Eye of the Beholder spell animations lock game for ~20-30 seconds

[davidsgrogan]

On both stable 2.8.0[1] and today's daily build[2], some spell animations take 30 seconds to slowly complete, during which time the game is frozen and I have the spinning beach ball cursor when scummvm window is focused. I have a screenshot of Fireball about 10 seconds in.

Repro steps: cast Fireball or Ice Storm into a wall. If I'm able to attach my saved game file, right click on the spell book near halfway down the right side. Select 3, then Fireball.

I tried with both SDL and OpenGL graphics settings. Same result in both.

Language of game is English.

Version of game is DOS.

My OS is Mac M1.

[1] ScummVM 2.8.0 (Dec 16 2023 21:16:18)
Using SDL backend with SDL 2.28.5
Features compiled in: Vorbis FLAC MP3 TiMidity RGB zLib MPEG2 FluidSynth Theora AAC A/52 FreeType2 JPEG PNG taskbar TTS cloud (servers) ENet SDL2 TinyGL OpenGL (with shaders) OpenGL desktop only

[2] ScummVM 2.9.0git1332-g8722701a945 (Jan 1 2024 07:48:27)
Using SDL backend with SDL 2.28.4
Features compiled in: TAINTED Vorbis FLAC MP3 TiMidity RGB zLib MPEG2 FluidSynth MikMod Theora VPX AAC A/52 FreeType2 FriBiDi JPEG PNG GIF taskbar TTS cloud (servers, local) ENet SDL2 TinyGL OpenGL (with shaders) OpenGL desktop only RetroWave

[davidsgrogan]

See yellow, red, orange squares.

[davidsgrogan]

Similar problem with spells in Eye of the Beholder 2.

[athrxx]

Thanks for the report. The savegame that you attached here is from the original game, not from ScummVM. The ScummVM one has a naming pattern like this: <target id>.<3-digit-index>, e. g. 'eob.000', 'eob.001', etc. (for EOBII: 'eob2.000', 'eob2.001', etc). But if I understand correctly it always happens when you cast a fireball or an ice storm against a wall? Or does it depend on the wall distance or anything else?
I can't reproduce anything like this on my PC, so it could be platform specific. I'll try to find out whats happening here...

[davidsgrogan]

It always happens when the fireball or ice storm explodes. Making them explode against a wall is just an easy way to cause the explosion, so good for reproduction :)

Distance to wall doesn't make an appreciable difference in the slowness.

​https://youtu.be/j7FdjUPJvRI is a demo video.

Attaching a ScummVM saved game this time.

[athrxx]

Thanks. I can still only guess what the source of this issue is on MacOS. Could be our own backend or SDL or whatever. I have committed a fix which hopefully addresses the problem for you. It should be part of the autogenerated builds by tomorrow. Please check if the performance is okay, now.

[davidsgrogan]

Wow, your speculative fix worked. Thanks!

[athrxx]

Nice. Lucky on the first try :) Thanks for your feedback!