So the highlight of this week is, as the title suggests, the Lingo tracer. I mentioned it in a recent blog. When I shared a screenshot with sev of the prototype I made, he said it seemed like a good idea and green lit it. This week was spent mostly on it, and getting it working was not that hard. The hard part was making it easy to use and understand.
The tracer records Lingo as it runs: every handler that gets called, when the score changes frames, and when a script is frozen and later resumed. It draws all of that as a flamegraph inside the ImGui debugger, so you can see which handlers ran, how they nested, and how long each one took. There is also a small stats table that sums the total and self time per handler, so the expensive ones are easy to spot. It stays off until you tick Capture, so it costs nothing when you are not using it.
Most of my time went into the reading experience. Frames and freeze/thaw markers sit in a thin strip at the top so the flamegraph below stays clean, tiny sub-pixel slices get merged so a busy trace does not turn into noise, and hovering one call highlights every other call with the same name.
fix
The other fix this week was a sound bug in gusmuse. Entering or leaving an area stacked the music tracks on top of each other, and the previous one never stopped.
In Director the sound channels are one shared resource between the Stage and any movie-in-a-window, but in ScummVM each window had its own sound manager, so a track started from one window could not stop a track from another.
I routed every window’s sound through the Stage’s manager, and now the channels are truly global.
That’s it for the week : )