ScummVM-GSoC 2021/6/14

2021/6/14

We are at the end of the first week now, and i'm going to write a summary here for the tasks that i do in the past week

Previously, i fixed the selection of mactext, and implement the basic text operations to mactext.

so then i started to fix the text castmembers in director. Sev guided me to use emulator to create and simulate movies in the original director. And that really helped me a lot with the developing. I tried to create some movies and test behaviours in original one. Then back to ScummVM to fix our director with the right behaviour.

And at the same time, djsrv also helped me a lot. He is a very skillful students. He gave me some advice and some guiding about the director, and also the code that i write. I wish to be a friend of him, and stick to ScummVM together to contribute.

Then is the custom target mission which i've described earlier in another post. Briefly, i've extended the advancedGameDetector for director to make director can detect movies like Lingo Dictionary now.

And the last one is for the offset fix, previously, i've added that to the trello card. I think maybe i've also described that in my proposal for director. Director didn't handle the border offsets correctly. I calc the pure text size and use it to create castmembers. But still, it got some defects, due to the unknown algorithm of how director handle the initialRect size. We still can't get the very precise size of our widgets, currently, it will get an offset of 2.

The good news is that even thought we didn't got the precise size, but that version can behave correctly on any test on them, including the test which djsrv gives to me(selstart-main, seltext). And once we got to know how to deal with the size, then we can bring a robust version of it.

I've also fixed some offsets problem in mactext. Eliminate some of the macgic numbers, and re-origanize the logic of mactext to make it more strong.

I've also use two days to work on "number of chars in", which is an movie parsing problem. Looks like we didn't handle the movie resource very correctly. But due to the lack of the knowledge of this part, i didn't managed to finish this mission. Even thought, i still learnt a lot of things. Reading those hex codes also let me dive deeper to director. And with the knowledge of that, i'm getting more and more familiar with director.

Thanks to the previous task i've talked about, and the previous experiments and experiences. I've fixed Apartment/User interface/button. Although it's a small part of apartment, but i feel like i'm really getting started on it. I've gained a lot of things, not only the improvement of the ability of reading doc, but also the interesting and happiness when i was working on scummvm.

I'm starting to like it. And with estimating the improments i've made in the last week, i have enough confidence to bring a good work during GSoC. Also, i have enough confidence to bring a better ScummVM with devs in the future.