How it continued

In my very first post on this blog I wrote how I came to be involved with the ScummVM project by adding support to the mac version of Broken Sword 1. I wrote I had been lucky, and you will have to wait a bit longer to know why (yes I know, I am milking this one, but I promise I will explain it soon). I expertly avoided however to reveal that I had also been lazy. When I submitted the initial patch I knew the support was not perfect. I already mentioned it lacked support for AIFF music (and I will take this opportunity to correct myself: apparently the support was added by eriktorbjorn, at least according to the history on github, and not by sev as I mistakenly wrote in my first post). But more importantly there were graphical glitches. Yes! GRAPHICAL GLITCHES! Oh, the horror! And I can't even claim I had not noticed them. That would mean admitting I was blind (or at least color blind).

The first one is visible every time you visit Nico in her apartment, which is quite often (just a shame you can't use that big bed). Notice anything wrong (no, not the bed)?

George, don't leave! Have you seen what is waiting for you out there? A corridor painter in red! Stuff of nightmare! And the psychopath who painted that might still be lurking in a corner!

Just in case the image above appears normal to you, here is what it should have looked like:

No light in the corridor? I guess they forgot to pay the electricity bill.

The second glitch is even bigger, although maybe not as obvious. I had not played the game for a few years myself when I added support for it in ScummVM, and while something was bugging me during my tests I was not sure what it was initially.

Bull's Head Hill, Syria, on a murky day. The sky, the color of a swamp, was empty of any birds. And I was about to jump into the void.

And here is what is should have looked like:

A Sunny day in Syria. Maybe I will live after all. Not that it will stop me jumping though.

So what is wrong? This scene in Syria has a background parallax layer, on top of which the foreground is drawn, with transparency where we should see the background. And you have probably noticed by now that the background was not visible in the mac version.

The game sometimes uses parallax layers to give a sense of depth to the scene. When the characters move on screen, the foreground and background will move at different speed. See wikipedia if you have never heard of a parallax before.

This is the only scene in the game that has a background parallax layer. And as such it has a special logic for the draw code. Other scenes may have a foreground parallax layer however, as is visible in the video below.

The two glitches are caused by two different bugs. But they are somewhat related. The game uses 256 colors with a different palette for each scene. That means each scene defines a list of 256 colors, and then the image data is defined using the indexes (stored on 1 byte) in that list instead of using directly the colors.

The palette for each scene is actually defined in two separate resources: one that defines the palette for the scene itself and contains 184 colors (indexes 0 to 183), and one for the sprites that contains 72 colors (indexes 184 to 255). The first color (at index 0) is actually reserved for the top bar (inventory) and bottom bar (dialog options) area when the bars are hidden. It is forced to black in all the scenes, whatever the color defined in the data file. This is also the color used for the door in Nico's room. And it is used for the transparent part of the foreground image in the bull's head hill scene. And this is the index used for the transparency in the sprite data as well.

You have probably guessed it by now: the mac version does not use color index 0 for the door in Nico's room and for the transparency in the bull's head hill scene. After a bit of debugging it turned out it is actually using color index 255 (i.e. the last color of the palette instead of the first one). In Nico's apartment that color happens to be red, and in the Bull's Head Hill scene it happens to be some sort of brownish dark green. Once I knew what the problem was, it was fixed with a simple patch.

Other than that the Mac version is identical to the Windows version. It still uses the first 184 colors of the palette for the background and the last 72 colors for the sprites. And it still uses color index 0 for the top and bottom bars area and the transparency in the sprite data. So I have no idea why they made that change for the two cases described above.

Here is the code to get the palette when loading a new room. As explained above it is called twice, once for the first 184 colors and a second time for the remaining 72 colors. We force color 0 to be black. Lines 6 to 9 corresponds to the fix for the mac version, in which we also force color 255 to be black.



And here is the beginning of the draw code. As I wrote above the Bull's Head Hill, which is screen 54, has a special handling. We first draw the background parallax and then draw the screen on top, skipping pixels with color 0 (which here means transparent). On line 21 we have the fix for the mac version, for which we also skip pixels with color 255.



And that is all for today. In the next post I will speak of the speech data, and I will explain why I was lucky in my initial implementation.