Official support for Wintermute 2D engine?

[albadross]

Given the recent work on the Wintermute 2D engine and the passing of Wintermute 2.5 & 3D to ResidualVM, I am wondering if the 2D engine could become officially supported in the next release of ScummVM.

I have completed over 35 Wintermute 2D games, using the long-standing (ScummVM 2.0.0 and earlier) engines, so that I feel it is stable enough.

Unfortunately, recent builds have changed the savegame file structure, rendering many/all(?) of my savegames unusable. I do intend to replay these games in the future, but not until the engine is officially supported and, hopefully, changes like this are less likely to happen.

David

[MusicallyInspired]

This is in totally the wrong subforum.

[digitall]

*cough* See https://www.scummvm.org/faq/#3_6

That said, the project does try where possible to load original savegame formats and avoid breaking older savegame compatibility or allow them to be migrated as this does help bug hunting and dealing with regression type bugs. Though this comes down to the engine developer(s) and is not always possible i.e. some original games did not save in a way which is portable such as the savegames being a memory dump which would thus be specific to the endian and machine which this was done on.

[digitall]

I took a look at the Wintermute engine code and I can't spot any change where "recent builds have changed the savegame file structure" ...

@albadross: When did this start occuring for you? i.e. when did you create the savegame that you now can not load?

[albadross]

I am sorry if this is totally the wrong forum – maybe I didn’t understand the forum description

Fangame Creation
AGI, SCI, Wintermute, Sludge engines fangame creation discussion

I also do not remember me complaining the savegames no longer work – I have always been willing to replay the games. Considering the number of Wintermute games I have played and the warning messages at the start, you could have thought I was well aware of the risks I was taking.

A lot of work was done on the Wintermute 2D engine in the month of June 2019 and so I closely followed the log of the many commits at that time. Although I cannot immediately find it, I am sure one of the commits stated that the file structure of the savegame file had been changed. That is obviously when I found my savegames (in particular, the Carol Reed savegames built up over the last three years) no longer worked. To help you pinpoint the problem, I copy an email I received on June 16. I believe the single byte problem mentioned was the indirect cause of the change to the savegame file structure.

Code: Select all

#10432: WME Carol Reed Mysteries hint system not working
--------------------------+---
Reporter: albadross | Owner: somaen
Type: enhancement | Status: pending
Priority: normal | Component: Engine: Wintermute
Resolution: fixed | Keywords:
Game: Wintermute |
--------------------------+---

Comment (by Filippos Karapetis <bluegr@…>):

In [changeset:
{{{
#!CommitTicketReference repository=""
revision=
WINTERMUTE: Fix Split() method of ext_string

It's hard to believe, but this fixes bug "#10432" WME Carol Reed
Mysteries hint system not working.

Carol Reed hint system happen to heavily use line.Split(";") results,
which were wrong by 1 byte (delimeter was appended to result while it
shouldn't be).

I started with decompiling Carol Reed source code, reproducing issue
with a stand-alone test project (which worked with WME and showed [null]
with ScummVM). then minimized it to a minimal testcase:

var line = new String("New Goal;Visit Christina at the Art
Museum;1;0;S;;");
var ar = line.Split(";");
if((ar[0] == "New Goal")) { var g = ar[1]; }
}}}

https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/comm ... 99f56f6d52

If this wasn't the cause of it, the problem certainly occurred around that time.

Thank you for your interest. The Wintermute 2D engine has given me a lot of enjoyment over the years, for which I am grateful.

David

[albadross]

If it is of any help, I do have an old savegame at the start of Carol Reed 9 – Cold Case Summer that works on ScummVM 2.0.0 but not the latest 2.1.0 git, and a new savegame at the same place using a recent 2.1.0 git. The newer savegame file is considerably larger than the old one. I assumed that was because the help system conversations were being now saved.

[albadross]

And, by the way, I am not asking for any changes to the engine. From my preliminary testing, the Carol Reed hint system now works! Which is how it should be.