Loom Crashes w/ Scumm 0.10.0

windsortheater · Post by **windsortheater** » Wed Jul 04, 2007 2:54 am

Weirdness. Installed scummvm 0.10.0 and it found all my games no problem. Loaded up loom and every time it gets to the intro screen (right after the chick says to pick a level)it just freezes. I can pick a difficulty and the stars / background comes up then nothing..total freeze. Have to HARD RESET my IPAQ 4355 to get it to come back to life.

Playing the same LOOM game (same directory and everything) on the same IPAQ w/ 0.9.1 presents no crash.

Any ideas?

knakos · Post by **knakos** » Wed Jul 04, 2007 8:54 am

At that exact time, the whole mp3/ogg/watever music track is seeked (i.e. read) so that the intro music can be played, which resides near the end of the file. For mp3, this means something like 30MB have to be read, so it takes some time. Be patient. (time varies on the bandwidth and cpu power available).

windsortheater · Post by **windsortheater** » Sun Jul 08, 2007 9:39 pm

hmmm ... thought about that re music load times. why would v9 scumm have almost 0 delay at this point and v10, more than a minute? i have tried to just leave the ipaq to see how long it takes to load and it sits for more than a minute...then im forced to reset. dont think its that. any other suggestions?

knakos · Post by **knakos** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 12:46 pm

Yeah that shouldn't happen. Have you compressed the sound according to SirDave's PocketScumm manual? I run Loom OK with 22050, 96kpbs (probably mono, can't remember) mp3. And it does take 1-2 mins on my relatively underpowered device to get the intro sequence playing.

fingolfin · Post by **fingolfin** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 12:59 pm

windsortheater wrote:hmmm ... thought about that re music load times. why would v9 scumm have almost 0 delay at this point and v10, more than a minute?

Because the code was changed between 0.9.0 and 0.10.0, adding support for VBR files. Unfortunately, to be able to seek in those, one has to sift through the full MP3 file. This overhead is not necessary if one only supports CBR (constant bit rate) files. See also
http://www.mars.org/mailman/public/mad- ... 01059.html

Of course, one might now say that this is not so good for low end devices, and that maybe for those one should only support CBR files with faster seeking. Yes, I would say, sounds reasonable. Unfortunately, this is the very first time I ever heard about this problem (as seeking 30MB on a desktop machine, where I develop the MP3 code, takes virtually no time). Since I can't fix bugs I don't know about...

.

Anyway, Knakos, feel free to contact me and we can try to come up with a better solution. Maybe it's possible to detect CBR files somehow and automatically fallback to a faster seeking mode for those. Who knows...

knakos · Post by **knakos** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 2:02 pm

fingolfin wrote: Because the code was changed between 0.9.0 and 0.10.0, adding support for VBR files.

... Because no good deed goes unpunished