Recent developments II

More than a month has passed since the last (and first) entry of this series. I’ve been a little busy with other things, but that doesn’t mean Residual ResidualVM development was paused.
First of all, two new contributors stepped in to help the development:

  • DarthJDG added antialiasing support. Add to your Residual ResidualVM config file the line antialiasing=$samples, with $samples equal to 0 (that is, no antialiasing), 2, 4, or whatever your graphics card supports, and enjoy the improved and smooth graphics!
  • juj worked hard on the bugs 31 and 247, regarding wrong head orientations, and made a pull request that fixes them. It is not in master yet, since there are some things to improve first, but the main code is there!

Aside the usual bugfixing in the Residual ResidualVM code I looked into a bug in the game scripts, a bug that existed since the Release in 1998 and that even Tim Schafer didn’t know of! This bug prevent(ed) a critical dialog with Domino at the end of the world to play, a dialog that explains the main plot!
I’ve explained what’s the problem behind the bug in the forum, with a possible fix. However, somaen recently added in Residual ResidualVM the support for a new lab file, called datausr.lab, which takes precendence over the others. This allows for a better fix, not needing anymore to replace data000.lab. These are the needed steps:

  1. Compile the tools mklab, delua and unlab from residualvm-tools;
  2. Unlab data000.lab to a directory and delua the file dlg_dom2.lua;
  3. Copy the “deluaed” file to a new directory datausr, keeping its name dlg_dom2.lua;
  4. Modify its first line to CheckFirstTime(“dlg_dom2.lua”);
  5. Create datausr.lab from the directory using mklab and put it where you have the other lab files;

Now when you run Grim you should see a dialog like this:

Now click OK and you’re up and ready to hear from Dom’s words his evil plans.