Woodruff slow animations

[kuchitsu]

Hello. I'm trying to play Woodruff with ScummVM and for the most part it seems to work fine, however whenever an animation plays (like the periscope moving in water on the very first screen) I experience slowdowns: the character moves slower, etc. Has anoyne encountered this problem and is there anything I can do about it?

Also once I placed a can on an X that appears when you use the weather thing, and after the rain it just disappeared. o,o When I loaded a save and tried doing it at another time, it didn't disappear. I wonder if that is normal.

[DrMcCoy]

whenever an animation plays (like the periscope moving in water on the very first screen) I experience slowdowns: the character moves slower, etc.

Yes, that's "normal", I'm afraid. That's also what the original does, as far as I remember.

The reason is that those animations are VMD videos, and they are played at a lower FPS than the usual sprite-based animations. So the video player forces the global game refresh rate to that lower rate of the video.

When I loaded a save and tried doing it at another time, it didn't disappear.

Hmm, the X should disappear after the weather effect. No idea why it wouldn't after a load. However, since both the saving/loading and the X drawing is handled by the game scripts, that sounds like a bug in the original scripts. Those are notoriously hard to debug and fix in the Coktel Vision games, unfortunately.

[kuchitsu]

No, I mean it was the can that I think disappeared, dunno why. Thanks for the reply. And damn this game is hard lol, I'm sooo stuck now. Can't crack the bluxtre nut because it rolls away, can't pour water in the clock because there is a hole in the hose, poured water in a fountain and got some red spice from a tree but no idea what to do with it... Going slightly mad here. T_T

edit: okaaay, so you have to pour some tar one the nut, finally I figured something out.

[monsieurouxx]

I observe the same thing (background "world" animations slowing down the overall pace of the game, especially character walking).

The character walks fast then slowly then fast again then slowly again, because along its walk, some background animations randomly play. There's a lot of walking aorund in this game, therefore walking through a screen is a pain.

I think that adjusting the game's pace to the background animations FPS is plain silly (it's really irritating, gameplay-wise).

I know it requires some work, but could it be made possible to disable it, maybe in the options?

[DrMcCoy]

I think that adjusting the game's pace to the background animations FPS is plain silly (it's really irritating, gameplay-wise).

I know it requires some work, but could it be made possible to disable it, maybe in the options?

Unfortunately, that's not just "some work", that would require completely rewriting the engine.

The problem is this:
1) the background animations are object animations that take their frame data from VMD video frames
2) these VMD video specify a framerate
3) Woodruffs normal walk cycle is a normal sprite animation
(4) Woodruff's walk between screens animation is also a VMD)
5) there's a global framerate all object animations have to run at; the game has no concept at all of object having different base framerates
6) the game's usual framerate is higher than the VMD framerate

So the "easy" solution to this is to either slow down the walk speed when an object animation from a VMD plays or speed up the VMD animation. I chose the former and IIRC that's also what the original did.

The "real" solution of having both play at their respective FPS would require a massive rewrite of the core game loop. This is really not something done easily, especially because a lot of things in Gob engine games happen in the game scripts that come with the game data files. Messing with the timing can easily destroy timing-related puzzles in all the other Gob engine games.