DIRECTOR: L-ZONE: Movie not found

[angstsmurf]

L-ZONE (Windows/English): Trying to leave the controls at the first station gives the console error:

WARNING: Movie R_A:CAR_A01B does not exist!

The actual file name on the CD is /WIN_DATA/R_A/CAR_A01B.MMM

[FredPJ]

I'm not a dev, but wanted to add more information on this. I'm surprised no one else noticed this and marked the game as "Working".

The Windows version of L-Zone (I've using the V2 CD) seems to be broken, expects files in the wrong folders and files without the file extension, just like reported here by angstsmurf.

The Macintosh version works great, for the file sources it only needs the "Mac_Data" folder, "QT" folder and "L-ZONE." file.

The Windows version should only need the "WIN_DATA" folder, "QT" folder, and "L-ZONE" folder.

However the Windows version sometimes expects the folders inside "WIN_DATA" to be at the root, so for example expects "\R_A\" instead of "\WIN_DATA\R_A\".

Also, it expects some ".MMM" files to have no extension, so renaming "CAR_A01B.MMM" to "CAR_A01B." makes it work, but it shouldn't work like that.

To reproduce the bug reported here, start the game, then:
1 - Click on the L from L-ZONE
2 - Enter the door
3 - Enter the second door
4 - Turn right
5 - Enter the door
6 - Turn left
7 - Click on the desk console
8 - Click on the lower white lever at the left
9 - Click on the upper white lever at the left
10 - Click on the the black slider handle on the right, and the video and music plays
11 - Now try to click on the lower left corner of the screen to exit but it gets stuck (expects a "\R_A\CAR_A01B." file instead of the correct "\WIN_DATA\R_A\CAR_A01B.MMM"

[angstsmurf]

I don't have anything useful to add, but from following the development of the ScummVM Director driver, it is obvious that translating the original Director file paths and file names into something that ScummVM can use is a super complicated task. I don't think anyone was expecting this to be the hardest part of making Director games work.

[FredPJ]

While not a solution, the way that I found to run the Windows version without any errors is to copy all the files inside the folders from the WIN_DATA folder to the root (apparently the SHARDCST.MMM files are superfluous), rename the *.MMM files to *. and then move all the files from WIN_DATA again this time without renaming them, so you get pairs of *.MMM and *. files. This way there are no errors, although the .MMM files are of course needlessly duplicated.

[rvanlaar]

Thank you for this bug and bringing it to our attention.
The path finding is still a bit finicky.
It's noted that win_data is a directory that needs to be searched.

As FredPJ noted, the work around is to copy the files to the root of the game directory.