Another week spent on improving and finishing the MacVenture engine. In the last week I focused on improving things that happen after the winning the game, i.e, loading diploma window & dialog, implementing “Clean/Mess up” functions. I also fixed the bitmap problem I had with with a few items in Uninvited game. Lastly, I spent time fixing the resize button and porting the leftover methods from the original codebase.
I started the week with adding support for the diploma window. There was already a pointer variable in the codebase, but until before I did not know what kind of diploma it was referring to. The diploma we are talking about here is the certificate you get after completing the games.
To implement it, a first added another constructor for the ImageAsset class, as the format for the diploma image was a little different from the rest of images. Once that was done, the diploma image already started showing:
After that, I needed to add the dialog that had with “Print” and “Exit” buttons. There was already a Dialog class for that, however only with prebuilt options. Similarly, I added the constructor for this, however, the text was a little off. To mitigate the issue, I added an additional MacText text so that line wrapping can be easily handled. Once that was added the dialog at the bottom started showing correctly:
After that I started fixing the bug where certain items (charm and statue) in Uninvited game were incorrectly displayed:
In fact, you can see the issue in one of the images in the previous post. For debugging, I first identified the object id of the item, then looked how the image was loaded. The problem was in ImageAsset::decodePPIC0() method, in particular, in the section where 32 bits were read and then bitshifted to the right, until most significant byte was taken. At first I thought the problem was that BitStream32BEMSB which was used here was behaving a little different from the GFile class in the original, and because of that these artifacts were happening. And indeed, in the original codebase, the position of the stream did not advance right away after getBits() was called, but was incrementing the internal variable and advanced the position only after that variable was greater than 0xa. I thought maybe I should wrap BitStream template inside the custom class to imitate the behavior of the original code. However, after thinking a little more and checking the walkHuff() method, where similar thing was happening, I realized than none of that actually needed. BitStream32BEMSB was advancing stream position correctly in the first place, so the only thing which was needed was to read the first 16 bits, and skip the other half. And indeed, this two line change fixed the issue:
Another thing I copied from the original javascript codebase was “Clean/Mess up” functions. Clean up is handy when there a lot items in the inventory, and you want the thing sorted. This was a simply copy-n-paste, however, the end result is quite satisfying and as said, useful for players:
At the end of week, I started polishing the console window The window where text (log) is displayed. There were small issues fixed away: numbers not showing and resize button not working. The last one was similar to the close button covered in this post. The last thing which needs to be properly done with console window is getting rid of unnecessary new lines, making the scrolling properly work and showing the text correctly when resizing (it gets clipped, not wrapped).