In the third week of GSoC, I worked on finishing the WAGE engine. The main things that needed to be done for the engine were: 1) check save/load system and fix the game bugs; 2) to redump the games and add them to detection table.
The save/load system was mostly working when I started, but a there were a few missing cases that needed to be handled. 1) When trying to load a save after loosing the in the game, the console window showed the text from the previous session. The fix was to simply reload the state() and then run the “Look” command, so that we get the initial text about the scene (surroundings) where the main character in located.
Other interesting bug to solve was the crash I was getting after loosing in several games. For example, I would always crash after throwing the “frag grenade” and destroying the spacecraft in the game Bug Hunt. Since we have the sources for the engine, I first tried to check the code there. It was the same. I run the original Java sources in Eclipse, but as it turned out, the game also crashes in that scene. So that meant I had to go deeper in the code logic and find what exactly went wrong there. The problem was that when destroying the spaceship, the script would move the character to “storage scene”, an empty, temporary scene where characters are located during the startup. Since the Scene class contains Rect pointer needed for drawing and the for the storage scene it’s null, the game crashed when trying the draw the scene. Of course, we could add the checks for the NULL pointer, and fix the crash, but that would not be sufficient, since the “Game Over” dialog would not show up. The solution I came up with is to check if the player was moved to this storage scene after making the turn and set the gameOver flag: commit.
After that, I fixed the remaining bugs and the text in the About dialog, which took several iterations since I would discover new problems as run more and more games with different text sizes, fonts, etc.
Then, it was a time to do the re-dumping task. Thanks to my mentor, I already had my Basilisk II setup ready, and it was not that difficult to do the task. My workflow was as follows: I would decompress the game archives inside Basilisk, then move them to place that will be visible from the host (my OS), then use dumper-companion the make sure the file names are nicely puny-encoded. After that, I would check if there are any issues with the games in ScummVM itself, and later add them to detection tables.