SCI: LSL5: Silas blinks distractingly frequently when talking to Julius

[eriktorbjorn]

English VGA version of the game

In the cutscene where Silas is on the phone with Julius, his eyes are open when he's not talking. When he's talking, he's blinking a few times per second. This is both distracting and inconsistent with when he talks to Larry at the beginning of the game, after the coffee incident. There he blinks very slowly.

Using sluicebox's scripts, in the Julius scene (rm205.sc) Silas's eyes are set up like this:

(instance silasEyes of Prop
	(properties
		nsTop 1
		nsLeft -2
		view 1215
		loop 2
	)
)

In the Larry scene (rm150.sc) his eyes are set up like this:

(instance bossmallEyes of Prop
	(properties
		nsTop 31
		nsLeft 16
		view 1150
		loop 2
		cycleSpeed 70
	)
)

Could cycleSpeed be the difference here?

[eriktorbjorn]

I've attached a video of the scene.

[sluicebox]

This is original behavior at all CPU speeds. After looking at this closer and talking with bluegr, I don't think this is in scope for patching.

This *may* have started out as a scripting mistake, but this is the blink speed that everyone saw and approved in every game version. This is not affected by CPU speed, he blinks this fast even at 286/386 CPU speeds. There are a few other eyes scripted like this in other scenes, so if we changed one we'd have to change them all, and it would get even less defensible.

If this were a CPU speed issue, where blinking was slower on the machines the game was developed on but then got unintentionally faster, then it would be in scope. Or, if this had been changed in any version, that would demonstrate that this was unwanted behavior, but I checked the scripts of every version and none of the fast eye speeds were altered.

At first I thought this was a CPU speed issue, and made a spreadsheet of all the eyes objects in the game in anticipation of patching, until testing revealed that it wasn't.