7th Guest, icon sometimes hiding, almost perfect....

Hawke · Post by **Hawke** » Fri Aug 06, 2010 9:27 pm

Hey,

I've got to say, nicely done! It was fairly easy to install the game onto the PSP using ScummVM. And to my surprise, it runs smoothly as well. Very, very nicely done.

I've only got 2 issues with the 7th Guest that I cannot seem to resolve.

The first one is that my mouse cursor disappears when I move it over the screen. In order to see the its position and animation, I have to stop moving it again. This is kind of frustrating.

The second issue, which is of a far less critical nature, is that the audio sometimes crackles... but I can live with it if there's no clear-cut solution for that one.

I'm running the newest ScummVM-eboot on a PSP-3000 with firmware 5.03C, one of the tested systems according to the readme (so I am hoping for an error on my part).

Anyone encountered this?

Kind regards,

Hawke

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Sat Aug 07, 2010 5:55 pm

I'm not sure what you mean by the latest version. There are 2 version available: 1.1.1 and subversion (SVN) download, which is newer and has some improvements. I suggest trying the SVN version if you haven't yet.

Playing on the SVN build, the video still stutters somewhat as a result of it not being optimized. This is basically a groovie engine issue. The rest of the game should be ok and the cursor should be too.

Hawke · Post by **Hawke** » Sat Aug 07, 2010 7:45 pm

I see. I was unaware that the SVN-version was more up-to-date.
I'll give it a shot and report back, thanks.

Hawke · Post by **Hawke** » Sun Aug 08, 2010 4:47 pm

You are a gentleman and a scholar, sir.

I've removed the old installation and configurations, reinstalled the Subversion nightly build-Eboot, installed the Windows-version of 7th Guest and all the issues, including the crackling audio (except for the occasional cutscene), are gone.

A great many thanks.

McKnallski · Post by **McKnallski** » Fri Aug 13, 2010 1:03 pm

The Game is running very slow on PSP. There are still some optimizations necessary for the PSP. But it is playable. I hope there will be some Performance Optimizations in the near future.

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Sun Aug 15, 2010 7:34 am

I'll ask you the same question I asked Hawke. Are you using the subversion build? I have made many optimizations since 1.1.1.

The only thing that should be slow is the video, and that will require the Groovie engine to optimize its video output. Other than that, the game runs about as fast on PSP as it did on my Pentium in the 90s, so I don't really see a performance problem.

I'm planning a few more optimizations, but they won't help T7G since it's not hitting any bottlenecks except for the video.

McKnallski · Post by **McKnallski** » Fri Aug 20, 2010 11:46 am

Yes. Using the latest subversion. And yes, it is about the Videos (when moving around). And with slow I do not mean stuttering. Just slower as on the PC when moving from one location to another. Or is that moving speed normal? I cannot really remember, but I thought it was faster on my Pentium. Maybe it is just my impatience

.

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Sun Aug 22, 2010 5:32 am

I think it's normal, but you can compare to the PC version and see if there are differences.

You have to remember -- this was the first big CD-ROM game, the one that made many people go out and get a CD-ROM drive. I think it didn't work on single speed drives, but did on a double-speed drive, which was really slow (about 26 times slow than today's drives). They couldn't update the whole screen at a fast rate, which is why you get the ~13fps update rate for the movement, and why the character videos only take up portions of the screen.

Pix2 · Post by **Pix2** » Mon Aug 23, 2010 12:37 pm

I think this probably did play faster on a Pentium. If I remember right, the video with audio was obviously played at a set frame rate but anything without audio (i.e. puzzles or walking round the house) would just play as fast as your computer could cope with. That was definitely the case in 11th Hour anyway. You could walk around at an insane speed in that game if you had a fast PC.

Bluddy · Post by **Bluddy** » Tue Aug 24, 2010 5:25 pm

Just checked on my PC and T7G seems to be running at about the same speed. I think it's framerate-limited. Never played 11th Hour.

ScottT · Post by **ScottT** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 10:21 pm

Pix2 wrote:That was definitely the case in 11th Hour anyway. You could walk around at an insane speed in that game if you had a fast PC.

The DirectX beta versions? From memory both of those showed that behaviour, though it's definitely not intended since there's a framerate flag in each resource file. Can't remember exact numbers but T7G movement was around 12 or 15fps, while the ghost-videos were low 20's (ish)

Pix2 · Post by **Pix2** » Thu Aug 26, 2010 6:58 am

I only ever played these games in DOS. As far as the 7th Guest goes it must be my memory playing tricks on me. It's a long time since I played the game and I only had minimum spec the first time round so it could have been quicker after I upgraded.

11th Hour definitely does speed up though. I've just tried it in Dosbox and if you set your cycles to 100,000+ then it absolutely flies by.

ScottT · Post by **ScottT** » Thu Aug 26, 2010 12:04 pm

I'm curious as to whether something in Dosbox doesn't play fairly either since I had issues with both T7G and 11H in there at one point too.

Also, turns out my memory was a little rusty. T7G house-movement videos are 8fps (which really is a little slow) while cinematics are at 15fps which feel similar to how I remember it back in the days of DOS. 11H appears to use a mix of 21 and 30fps, but since I only got that in the last few years I can't comment on DOS vs Dosbox vs ScummVM performance here either.

I guess it's possible the originals may have had overrides (eg, only listen to framerate for 15fps videos), but that would mean things like the intro sequence would be out of sync with the CD/midi audio.