[Ohrrpgce] Callipygous

[Ralph Versteegen]

On 22 March 2016 at 03:11, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 9:30 AM, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> OK, I'm basically done; I'm putting everything else off until after
>> release, and don't really have more time right now. James, are you
>> planning a release candidate?
>>
>
> Awesome! I Think I will declare a nightly build to be the release candidate
> (without actually branching in svn just yet) and see if I can prod people
> into testing.
>
>
>>
>> The only thing that still concerns me is my last todo list item:
>>
>> -slice errors now appearing in old games due to slice handle numbering
>> changes. Just hiding the errors with Release Mode may not be good
>> enough, they may be real (new) problems. The following are likely to
>> be caused by the same problem:
>> --Lots of suspicious pauses and script errors in Sephy's Angel
>> Whispers (haven't checked whether actually caused by freeslice
>> changes)
>> --'waitslice, already deleted slice' in Karate Fight (probably no
>> consequence)
>
>
> Well... if we add a backcompat option for bringing back the old way of
> allocating script handles, how much of a burden would it be to keep that
> working in the future?
>
> My (limited) understanding of this issue is that these games were
> incorrectly re-using slice handles for slices that had been deleted, and
> then new slices had been created with the same handle number

That's correct.

Adding a backcompat setting would be a one-line addition right now,
but I'm still not sure how much trouble it will be in future.

[Begin train of thought]

I did want to switch to garbage collected handles in the new script
interpreter. In fact I want to turn all handles and ID numbers
(including all of the constants found in an .hsi file) into typed
objects (called "weak types" in the ancient Plan on the wiki). For
backwards compatibility it will be necessary to allow handles to
existing types of objects to be treated as integers, and for integers
to be treated as handles. A further level of back-compatibility is
ensuring that handles correspond to the same integers that they
currently do. Finally, a question is whether this integer<-->handle
conversion should always be allowed, or whether it should be turned on
by backcompat bit. If the former, it can throw an error but work
anyway.

-For NPC references, the integers clearly have to remain the same.
-I have seen several people do/think confused things with menu/menu
item slots/handles, since they count up from 1 in a very predictable
way (should have made them count from -418015 instead)
-I was planning on making the assumption that no one ever does
arithmetic on slice handles, but the problem we're talking about is
nearly as bad as that.

Note that you might store an npc ref or slice handle as the width of a
slice. (People would actually do that; they wouldn't store it as the
NPC walkabout palette.)

Also you can save a game today containing saved slices, and handles to
those slices in global variables will be integers regardless of what
version loads it.

[End train of thought]
....

I thought that we had more examples of games where we suspected that
the change in slice handles caused error messages? I remember that you
figured out that that was the problem in Karate Fight. (And in that
case we determined the error was safe to ignore, IIRC.) My reason for
suspecting a change in the engine is to blame for Angel Whispers is
that there so many errors (and serious breakage, I think) that I doubt
Sephy released it like that.

Maybe there actually aren't many, and we would fix more games by
adding a backcompat bit to disable alt-key filtering.

It looks like we need an easier way to actually see the error messages
in games set to Release so that we (and others) can look for them,
such as a debug key that always works. The --errlvl commandline option
has no effect in Release mode, that's something I meant to fix.

>>
>> Also there are some minor things, like fixing the permissible ranges
>> and documentation for attack costs to match reality
>>
>> Other bugs put off:
>> -backwards non-automatic shrink animation can crash (can test in slice
>> editor)
>> -double fade out in screensaver3.rpg (update palette)
>> -fix two off-by-one bugs in battle backdrop animation ticks
>> -window scaling when launched through steam wrong size (Citizen Kane)
>> -sprite dissolve with transparent=no doesn't work
>> -disable filtered alt in old games. For example in Apophenia (2010
>> version) pressing alt instead of esc to bring up the menu doesn't work
>> properly. (But with either alt or esc the menu flickers anyway.)
>> -keyval repeat rate might break balance in old games? But only if they
>> run < 18 fps. Not a new problem since Beelzebufo