Curse of Monkey Island is NOT at all playable.

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stormfrog
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Curse of Monkey Island is NOT at all playable.

Post by stormfrog »

Completable, yes? But its unbearably ugly and impossible to enjoy with all the current quirks.

I have tried to play Curse of Monkey Island on all versions since 0.8 -> 0.11.1 and 0.12 svn.

None of them plays COMI even remotely well.

To start off, the speech often stutter. When a dialog begins or when you "fast forward" often the dialog will begin with a stutter, maybe in 3 of 10 cases this will happen.

The next thing that is completely unbearable is that the side scrolling also "stutter", its NOTHING like the smooth scrolling original is.

Ive tried on several computers and the same quirks occur.

The only reason I don't play COMI with the alternative 3d party launcher instead is that the sound sometimes locks up, which is if possible even more unbearable.

Please please, take COMI away from the list of working SCUMMVM titles and have another go at it. The current status just isn't very satisfactory imo.

Thanks for all wonderful work done by SCUMMVM devs!
Mr. Wood
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Re: Curse of Monkey Island is NOT at all playable.

Post by Mr. Wood »

stormfrog wrote:To start off, the speech often stutter. When a dialog begins or when you "fast forward" often the dialog will begin with a stutter, maybe in 3 of 10 cases this will happen.
Knowing a little bit more about your set-up (your hardware, your system, whether you compressed the audio, etc) would be helpful in diagnosing that problem. Personally I've never noticed any stuttering.
The next thing that is completely unbearable is that the side scrolling also "stutter", its NOTHING like the smooth scrolling original is.
That's more of a cosmetic problem, if you ask me. Annoying, true, but hardly a deal-breaker.
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Raziel
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Post by Raziel »

We need more information on what computer you performed the tests

I have it running on a PPC G4 at it works VERY well
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raina
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Post by raina »

I'm thinking it could be related to image scalers being too heavy on the CPU, especially the 3x ones because the game already is 640x480 originally. Is this ruled out, in other words are the problems there if you run it without any gfx filters?
Collector
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Post by Collector »

Could it be that he has a damaged CD? He said that the sound stutters using other methods.
fingolfin
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Post by fingolfin »

I am aware of some glitches in COMI, aye. But never had *any* stutter, neither in the graphics nor in the voices or the music. On my PowerBook 1.5 GHz running Mac OS X 10.4

Of course there might be problems with certain ports, but that's just guessing -- so, stormfrog, you really should add some beef to your claims.
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Noelemahc
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Post by Noelemahc »

Could we at least know which particular platform is the game being run on? Win32, Mac, PSP, C64 or whatever else?

Are you running the game off the discs or from copied data? That's usually the reason for most of the issues you describe.

Completed the game via ScummVM in 0.9.1 and 0.10.0 on Win32 on three different machines of varying machining power, and never had ANY issues whatsoever. Well, aside from the disc switch issue, but that was my mistake when I copied the files, a simple re-copying solved it.
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Freddo
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Post by Freddo »

No problems here. Running on a 4 year old AMD 3500+ in Windows XP.

There's one thing I wish for COMI, though. It would be royally awesome if the sprites in the game were antialiased against the backgrounds. But granted, that's not possible to implent as long the game runs in a paletted 256 window, as I belive it does.
stormfrog
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Post by stormfrog »

Hi everyone!

I am very happy so much interest is put into this thread. I will do my best to answer all questions.

Ive tried it on numerous computers with the same glitches occuring, I only know the specs of my current one.

Intel 2.8GHz, 2Gb RAM more than enough disk space. RealTek/Sb Audigy 2 ZS (problem occurs with whichever is used).

Now I wish I could just make a frap clip to show the animation stutter. But since that is not possible I will try to explain it. The glitch occurs "best" in areas were Guybrush walk around and the scene is scrolling alot. Like the Fort beach.

In the original COMI scrolling would be perfectly smooth and scroll "pixel-by-pixel" when you walk around with vertical scrolling. When I do the same in scummVM Guybrush takes a step and then scene scroll "one step" then there is a small micro second pause before next Guybrush takes. Its like the scrolling is controlled by each step he takes and the scrolling jumps one step at the time instead of smoothing scrolling the whole thing.

Maybe I am the only one who notice it, I have played these Lucasart games so much that the smallest little thing would be a great difference to me.

The only way to see the difference is to run COMI without ScummVM and walk around the fort beach. Then do the same with scummVM and you will see the difference.

About the sound, I played around alot with different sound hardware acceleration modes, disabled enabled services and processes. And now the speech is perfect. I think it is safe to say some other thing was disturbing scummVM somehow and that it was a specific problem to my computer.
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Raziel
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Post by Raziel »

Ah, i think i know what he means with "stutter" on scrolling

The screen scrolls together with Guybrush, not smooth, but in steps
For every step Guybrush takes the screen is scrolled to keep up with
him and keep him in the middle of the screen.

All of it in "realtime", though, no slowdowns, don't know of the original behaviour though
fingolfin
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Post by fingolfin »

Aha. Well, so this sounds like a "problem" with the "camera mode", which controls how the "camera" moves in SCUMM games. It can be set to various speeds, accelerations etc. -- and this is fully controlled by scripts.

Maybe we implement something there wrong for COMI. Somebody would have to verify the code in scumm/camera.cpp against disassembly to find out, though.
fingolfin
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Post by fingolfin »

The code in method ScummEngine_v7::moveCamera() (engines/scumm/camera.cpp), line 344ff, might be the culprit. It causes VAR_CAMERA_SPEED_X and VAR_CAMERA_SPEED_Y to be set to at least 8, which is correct for old games (which scroll in steps of 8 pixels), but probably not for COMI.
Arantor
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Post by Arantor »

I have to admit having played both native and with ScummVM for a while, the behaviour of COMI on all 3 of my PCs has been consistent (and fully playable), and I've never noticed anything significantly different in the way it handles on screen.

In fact, it's an improvement since on my dad's PC where I first played it (Cyrix M2 300MHz, onboard graphics and sound), the original executable had some oddities like random crashes and the occasional moment where videos would speed up for no apparent reason and play at double speed until the end of the cutscene.
fingolfin
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Post by fingolfin »

Yeah, at most there is a small glitch / difference compared with the original. I think that saying CoMI "is NOT at all playable" is somewhat of a exaggeration (not to say, "total nonsense" 8)).
stormfrog
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Post by stormfrog »

fingolfin wrote:Yeah, at most there is a small glitch / difference compared with the original. I think that saying CoMI "is NOT at all playable" is somewhat of a exaggeration (not to say, "total nonsense" 8)).
I agree completely! :) At the time I was writing the post I had been trying to sort my scrolling problem out for a few hours - since I refused to play COMI in any but mint condition performance. So, I certainly exaggerated and cried wolf and all that being a general attention whore (but it seems to have worked!). It makes me look stupid thou, but thats just something I will have to learn to live with ;)
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