SCI: Shivers: Intro video too small

[legluondunet]

Hello,

when I launch Shivers, the intro video played is too small:

on scummvm last git from 29 april 2017:
​https://goo.gl/photos/5TCuiVFB8t23wPUM6

on Dosbox:
​https://goo.gl/photos/NCCnN34udyQW6ftB7

Thank you for your help.

[Kurufinwe21]

It works fine for me, as long as the large videos are enabled in the engine tab of the launcher. (Maybe that should be the default?)

[csnover]

Thanks for your report!

SCI system scripts run a benchmark at startup of the game engine to detect the video performance of the system and adjust visual effects accordingly. This benchmarking code does not always accurately detect the performance of modern systems and can cause the game to think that the video card is too slow to be able to render video at full size.

I will look more closely at how benchmarking is being handled to see if there is any reason to not simply disable it by ignoring writes to the backend during benchmarking. In the meantime, once you start the game, you can go to the in-game settings and toggle it from “Halfscreen” to “Fullscreen”, which will restore rendering of the full sized videos.

[legluondunet]

In he original game, they are using scanlines to play the video in a bigger size.
I try different options in the graphic tab, the video always play in the original size, it is not stretched.

[csnover]

I try different options in the graphic tab, the video always play in the original size, it is not stretched.

The setting for video playback size (“Halfscreen”/“Fullscreen”) is in the game itself, not in ScummVM. Go to the in-game menu.

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Investigating this issue, I’ve determined that the SCI game script benchmarking code is never going to work correctly and needs to be disabled. (Calling to OSystem::updateScreen on every frameout during benchmarking makes the system appear slower than it is; not calling it causes the benchmarking counter to overflow because it runs too fast.)

[csnover]

Game script video benchmarking has been disabled across all SCI32 games in commit 8d94a046052bc5c041831a77b2a9a8b59e1f527e, so Shivers should now always default to “fullscreen” video mode when running ScummVM build 1.10.0git-3236 or later.

Note that any saved games already created in “halfscreen” mode will need to be adjusted by going to the in-game settings menu and changing “halfscreen” to “fullscreen”.

[legluondunet]

Very good job, thank you!