The past week has seen quite a few deletions from the codebase, I’ve removed the debugger, the registry and a lot of smaller pieces here and there in the code, all stuff that isn’t really necessary in a ScummVM-version of the engine (like in-engine fullscreen-switching-handling).
I’ve also found time for quite a bit of cleanup, with the assistance of the nifty astyle tool I added braces to all if-, for- and while-statements, breaking single-line ifs that looked like this:
if (conditional) doStuff();
into:
if (conditional) {
doStuff();
}
which made for quite a bit more readable and consistent code.
I’ve also removed Base as super-class for a few classes that didn’t really need to reference BaseGame (formerly CBGame), thus easing the cross-file-dependencies that were making the compile-times horrible.
File Management
The package management in the file manager has been refactored into a subclass of Common::Archive, which at this point means that it’s quite close to being able to be added to SearchMan, and then just using SearchMan directly, one of the blockers for that is the filename-handling for absolute paths (i.e. redirecting C:\Windows\fonts somewhere usefull, another is that quite a few classes use the “readWholeFile”-function (those that just got a bad case of “endianness”-itch, can relax, it’s only used for text files)).
Save games
Where formerly save games were taking ages and ages to load/save, they now should take quite a bit shorter, the speed-issue here came from the fact that the “load-progress-indicator” was drawn for every instance of every class that was loaded/saved, this in turn made a full screen update (as everything does for the moment, for lack of fully working dirty rect-updates). This meant that for every millisecond of usefull load/save-work, the engine would be doing hundreds of milliseconds of work updating the screen just to possibly move a progress bar another pixel.
I changed this behaviour to only update the exact region of the screen where the indicator is, and only as far as the indicator has progressed (and, only when the progress bar has changed at all). This might result in minor differencies in how the progress bar looks (as it isn’t redrawn on top of itself for every single instance any longer). But that’s a cost I think most users will be willing to take when the end result is a decrease in save/load-time by a factor of 10.
Lazy loading of images
The engine used to take a few seconds to startup a game on my computer, the reason for that was simply that all the images in the entire game would be loaded. I looked into this, and the only reason most of these images were loaded, was simply that their width and height was needed to set the default size of _rect in BaseSubFrame. I changed _rect to private and made ALL access to it use getters and setters (even internally in the class). Then I added the field _wantsDefaultRect, that kept track of whether _rect should have the width/height-values or something else. When getRect is triggered, and _wantsDefaultRect is true, the image will be loaded, to get at those values.
Now, this might sound like a rather odd approach for a simple getter, but the end result is that the state of the class is preserved WITHOUT loading every single image on startup, thus reducing both the load time and the memory footprint by quite a bit. (For Dirty Split I halved the memory footprint of the first screen, and reduced the load-time to between a fifth and a tenth).
One side-effect of this that might prove this solution quirky, is that there is no guarantee that all frames of an animation reside in memory now, which might result in some animations being slow or late the first time they are played.
Singleton and separation
Instead of passing the File Manager around to everyone and everything, it’s now moved to a singleton that is supposed to keep it, and other stuff that survive between loading savegames. Since BaseGame is already quite a bit on the heavy side (clocking in at over 4 KLOCs), I think it’s appropriate to try to move as much functionality as possible OUT of that class and put it elsewhere.
Minor stuff
I had forgotten to add the space-bar as a “printable” key in the events-checks, which made typing anything but rather long words in i.e. save-game titles impossible. That is fixed now.
- Sounds that were playing when saving now resume properly on load.
- Screen-fading now works.
- Save game thumbnails now scale properly (thanks to some scaling code I got from clone2727), where before they would repeat the first column in the last few rows, owing to some integer-division gone haywire.
- The settings that were formerly in the settings.xml-file have now been moved to ConfMan, which is responsible for the ScummVM-settings-file (.scummvmrc/ScummVM Preferences/scummvm.ini), any game-specific settings will be stored there with the prefix priv_ (for instance the subtitles-flag in Dirty Split is stored as priv_Subtitles).