SCI: GK1: Restore missing Windows video in Day 6, Bayou Cutscene?

[DustyShinigami]

Reached the Bayou in the swamp and the cutscenes that play during the rital are a bit off; their transitions appear too quick or only animate one frame at a time. While this Let's Play video is no doubt the DOSBox version you should be able to see the difference between that and the save file. Lowering the speed doesn't seem to help either.

Here's a link to the video: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ftP0RseUg

It's around the 20:33 mark.

ScummVM version - 1.10.0git3348-g30b5fc8c36
Language of game - English
Version of game - Talkie, CD-ROM
Platform and Compiler - Win32

[DustyShinigami]

Replying to DustyShinigami:

Reached the Bayou in the swamp and the cutscenes that play during the ritual are a bit off; their transitions appear too quick or only animate one frame at a time. While this Let's Play video is no doubt the DOSBox version you should be able to see the difference between that and the save file. Lowering the speed doesn't seem to help either.

Here's a link to the video: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ftP0RseUg

It's around the 20:33 mark.

ScummVM version - 1.10.0git3348-g30b5fc8c36
Language of game - English
Version of game - Talkie, CD-ROM
Platform and Compiler - Win32

[csnover]

Thanks for your report!

So, I don’t know why, but Sierra patched out all of the video playback in the Windows version of this room. So, ScummVM is working correctly here, this is how the Windows version of GK1 works.

It might be possible to restore the video playback, since the video files are on the CD (at least on the 1.0 US release), so I am converting this ticket to a feature request to see if it is possible to restore the video playback in this room without breaking something.

[DustyShinigami]

I see. Bizarre of Sierra to do that. Two of those sequences are basically repeats from the dream scenes at the beginning of the game. The wheel within a wheel one plays for about 2 seconds, but isn't as abrupt as it is during that section. Certainly hope that feature gets added.

[sluicebox]

This hits on a bigger issue I would like to fix. There are several Sierra games that shipped with both DOS and Windows interpreters and we ask the user which version they want. That's a bad question with a wrong answer that the user can't possibly know until they're days deep and hit things like this. The *best* case scenario is that their answer doesn't matter.

There's no such thing as a DOS version of Gabriel Knight and a Windows version. There are two interpreter EXEs that shipped on the same CD, and only on English versions. One of them sets a flag that says "I'm Windows 3.1, please don't hurt me" and one or two game scripts comply by doing things like not playing full video, or instead launching postage stamp AVIs. A user presented with this impossible question would likely assume that the *newer* operating system was the right answer, and sadly get the result we have here.

I would submit a PR today that ripped out all the duplicate Windows versions from the detection tables except I think that would breaks things for users who have already answered the question wrong. (Or maybe I'm wrong about that?)

We should still do that though! But with a migration path, which is the hard part. For now I'm just mouthing off here for lack of a better medium. But this one is on my radar.

[angstsmurf]

I think games will actually stay playable in the library even if they are removed from the detection tables.

EDIT: I looked into this. If I add Gabriel Knight Windows version, and then comment out the Windows version from the detection table and rebuild, then the Windows version is still listed in the menu, but when I click on it, it seems to run the DOS version instead (although it uses the engine-specific settings and save files from the Windows version). I guess this is because we re-run detection every time the user starts a game. Perhaps ​PR #1210 will change this?

Still, just removing the detection entries for the Windows version would kind of work already. New users would not be tricked into adding the inferior Windows versions, and old users could still play their games using their old saves, even if some settings might break. In the case of Gabriel Knight 1, for example, the interface will become lo-res with no way to change it back (because it uses the settings of the Windows version, which uses high resolution by default and has no setting for it).

EDIT 2: If anyone wants to experiment with this, the lines I commented out are ​795-799 in engines/sci/detection_tables.h.

[sluicebox]

Fixed in 4008b845a1e845f90c06f4e538d10194ba1b31f6