DIRECTOR: The Dark Eye progress bug

[DOSNostalgic]

In the second "chapter" of the main game, after playing through the first nightmare sequence, it's impossible to progress because one can't enter Henry's room. Instead of the door opening the transition of entering the frame is repeated.

Video here: ​https://youtu.be/8WajPHvF1Wg
Save file attached

Latest Daily build (2023-12-21)

[DOSNostalgic]

Save game at the "chapter" 2 of the game

[moralrecordings]

Thanks so much for the savegame and the video! I'm not able to reproduce this; would you be able to run ScummVM with --debugflags=lingostrict, reproduce the issue and attach the full console output? Also which platform are you running this on?

[DOSNostalgic]

Console output lingo crash

[DOSNostalgic]

Platform is Windows 10 64-bit.
Updated to build git1319-gfd75208f27d (Dec 31 2023 04:02:58)
With the flag the game now crashes when opening the door.

Full console output attached

[moralrecordings]

Nice, thank you. This has been a good reminder that I should really make lingostrict print all of the debug info...

Would you be able to do the above again, then when the debug console opens type in the following commands:

scriptframe
backtrace
disasm
var
info
cast

Then attach the console log? (Apologies in advance, the cast command is going to make it massive)

[DOSNostalgic]

New log

[DOSNostalgic]

Here you go

[moralrecordings]

Amazing. Your copy of the game appears to have a unique typo in ML.DIR cast member 2923. Inscape's custom engine has a bunch of text cast members with hand-written data structures, several of which have typos.

Would you be able to provide:

• the md5sum, size (in bytes) and date+timestamp of dkydata/dirfiles/ml.dir from the CD
• the contents of the 8629.TXT (or similar) file in the root of the CD (should list the version date and version number)
• any other information you might have about your particular release of the game (publisher, region)

[DOSNostalgic]

Aha! Well, this sure is something. Here's the thing, I'm a big Dark Eye fan, and own several releases, but I have no idea which one these files came from. These files have been migrating along my main PC for 20 years now. But for the first time in two decades I've grabbed my US big box release (the only one that I've actually kept on a shelf in my apartment) to compare, and it is indeed different. In fact, ALL the dir files are different! So I'm attaching stats for all of them. Which release this is exactly will take a bit longer to figure out.

12/07/1995  10:44 AM         8,025,932 AL.DIR
12/07/1995  10:46 AM        93,894,790 BN.DIR
12/07/1995  10:49 AM       100,279,122 CA.DIR
12/07/1995  10:51 AM       108,212,348 ML.DIR
12/07/1995  10:51 AM            72,678 NT.DIR
12/07/1995  10:52 AM         9,513,054 RD.DIR
12/07/1995  10:52 AM         2,539,576 SHARED.DIR
12/07/1995  10:54 AM        85,786,282 TH.DIR

a7d53d71fda012a436c82a05cbacc296 *AL.DIR
acd3bdd824a174296e8611a1e0740d4b *BN.DIR
20d8834d2d664c0d3a9eb6417ba0c159 *CA.DIR
9dadb464f765e7bc066cf35a0b99be2e *ML.DIR
5ea1e41cb26845f41f3a547771b69128 *NT.DIR
a5d8fd71e701e165a9bc53e45433a3bc *RD.DIR
3e9a69c0ad10c35e9bd2554eb6b852eb *SHARED.DIR
bd9d81e72b74db2bfe68ad9fc53f4b34 *TH.DIR

There's a VERSION.TXT file in the SETUP directory:

This CD contains The Dark Eye v1.0.3
11/22/95

[moralrecordings]

Huh. I think I was testing with the later Expert Software release of the game. There's no VERSION.TXT file in the setup/ directory, however there is a docs/dummy.pdf with a big Expert software logo in it, which is a bit of a tell. There is a 8629.txt in the root folder, which I think might be a ruse.

scott@hoagie:/run/media/scott/DARKEYE/dkydata/dirfiles$ md5sum *
dec8a7680990d6e8687ac741196d24e0  al.dir
0436acb810f25fb130e1c2a56cff77ee  bn.dir
77d009edbe4af73c7b08522c7f533fa5  ca.dir
c2f43fc5bb2d30e0a4bc64d59d4bc86f  ml.dir
9c62b4cff369ab91587ba68089740d12  nt.dir
2a8eb2a820fee82c407e597eccd7ef6a  rd.dir
16b7c7ccead3604f578fe17461877772  shared.dir
218a474afd414c24c2283036ea8e8ee8  th.dir
scott@hoagie:/run/media/scott/DARKEYE/dkydata/dirfiles$ ls -Alt
total 397706
-r-------- 1 scott users  85786306 Oct 22  1995 th.dir
-r-------- 1 scott users   9513010 Oct 21  1995 rd.dir
-r-------- 1 scott users     72634 Oct 21  1995 nt.dir
-r-------- 1 scott users 107123474 Oct 21  1995 ml.dir
-r-------- 1 scott users 100278750 Oct 21  1995 ca.dir
-r-------- 1 scott users  93900252 Oct 21  1995 bn.dir
-r-------- 1 scott users   8025888 Oct 21  1995 al.dir
-r-------- 1 scott users   2548860 Oct 19  1995 shared.dir

scott@hoagie:/run/media/scott/DARKEYE$ cat 8629.txt 
Version Date:  0862901
Version Number:  1.0

Re. the dates in your listing, is the ordering normal (12 June) or US (7th December)? We should probably add each version to the compatibility list, so we can track all of the unique and horrible edge cases between versions.

[DOSNostalgic]

I looked at the Expert Software release, and the game files appear to be identical to the original US big box release. There's just been a bunch of additional crap thrown in, but I assume the txt file listing it as v1.0 is correct.In the US big box release there's nothing in the root, but 3 folders. BDMASP, DKYDATA, and SETUP. Even the original manual tells you to go open the setup executable manually in the SETUP directory.

My dates are US dates MM-DD-YYYY

Edit:
I also saw a while ago that the same bug was reported for the French version in Discord. So I checked, and the French version that I had access to also has the v1.0.3 file, and the dir files are different of course.

[moralrecordings]

I've added v1.0.3 to the detection table and committed a fix for the door bug. It should show up in tomorrow's daily build (2023-01-07), would you mind confirming that I got it right?

[moralrecordings]

Fixed in ​https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/commit/2644f9a775fab4127b8c089e210c0fbdadeb320b