V-CRUISE: Unknown game variant & gameplay issues for Schizm: Mysterious Journey (English CD)

[mystrw1]

Game - Schizm: Mysterious Journey
Game Engine - V-Cruise
Game Language - English
Game Version - CD
ScummVM Version - 2.8.0git5090-gb4d83e43da1 (May 29 2023 23:15:54)
Laptop OS - Win 10

Hello. I gave the CD version of Schizm: Mysterious Journey a try and, as expected based on the recent announcement only mentioning DVD & digital version support, received the following error message when trying to add the game to SCUMMVM :

The game in 'Schizm\' seems to be an unknown game variant.

Please report the following data to the ScummVM team at https://bugs.scummvm.org/ along with the name of the game you tried to add and its version, language, etc.:

Matched game IDs for the vcruise engine: schizm-win

{"0001_a.wav", 0, "374d93abc3422840623acc618ecb2b1e", 1553784},
{"Schizm.exe", 0, "24bb1831a53b3969d9d1a9302740de4a", 368640},

I added the game to SCUMMVM anyway...

I wanted to note the following gameplay issues experienced while playing the game (for any future CD version SCUMMVM support development efforts...)

• Although the game's title is displayed in the upper left corner of the menu screen, no text is displayed on the selection "pads" on the screen. All of the selection pads work, though, because I can access New Game, Load, Settings, Credits and Quit actions properly. Text is then displayed normally (and voice-overs occur...) on the subsequent storyline screens...
• Similarly, no text is displayed on the selection "pads" located across the top of the gameplay screen when moused-over. Again, all of the selection pads work properly.
• No text is displayed on any of the the individual options screens (Help/Load/Save/Settings/Quit) either. I CAN see the Sound/Music check boxes (both checked) and sliders (adjustable/working) and the "Subtitles" checkbox (checked) on the "Settings" screen but no text (including the "Return" text that's supposed to be in the lower right corner on every screen...)
• No subtitles are displayed in the bottom, black "inventory" bar of the gameplay screen when voice-overs occur. (As mentioned, Subtitles are "checked" on the Settings screen...)
• This situation kinda reminds me of the missing text display issues encountered while trying to play DarK Side of the Moon/Temujin natively on 64 bit Win 10.

Hope this info. might help in the future.

[elasota]

It sounds like the text data failed to load. English text data is normally in Log/Speech01.txt, and if it can't figure out what the default language is, then it should try to use English.

I added some better fallback behavior and diagnostics, so you can try again with the next build. If that still doesn't work, can you please attach the error log? Also, can you try other languages and see if any of them work?

[mystrw1]

Hey! You nailed it, sir. I only find one "Speech" file in the game's "Log" directory, which is "Speech00.txt". To be safe, I opened the file and saved as "Speech01.txt". Re-started the game in SCUMM and all text and subtitles now display as they should. Thank you...

Does this company use a non-standard method of naming their speech files? Does SCUMM need to make any type of change to compensate for this file naming convention ... or is simply renaming the Speech file to expected the proper fix...?

Problem solved (I think...?). Thanks again for your help/effort...

[elasota]

Normally Speech00.txt is Polish, so this seems like an unusual configuration. I'll make some changes to have it pick up Speech00.txt if it can't find the one it's expecting.

[elasota]

Fallback loading of Speech00.txt should be fixed by 389594e9ec140eddcfe9e79a49c0e5f6720a839e

Detection of the English CD-ROM version should be fixed by 920308f877b03194c6f9f9cd5de06c664b565fbe