A real saviour

one thing that is rather common among all adventure games, is not only the ability, but also (without naming names) the NEED to save early and save often, certain games could even make good use of a version control system for that particular thing...

Oh well, puns and jokes aside, last week I added savegame-support in the WME-port, initially this worked fine for everything BUT J.U.L.I.A. and after looking for the problem for a good day, I noticed that the savegame-code for the theora-wrapper had a special case for savegame-versions below a certain threshold, thus reading fewer bytes than was written. (And well, I had reset the savegame-version system to 1.0.0 at the time, since I wasn't aiming for savegame-compatibility anyhow). Fixing that allowed for working savegames in all the games I have tested so far (which would be Dirty Split and J.U.L.I.A.).

I also made some headway with the renaming of functions the past few days, now a good chunk of the functions follow the "funcName()"-convention, instead of the "FuncName()"-convention. A few still remain, and the arguments and variables still stay mostly unchanged.

I also finally got around to compiling the port on a PPC Mac, only to realize how much worked there: the mouse cursor. Yup, some Big-Endian-love is needed to get this train rolling on such CPUs. The main problem at the moment lies in how the scripts are read: *(uint32*)char_buffer... I'm thinking I'll replace most of that code with MemoryStream-code, to make the endian-handling a tad easier (and possibly avoid having to read the entire file in one big chunk at game-start.

The persistence system used in WME originally made a note of the saveable classes by having a static instance of CSysClass per class, this was a bit too global for my tastes, and I have changed that to a function that manually registers all the classes, this way it can be cleaned up properly on exit.

Along with these changes, I also added in load-from-launcher support, and RTL-support, right now the thumbnails are a bit off for load-from-launcher, but the same problem exists for ingame thumbnails too, I guess I'm using a bit too much of the render-surface for the thumbnail, either that, or the downscaling works a bit quirkily.

I'm hoping to have atleast the scripts rolling on PPC this week.

Sorry for the lack of exciting pictures this time, but atleast this means both your game progress and bandwidth can be saved now.