Broken Sword 1: subtitles move along with the scrolling

[Kaminari]

I'm not sure whether it's a bug or a "feature" of the first game, but while playing both episodes I noticed a strange behaviour in BS1. If you happen to talk or trigger any kind of message while walking across the screen, the subtitles move along with the scrolling (like if they were part of the background). In BS2, the subtitles stay properly centered.

Is this to be expected?

[Sold Out editions running on ScummVM 0.10 and 0.11 for Win32.]

[fingolfin]

Sounds indeed odd. Could be a bug... but somebody who is able to play the game with the original .exe (e.g. using dosbox) will need to check, I guess...

[eriktorbjorn]

If you happen to talk or trigger any kind of message while walking across the screen, the subtitles move along with the scrolling (like if they were part of the background).

Do you have any good example of how / where to make this happen?

[Kaminari]

This kind of situation (dialogues and messages being displayed on the screen while the background scrolls horizontally) happens a lot in BS2, but it seldom occurs in BS1 (maybe because the problem is already present in the original exe and the developers wanted to hide it?).

I'll try to find a good trigger.

[Kaminari]

Ok, here is one in Scotland.

Just walk right and as soon as you see the tower, right-click on it to examine it.

broken1_win.zip

[lavosspawn]

AFAIK the original behaves exactly the same.
It would be quite easy to fix, but I decided not to.

The game draws 12 real frames per second. If it's currently scrolling, it'll show each frame twice on the screen (moved by 1-2 pixels) to make scrolling smoother. So if we were going to change the subtitle code to make the text stay centered, we'd actually have to render 24 frames during scrolling.
That'd also be quite easily implemented, but would probably cause a (at least slightly) increased CPU load.
And as there're only 1 or 2 scenes in the entire game where the subtitles behave like this, I decided to ignore the issue

[Kaminari]

There are actually more than one or two places where it happens (believe the betatester in me), but most of the time the inconvenient is negligeable.

However, there's at least one scene (when talking extensively to the priest in Montfaucon Chapel) where I just couldn't read the three long lines of text fast enough, because it was already scrolling outside the edge of the window.

[saulob]

So, according to Kaminari, it would be nice to fix it right ?

lavosspawn, what do you say ?

Thanks.

[Kaminari]

Nice, yes -- although Revolution probably didn't expect players to try and initiate dialogues while the background was still moving :)

In the aformentioned issue (the chapel for example), you can easily bypass the "bug" by standing next to the priest, waiting for the scrolling to stop and then talking to him. No big deal, it's just a bit annoying when you're used to BS2.