivated to improve the quality of the playback, which proved to get more and more difficult. The quality of the music posted on the 6th June was already good and what was left was implementing a few more effects Monkey Island is using and finding bugs which affected playback. Implementing new effects is rather straightforward, but some new effects suddenly caused heavy regressions aswell. I was already past the point beeing able to rely on the available opensource TFMX-Players (tfmxplay) so this meant timeconsuming reversing of the "Monkey Island" executeable. In the end the most trivial bug kept me occupied a whole day. Around the 10th June I had a Player which supports all effects Monkey Island is using.

Today I managed to enable sound support for Monkey Island, looking at the scumm-engine I initially felt totally lost. But with the help of one of the ScummVM devs (_sev) I found the hooks already waiting for my code. Its still hackish and maybe even causes problems sometimes during the game, but you can try it out for yourself: ScummVM (Win32) (use at your own risk)

Now what up next?

I found out a couple of  things while adding MI-support, for one than not only the music but also the sfx are done with TFMX. Its not documented anywhere how these are invoked and I got to reverse and add this to the player aswell. And of course improve the integration into ScummVM.

2 comments:

  1. Wow.

    Will the player code be too integrated in ScummVM or could I integrate the TFMX player in another codebase I have that needs it?

    Congrats on the fast work! :D

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  2. Yes, the goal is to have code added to ScummVM.

    Also if your code is GPL, you can use the player, just don't forget to provide proper copyright statements.

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