Month: August 2026

Starting to write this blog with a great news that the PR implementing the CgBI decoder as well as the hint system has been created. I just finished the last touch up of the hint system and then pushed it. How long it takes before it gets merged now is subject to review.

While implementing the hints, I encountered many cases where, due to many hints for a single question, the hints did not fit on the screen all at once. So, I implemented a button to go down to the bottom so that the user can view the hints fully.

This is how the hint system is working. As you can see, the moment the hints go beyond the bottom edge, the “down” button appears.

Next, I will be implementing the intro and outro videos. Those videos are in a format named “m4v”, which, as I understood by reading about it, is just an mp4 container only but with a different extension, created by apple. It uses the aac audio and h264 video codec. I am not completely sure if our existing decoders would be able to decode this format but during the time I had started working on this project, I’ve had a discussion with @sev on this topic and he thinks that our quicktime decoder would be able to decode it.

So, I will start attempting to decode it with quicktime only.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Welcome back to another blog. Last week, I primarily worked on the text rendering inside the help panel that includes hint questions and their respective answers(hints).

The help panel provides us with hints in the form of questions and clicking on each question provides us with some hints in the forms of answers to those questions. I am currently testing the whole pipeling with one test case i.e. “How do I get out of the furnace room?” which is the case 3 in the hint system’s state machine implement in the function Control::buildHints() in control.cpp.

The question and answers are implemented in the form of a struct Hint that contains an integer for storing the question’s number and an array of integers for storing the answers indices. The questions and answers are implemented in an array of strings in ibasstext.cpp

And the font rendering is done in a method named initHelpPanel(). For the rest of the questions and answers, we have the placeholder(“?”). The hint system for the furnace case looks like this-

Clicking anywhere else than the answer’s rect clears the answers(think of it as a back button to the question). And, to close the hint panel, we hit the esc button.

After fully implementing the hint system’s pipeline end to end and testing with the furnace case, I will now be porting rest of the cases too. And just like english, it has support for many different language like Spanish, Italian etc. adding whose support for the hint system I am considering in the longer run. See you in the next blog.

Thanks for reading 🙂