The Dig

[clandestino]

I've compressed all the *.san and *.bun files of "The Dig" and I got a folder of 245 MB. I put it on the MMC of my Nokia 6630 but even if Scumm recognize it, the program quits as soon as I try to start the game! Are the memory requirements too high or is compression the problem?

Thank you for your great job!

[Anotherguest]

I really dont know as I have n't tested The Dig on any phone yet, the only thing I have tested is the the Dig demo on the emulator. So there might be many reasons for it not to work as the Symbian version is everything but straight forward to build

[jg]

The first scene in The Dig is a video cut scene. There might be a problem with the video decoding/playback. I have The Dig on CD, but my MMC is way smaller than 245 MB, so unfortunately I can't try it on my phone.

[Yixian]

I'm not getting any sound and the game freezes when the first astronaut leaves the shuttle. I didn't include the Video folder, but everything else is intact, uncrompressed, on a 1gb MMC. The game begins with the astronauts emerging from the shuttle. When I try to load a save file, the game crashes.

Any ideas?

[jg]

I have a bigger MMC now, so I'm going to try this out and see what happens.

EDIT:
OK, I've tried it out. I compressed bun files and skipped the video directory. I ended up with 188 MB, which I put on my MMC in my 6680. ScummVM recognised The Dig and executed it fine, speech and music. "Come on out kids, the water's fine." "Robbins here, going independent." Blah blah. I looked at "the pig" and then I talked a bit to Robbins about it. The first few lines were fine, "We call it the pig... I know, I've logged over 100 hours blah blah." Then I clicked the dialog option for the pig again, and suddenly there wasn't any sound. No speech, no music. Maybe a high pitched buzzing sound. Lowe was moving his mouth, but he wasn't saying anything. That means he could go on talking forever, since there was no playing sound to synchronize the script with. I had to skip a few lines of dialog (FIRE) to get out of the endless flapping lips animations.

So yeah, I probably ran out of memory. So I thought I'd get a fresh start. I quit ScummVM, ran FExplorer to "compress memory", i.e. consolidate any free space, and then I ran The Dig again. This time I got the same freeze (I think) as the previous poster. Lowe comes out of the shuttle, but there's no speech and no music. Then Robbins comes out, and ScummVM freezes.

I tried turning the phone off and turning it back on again, but I still get the same crash. Kind of weird that it almost worked the first time.

[jg]

I'm going to have to revise my previous post. It doesn't seem like a memory issue. I discovered that after running The Dig, the other games in ScummVM didn't have sound either. So I turned the phone off and on again (again), and ran another ScummVM game. Now it had sound again. I checked the memory usage with FExplorer, and I still had 3 MB free. So I quit ScummVM and started it again, this time running The Dig. Voila! Sound again, music and speech. FExplorer was still running in the background. I checked the memory usage: around 1600 kB free.

Now I went back into The Dig and looked at the toolbox. Bam, no more sound. Not a crash, but the endless flapping lips animation was back. So I switched back to FExplorer: 1640 kB free. I'm not running out of memory. So is this some kind of bug in SDL? Too many mixed samples or something? Since both the background music and speech is MP3, maybe it breaks down somehow... My uneducated guess anyway.

EDIT: Oh, and I'm not using the CVS build, because I'm getting a 404 error from http://anotherguest.b0.se . My version is 0.8.3. What's the latest build and where can I get it?

[Anotherguest]

Hi! I thinks its the audio thread, which is n't renabled properly when you re-enter scummvm (its put in pause when tasking away). Or the sound thread is not running. or it can be something timer/thread related just for that special instance.

Symbian OS can't share handled between threadds as other OSes can, and instead you are getting crashes in those thread trying to access handles initiated from other threads. Just nice to see that its seems to be starting on the S60 devices, I just tested the demo on the P910.

And.. hmm I need to update the wiki and links. I have changed server slightly so the cvsbuilds are now located at
anotherguest.k0.se

[Werre]

It didn't even show the intro on my 9300 communicator (S80). Probably eats too much memory? My Scummvm version was 0.8.0 (EScummVM).

[Anotherguest]

The 0.8.0 does NOT run the DIG since there is a problem in the movie handling in that version which I had n't resolved at that time. It should be present in the latest svn build.. try the version at anotherguest.k0.se/cvsbulds and see if it works better. I should release a new svn build soon. Just have n't had the time to do that yet.

[Anotherguest]

I have just uploaded a new svn build to anotherguest.k0.se/cvsbuilds if any one likes to try. It includes a testbuild for Lure.

[jg]

I think it's the audio thread, which isn't re-enabled properly when you re-enter scummvm (it's put in pause when tasking away). Or the sound thread is not running. or it can be something timer/thread related just for that special instance.

It seems to have nothing to do with any of that. The audio can stop working at any time. I've tried playing The Dig three or four times now without switching tasks. No matter what I do, the audio dies sooner or later. The switching was only done during one test, to see if I was running out of memory.

Last time I tried, it died in mid-sentence: "Some people get vertigo when they realize they're hanging upside down thousands of miles over the ocean." "Do some of them throw u-" This is just standard dialogue, so there shouldn't be any special timing in the script or animations.

However, speaking of special stuff: The PenUltimate (Lowe's PDA), doesn't work at all. (Which means I can't get the toolbox out of the shuttle and deploy the bombs.) If I recall correctly, the phone actually crashed and restarted. I thought it might be due to the missing video files, but I tried it on my PC (without the video dir), and it works just fine. Apparently all the files are there, but ScummVM S60 can't handle the PenUltimate.