Pre-0.10.0 Testing Season Announced

[iPwnzorz]

Well I just found a bug in Broken Sword II, never experienced pre 10, even though I've done it before.

In the London museum as Nico, talk straight away to the Girls. CRASH! Sent me back to Quraramonte.

[eriktorbjorn]

Well I just found a bug in Broken Sword II, never experienced pre 10, even though I've done it before.

In the London museum as Nico, talk straight away to the Girls. CRASH! Sent me back to Quraramonte.

I only have a few savegames for Broken Sword II, and none near this scene. I wasn't able to reproduce it by going to that scene using the debugger, though.

[iPwnzorz]

Hmmm could have been the game. I remember the ScummVM thingy... CMD watchamacallit the black thing with the writing repeating:
WARNING! No free slot in audio queue

[eriktorbjorn]

Hmmm could have been the game. I remember the ScummVM thingy... CMD watchamacallit the black thing with the writing repeating:

I think I did understand a few words there, but I have no idea what you're trying to saying.

WARNING! No free slot in audio queue

I think the only time I've seen that message repeated over and over was when I was experimenting with letting the resource manager free resources from memory immediately when they're closed. I have some ideas of why that may have happened (it would reset the script resource's local variables, for one thing), but I never bothered to figure out it out exactly.

Needless to say, I never committed that version of the resource manager.

[iPwnzorz]

I think I did understand a few words there, but I have no idea what you're trying to saying.

I had no idea what I was typing
Well, I did, I know what I mean.

I think the only time I've seen that message repeated over and over was when I was experimenting with letting the resource manager free resources from memory immediately when they're closed. I have some ideas of why that may have happened (it would reset the script resource's local variables, for one thing), but I never bothered to figure out it out exactly.

Needless to say, I never committed that version of the resource manager.

"I think I did understand a few words there, but I have no idea what you're trying to saying. "

[eriktorbjorn]

"I think I did understand a few words there, but I have no idea what you're trying to saying. "

Resources is the general term for the various pieces of game data: scripts, text, animations, sounds and so on. Whenever the game engine wants to do something with a resource, it opens it. Once it is done, it closes it again.

But since the engine opens and closes the same resources so frequently, it doesn't make sense to re-load the data from file every single time. Instead the resource manager caches the resource so that the next time, it can simply return a pointer to the one it already has in memory. Of course, precautions have to be made to keep the cache from growing indefinitely.

I did experiment briefly with disabling this caching mechanism, relying instead on the operating system to keep frequently used data in the disk cache, but it seems that this breaks things. I'm guessing that the main problem was with script resources, since re-loading it would reset the memory area used by the script for its own, private variables.

It used to be that resources were only really freed when changing from one room to another, but someone later extended the resource manager to be able to do it in mid-scene. I suppose there could be some potential problems there...

[iPwnzorz]

So this is the game, not SVM?

[eriktorbjorn]

So this is the game, not SVM?

The resource manager is part of ScummVM, of course, but it's often the game scripts that instructs it to load certain resources.

Anyway, I have no idea why the game would crash for you. Can you repeat it?

[iPwnzorz]

Well I suppose it could be the fact I was using my laptop, closed it (standby) then re-opened it mid-game...