Last week, I finished implementing the direct-copy mode for our Macintosh window manager. Now, with the Director engine, there is no intermediate blitting onto a screen surface that is then copied to the physical screen. This restored transition speed and avoided duplicate work on every frame. Here’s the opening of Spaceship Warlock with the new interface and transitions:

For a while I was stuck on implementing border transparency without an intermediate surface, but @sev helpfully reminded me of g_system->lockScreen(), which no longer has performance issues on some systems.

I also looked at several long-standing bugs this week. As @djsrv probably noted, in investigating one we discovered that the goto Lingo should not run the exitFrame event. In the opening scene of Majestic, the two middle bitmap text channels previously held the mouse-over highlighting for “Restore Old Game” and “Exit” in the main menu. Clicking “Start New Game” went to the correct place, but not before the main menu’s exitFrame event disabled visibility of those channels again. Now, though, everything looks right:

Tomorrow, it will be time to figure out why the cursor implementation I made doesn’t work with Majestic… and also why the bitmap cursor in Chop Suey still has a strange flashing behaviour.