ASYLUM: Crash in main menu for Sanitarium in recent ScummVM releases

[darkranger-red]

Hello,

It seems like some kind of regression. Unfortunately I can't remember starting from which ScummVM version. But the version 2.9.0 still has the same issue. In the game 'Sanitarium', if move the mouse cursor quickly around during the game menu screen - the game will crash thus it hardly playable. It is very easily to reproduce the crash.

ScummVM version: 2.8.1 and 2.9.0 from Fedora RPM repository and Flatpak
Game data: Sanitarium GOG release (sanitarium_1_0_svm_59267.sh) without using its ScummVM bundle
Game language: English
OS: Fedora 40 and RHEL 9

[eriktorbjorn]

I wasn't able to reproduce this. (And I know little to nothing about the game engine anyway.) I did fix some variables that weren't initialized, but I don't know if that makes any difference at all.

[antoniou79]

Replying to darkranger-red:

Hello,

It seems like some kind of regression. Unfortunately I can't remember starting from which ScummVM version. But the version 2.9.0 still has the same issue. In the game 'Sanitarium', if move the mouse cursor quickly around during the game menu screen - the game will crash thus it hardly playable. It is very easily to reproduce the crash.

Hello, I can reproduce a crash that might be identical with the one reported here.

I am testing with the GOG English version of the game, on Windows 10, with a local build from current master HEAD (2.10.0git) (development build) in release mode (--enable-release --disable-debug).

The crash for me happens when I enter the in-game menu (eg. by pressing Esc) and then move the cursor to the top part of the screen, if it's not already there. From debugging it seems that this is an elusive bug, potentially caused by the optimization level used for the build, connected with the code that calculates where the eerie eyes in the center of the screen should be looking at (following the cursor movement).

Could you confirm that this is the case for you too? Does the crash only happen if the cursor is moved on the top part of the menu screen but not if it's moving around (fast or slow) in the other lower two thirds of the screen?

[darkranger-red]

Replying to antoniou79:

Could you confirm that this is the case for you too? Does the crash only happen if the cursor is moved on the top part of the menu screen but not if it's moving around (fast or slow) in the other lower two thirds of the screen?

Oh, I think that you are correct indeed. Thank you. The crash can be reproduced precisely by following your instruction.

[antoniou79]

There's an open PR for a proposed fix for this issue, as well as bringing the behavior closer (actually identical) to the original game wrt the eyes following the cursor on the main menu screen.
​https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/6385

If the PR is merged with the master codebase, I will also be backport it to the 2.9 branch so a possible future bugfix release in 2.9.x will have the fix.

[antoniou79]

The PR was merged with master and the fix is backported to branch-2-9 as well.

Setting the status of the report to pending.

[digitall]

Since there has been no further feedback from the user to confirm if this is fixed, but the PR has been merged, closing this bug as fixed.

@darkranger-red If this is still occuring, please feel free to reopen this bug and update.