SCUMM: SAM: Strange dialogue line behavior in Bumpusville, German version

[GermanTribun]

What is described below already was a thing in the original interpreter.

In the German CD-version of Sam & Max, the announcement of Lee-Harvey in Bumpusville, just before Bumpus starts his song, has a strange behavior. After Lee-Harvey is done, Sam just stares ahead and does nothing. Only after considerable time (~10 seconds) does he say his line and then the song starts.

Perhaps it can be investigated what happened there? Since I can end the silence early by pressing '.' I suspect they didn't cut that line properly, adding silence at the end of it (that the subtitles stay in place supports that theory).

Can be observed in below video at about 2:39:20 (which also irritated the LPer)
​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByC0rswsjEA

If that's the case, can anything be done about that or is it simply too baked in?

[gabberhead]

i have modified nearly all lucasarts adventures games in german language, and there will be one big patch for all of them for download on compiware site in the near future. work is in progress :) i also fixed some text issues in the german version for sam and max also, but i was not aware of this problem. i have fixed it now for my version. there is no long delay anymore like in this video.

i have removed the: "(A9) wait.waitForMessage()" line before "(BA) talkActor(:sound:"Ich hasse Varietévorstellungen.",2)" and extend the "(CA) delayFrames(2)" to (CA) delayFrames(94).

but i will take also a look into the english version, how it looks there...

ps. the english version is the same, like the german version. beside the language of the text of course :) i dont know why in the english version there is no delay, like the german version have. anyway, in my version, there will be no delay anymore.

[GermanTribun]

Ah, so instead of something in the MONSTER.SOU, which would have been a bitch to correct, it's a coding issue? Then there's hope the team can indeed fix this internally in ScummVM.

[gabberhead]

I dont know, if its a coding issue. because the part of the Script, is the same in english as in german. I dont know, why in englisch it is ok, but not in german. Perhaps the Real problem is somewhere else, perhaps also in the sou file. But the way I did it, it works without problem. With and without subtitles and also, if u skip the Song with esc. The offset for the overide with esc has changed a little bit, which i corrected, because of the delete from the waitformessage part.

[dwatteau]

Hi, thank you for reporting this @GermanTribun, and thank you for your help exploring the resources, @gabberhead.

I can confirm that the French release of Sam & Max has the script content (minus localization), so it's not a script error.

scummtr.exe -g samnmax -ch -of output.txt shows that the related line is this one:

[047:SCRP#0099]\255\010\164\116\255\010\085\001\255\010\010\000\255\010\000\000BUMPUSVILLE IST STOLZ, IHNEN DEN MEISTER DER MELODIE ZU PRÄSENTIEREN,\255\003DEN KÖNIG DES COUNTRY,\255\003MR. UNTERHALTUNG,\255\003CONROOOOOY BUMPUS!!!

and so, the related [047:SCRP#0099] script can be read this way (descumm.exe coming from scummvm-tools):

scummrp.exe -t SCRP -g samnmax -od DUMP
descumm.exe -x -6 .\DUMP\DISK_0001\LECF\LFLF_0047\SCRP_0099 > bumpusville-song-script.txt

which gives you the following script line:

(B4) printLine.msg(sound(0x15574A4, 0xA) + "BUMPUSVILLE IST STOLZ, IHNEN DEN MEISTER DER MELODIE ZU PR\x8ESENTIEREN," + wait() + "DEN K\x99NIG DES COUNTRY," + wait() + "MR. UNTERHALTUNG," + wait() + "CONROOOOOY BUMPUS!!!")

there, sound(0x15574A4) gives you the offset of that voiced line, in the MONSTER.SOU file.

You can extract this particular line with SCUMM Revisited v2 (from <​https://quickandeasysoftware.net/software/scumm-revisited>), where you can open the MONSTER.SOU file, and scroll the list of audio clips (sorted by increasing hexadecimal numbers), and play the "Crea" sample that's as close as possible to the 0x15574A4 offset found above.

In this case, it's the "Crea" sample at Offset: 22377646 (0x015574AE) in SCUMM Revisited (see the attached screenshot).

Then, export it to .WAV, and open it in something like Audacity or Ocenaudio. And then, indeed, the problem is in the audio resource itself: there are about 9.5 sec of silence at the end of that sample.

That's why the scene is stuck, even though the script is identical to the other releases: the script waits for that line to be done, before moving on to the next action.

We can probably fix this in ScummVM through an Enhancement. I'll see what I can do...

[dwatteau]

How to play/extract the affected MONSTER.SOU sample with ScummRev v2

[dwatteau]

Spectrogram image of the affected sample, showing more than 9 seconds of silence at the end

[dwatteau]

samnmax-de save, for an easy reproducer. Just move to the room on the left

[gabberhead]

Ok. So my "fix" is then more a workaround only :) but anyway, its working. I will keep it that way, because the patch for the lucasarts adventures is nearly finished. It will take some days until it is finished and available for download :)
Or, if u can fix it over the enhancemnet, I can reverse it again.

[gabberhead]

The big Patch is now online on compiware :)