Big adventures ahead - Little Big Adventures

[mattn]

Once upon a time in the past - around the year 1994 - a software company called Adeline Software International released a game titled “Little Big Adventure” or “Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure”. This game, a classic pseudo-3D action adventure game with an epic story set on a fantastic planet, has now entered the testing stage in ScummVM. Please, note that a few features of the original game are not implemented yet. However, we also added a few features which are new for the game.

Features not available yet and known issues:

* The holomap is not yet available
* Changing the rendering details is not supported yet
* The credits sequence has a few rendering bugs

New features:

* An option to disable wall collision damage
* Improved UI navigation

This was all made possible by the people behind the TwinEngine project and the LBA community.

Please test the game with the latest development build and report any issues you find on our bug tracker.

[raina]

Is the CD audio supported?

[mattn]

Yes, the audio cd is supported - but only compressed to mp3 or ogg is currently tested. You will also need the latest nightly build, as I've just fixed a bug that disabled the menu music right after enabling it. If you encounter any issues or unexpected music, please let me know.

[raina]

Happy to report FLAC audio tracks seem to work just fine.

[Abandoned Witch]

And if the PC version for LBA is fully supported, will there be support for the PS1 version as well?

[Muyfa666]

This is great! Can we also assume LBA2 will be supported down the line?

[Muyfa666]

Peixoto's patch had looping CD audio. Will it be possible to have that with this?

[sndwv]

I just downloaded the latest development build and have the CD music ripped to flac (as track1.flac etc.) in the game folder, but it's not working for me (Windows x64 dev. build). Am I missing something / should I explicitly enable soemthing? I see 'UseCD false' and 'Failed to query the CD TOC' in the console. Thanks!

edit: also no luck with mp3 rips.

[Graxer]

This is great! Can we also assume LBA2 will be supported down the line?

I don't think we can assume it, but I think it is being seriously considered because some preliminary detection code for LBA2 was added towards the end of November.

https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/comm ... 24c6e596f9

I don't think support has gone any further than that yet, and plans may change. If support was added it would be wonderful though, as LBA2 was my favourite PC game back in the 90s.

Edit: I just tested it on the latest development build of ScummVM, and my LBA2 CD (European) version is detected by ScummVM, and is added to my ScummVM games list, but the game unsurprisingly crashes on boot.

[Blakes7]

I've tried running Little Big Adventure in the latest daily build and it seems to run okay until other actors are on the screen and then things slow to a crawl. This first happens for me in the beginning of the game when the guard appears on a floating platform.

Edit: The slowdown occurs if graphics mode is set to opengl, other graphics modes allow the game to run at the proper speed.

[Graxer]

I just downloaded the latest development build and have the CD music ripped to flac (as track1.flac etc.) in the game folder, but it's not working for me (Windows x64 dev. build). Am I missing something / should I explicitly enable soemthing? I see 'UseCD false' and 'Failed to query the CD TOC' in the console. Thanks!

edit: also no luck with mp3 rips.

What version of the game are you using? I am able to use audio tracks (track1.flac to track9.flac) extracted from my European CD copy and placed in the folder alongside the game files. This works when using the GOG version, or the files extracted from my CD using this data files list:

https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?titl ... _Adventure

There was a floppy disc version of the game with midi audio and no video cutscenes, which may not support CD audio when run in ScummVM. Maybe there are CD versions that are mistakenly identifying as floppy versions.

My versions appear in ScummVM as:
Little Big Adventure (DOS/English (GB))
Little Big Adventure (GOG Version/DOS/English)

What does yours show up as?

[mattn]

The slowdown for opengl is being worked on. I've already reduced the drawcalls in a lot of situations. The problem is that the software renderer works completely different from opengl renderer when it comes to updating parts of the screen. This happens way to often for the opengl renderer in the current lba1 codebase.

And yes - my plan is to also add LBA2 support - but first I have to get the LBA1 code into a shape where this should be relative easily possible. I'm not yet there.

[mattn]

@Muyfa666: Please tell me more about the looping cd audio. I couldn't find many details on it. What exactly did it solve?

[Muyfa666]

I can't actually get Peixoto's patch to run anymore, so I can't say for sure as it was a long time since I played it through.

If going by memory (which likely can't be trusted) I seem to recall that ambient audio played once per scene, and then it would stop until you entered and exited.

This might as well be a limitation/bug of the wonky DOS CD redbook audio limitations thou, maybe someone else knows in detail?

Peixoto also mentions a non-working volume control, but I have no idea what he means.

Either way, I'm very gratful for all the work being done on this game.

[raina]

This might as well be a limitation/bug of the wonky DOS CD redbook audio limitations thou, maybe someone else knows in detail?

There's no such limitation. Sure, there might be a second of seek time where a game would freeze while the drive would cue up the track again but this would vary from system to system and if memory serves, wasn't even an issue with every game. To me it seems the game not looping CD tracks is a design decision.