Opened 3 months ago

Last modified 3 months ago

#15502 pending feature request (assigned)

SCUMM: INDY3 Pink pixels at Irene's typewriter

Reported by: GermanTribun Owned by: dwatteau
Priority: low Component: Engine: SCUMM
Version: Keywords:
Cc: Game: Indiana Jones 3

Description

Game: Indy 3
Version: German VGA

This one is a bug that already was present in the original interpreter. Like other ugly pixel artifacts overlooked during the VGA-conversion, another one is present in the anteroom to Indy's office. After the students got sent away, return to the anteroom and look at Irene's typewriter. there are highly noticeable pink pixels at the right edge.

Attachments (2)

scummvm-indy3-vga-00002.png (33.1 KB ) - added by GermanTribun 3 months ago.
scummvm-indy3-ega-fr-00000.png (4.9 KB ) - added by dwatteau 3 months ago.

Download all attachments as: .zip

Change History (7)

by GermanTribun, 3 months ago

Attachment: scummvm-indy3-vga-00002.png added

comment:1 by dwatteau, 3 months ago

Owner: set to dwatteau
Priority: normallow
Resolution: assigned
Status: newpending

Is there a way to reach this room (without the students) without using the debugger or cheating in some way? When I try to go back there, Indy doesn't want to if I do that from his office. And if I go back to this room from the other side of it, the students are still there.

Anyway, if the room's reachable, why not. Indy3 indeed has some of these weird lines in a few places, and I already added some enhancements to fix a couple of them. But that one looks very small to me, so I think I would only fix it it doesn't add too much code to the engine.

comment:2 by GermanTribun, 3 months ago

Weird, is your version of the game broken? I just send the students to Reid and can enter the anteroom from the office without any trouble. At least it works in the German VGA version without trouble...

by dwatteau, 3 months ago

comment:3 by dwatteau, 3 months ago

No, I just never knew that it was possible to make the students go away, after telling them about this Professor Reid, if one knew about him from Marcus first ;)

Ok, then I see in a normal game play. But the same line appears in the EGA release too; it probably symbolizes the carriage return of the old typewriter?

So I'm not really seeing an unintended artefact, like the ones we already fix in Berlin and in Castle Brunwald. Maybe something that the artists should have changed to a better color, during the EGA to VGA conversion. But there was other art in the VGA releases which wasn't really upgraded from EGA, wasn't there?

comment:4 by GermanTribun, 3 months ago

Yeah, the librarian in Venice is a prominent example where they forgot to update the EGA art to VGA. Guess it means nothing can be done about it, right?

comment:5 by dwatteau, 3 months ago

Kind of.

The weird pink/cyan lines in Berlin and Castle Brunwald have an enhancement to remove them because they were 1) very obvious on the screen 2) clearly unintended (no reason for them to be displayed in the game) 3) the original art could easily be restored without including any copyrighted resource in our source code and 4) these weird lines confused some players.

Actually, I took the motivation to work on these fixes because I saw several Twitch players wondering quite a lot about them, during gameplay (thinking there was an "emulator (sic) bug", or some puzzle to solve).

Another example of what we did was to fix the color of the Nazis' uniforms in Castle Brunwald in the FM-TOWNS release (https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/3930). It was done because we knew it was an unintended continuity error (their color is correct in the other rooms of the Castle, the fix is already present in the official DOS VGA release, and an analysis of the script showed how the error originally appeared: it was using a palette override, which was necessary in the EGA release, but had no reason to exist in the VGA release -- as was publicly documented by ATMachine many years ago).

The EGA art that wasn't converted for the VGA release is probably another matter. It causes no functional problem or confusion, it's just a lost opportunity that happened back then. But how do we know what the VGA artists would have done, which colors they would have chosen? Also, how do we fix original art, without taking any copyright risk? (apart from some very trivial fix, such as changing only a few pixels, exchanging a color for another one, and so on, of course).

Another thing to take into consideration is that, in their current implementation, the enhancements "pollute" the SCUMM engine code a bit (that's why we label them workarounds in the source code). So, if we need to add a dozen of inline "patches" in the engine code to fix all the various EGA resources in the VGA release, it's going to get rather large.

So yeah, it's about trying to draw the line somewhere... I agree that the official VGA releases of Indy3 all look rushed in some way, and that it would be so nice to fix all their original "mistakes". But I'm not sure ScummVM's goal is to fix each and every one of them, especially when you take into consideration the copyright/implementation limits we currently have.

Maybe another solution for some fixes that some players want would be to add support for fan-made .IPS files or something like that (but then, that code would need to be written, and I'm not sure we want to deal with this)…

…or maybe Indy3 deserves a community-made "Ultimate Edition", as was done for Monkey1/Monkey2 (which was very well done, both in terms of care, contents and technical implementation). I know there were some people interested in producing a fan-made patch like that. But look at how long is the list of changes in the readme.txt file of the Ultimate Talkie Edition. It's amazing, it's impressive work, it's a joy to be able to play that release. But I'm not sure it would have been wise to implement of all its fixes/improvements in our SCUMM engine code.

We're open to suggestions about small fixes, including visual ones. But each "WORKAROUND" in our code has a cost, and I'm not sure a 2-pixel color issue is worth it. It's like fixing original typos in the subtitles; we currently do fix some of them (see <https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/blob/branch-2-9/engines/scumm/script_v5.cpp#L3367-L3516>), but we're not going to fix any "it's/its" mistake in the original games.

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