Planet SoC

Hi! Google Summer of Code 2008 just ended and I thought that it’d be good to make a new blog entry about where I got during the last days of GSoC and talk a bit about the overall experience.
Status update
The problem I was having with player movement last time really was just that, the player movement routine (executePlayerInput) was incomplete. Once I reverse engineered Operation Stealth’s version of it and modified ScummVM’s current implementation (r33872) of that function a bit I got the swimming working and I could get to the girl and free her:

I’m throwing a pretty crazy end-of-GSoC party over here, so I thought I’d post some PICTARZ (TM) of the GUI as it’s on the branch right now, because I’ve been promising them for quite a while. That’s pretty much it folks.

That’s it, folks.
Google’s Summer of Code is officially over (it’s been over for about 20 minutes now). I thought I’d write the mandatory long post where I talk about my experiences during the summer and all that. So here it goes.
The ghost of The Old GUI
I obviously had lots of fun during the project, and I knew since the beginning I was going to enjoy the experience. I applied with 3 projects for GSoC and the three of them involved hefty amounts of graphics programming because basically that’s the only thing I can spend a whole summer working on.

So… yes, right. Doc is up. And by doc I mean documentation. And by up I mean that a first draft of the Theme Format documentation has been uploaded and can be seen here. It even has PICTARZ, so feel free to take a peek and tell me what do you think I could improve (apart from the obvious missing sentences and the hundreds of typos). And don’t tell me I can improve PICTARZ because they are the most awesome shit you’ll ever see in a XML format documentation. EVAR.
Also, in case you don’t know, I have been working my ass off this last week. Yesterday I dropped all traces of the legacy GUI code from my SVN branch (if that’s not a project milestone, then I don’t know what is it).

So… yes, right. Doc is up. And by doc I mean documentation. And by up I mean that a first draft of the Theme Format documentation has been uploaded and can be seen here. It even has PICTARZ, so feel free to take a peek and tell me what do you think I could improve (apart from the obvious missing sentences and the hundreds of typos). And don’t tell me I can improve PICTARZ because they are the most awesome shit you’ll ever see in a XML format documentation. EVAR.
Also, in case you don’t know, I have been working my ass off this last week. Yesterday I dropped all traces of the legacy GUI code from my SVN branch (if that’s not a project milestone, then I don’t know what is it).

Hi! I’ve been fixing lots of things in Operation Stealth. I started using Valgrind because the Cine engine corrupted memory and I didn’t know where to start fixing it. I’ve now got Valgrind running ScummVM under Ubuntu 8.04 which I’m running in VirtualBox. A virtual machine (VirtualBox) running a virtual machine (Valgrind), yay! One could think that it’d be dead slow, but actually it runs ok.

I’m exhausted. Really burned out. I’ve had to take a day out from coding -and I spent it writing documentation, which is sad enough.
The theme format documentation is coming along nicely. After that, there’s this TODO list:
- Finish builtin theme.
- g1x dialog boxes/options
- Theme loading: Theme names, theme headers.
- Button corners too big, widgets gigantic
- No shadows on top of the widgets (rework shadows engine)
- Popup widgets could use 2 triangles
It’s a bit of work but I have the whole week. Unless I decide to throw my computer down the balcony. I promise there’ll be a proper update in the middle of the week, and a big “end of gsoc” post on the weekend.
I really have a hard time expressing myself in english; this documentation writing thing is giving me a serious headache.

Hi! Got through the first arcade sequence in Operation Stealth and back onto dry land :-). But it wasn’t very easy, as there were problems to overcome:

Hi! Played the 256 color PC version of Operation Stealth under ScummVM to the first arcade sequence. Found lots of bugs but only one that was a showstopper (Crash when leaving the airport) and another one that may be a showstopper (Moving in the first arcade sequence is so hard that it may be practically impossible to complete it). Fixed the former bug already but not the latter one. Here’s a list of the bugs I found:
Bugs found on first completion run try so far
#1: Verb-handling bug:
If you open the briefcase with “Operate briefcase” the operate-verb will stay chosen and then you can choose “Operate calculator” again and again etc and it becomes “Operate calculator calculator calculator…” and finally crashes.

As time to the deadline winds down, the pressure is building up. Since my focus has been on programming and dealing with the outstanding issues, I have neglected updating this blog as frequently as I would like.
As it stands, with the latest update, I believe the issues with the update cycle and timing system should be resolved. The previous revision had several problems due to the patterns or macros terminating prematurely or not stepping properly. With the revised system, song playback is handled as follows: