Hello!

This will be short, as last week was rather slow. I mostly finished shoring up all the areas where Director palettes can be tested and set – in the frame palette channel, with the puppetPalette command, with the movie-wide default palette, and also with the palette of cast Lingo. As I look back at my commit log, I realize that this took me many more commits than I expected. There are still some issues that some of our new test targets, including the 1991 title The Riddle of the Maze, recently revealed. As of this morning, though, this game’s elegant artwork has been restored:

Apparently, before Director 4, palette castmembers were forced into the same order that they are stored. If you reorganize them in the cast window, they will actually revert to a default position on save – and this position seems to be in the order of palette creation. Also, Director 3 Macintosh format has a slightly different way of storing palette channel information in the frame. (I have still to push the patches for titles that have this variation.)

I also finally got some of the titles that @trembyle had mentioned on the Director wiki, including the aforementioned Maze. @trembyle has done some immense work testing many new titles for us, and today I enjoyed investigatinCEg some new bugs in new titles. Playing with these new games was a nice breath of fresh air from the targets that we had been testing since the beginning – like Spaceship Warlock and Chop Suey and The Apartment.

My other big task last week was working on the text selection interface. When I think back, I believe my first experience with Director happened when I was pretty young; it was a typing game that also depended heavily on text selection. I remember this game as Director because it crashed once and I distinctly recall the Director projector icon. @sev had done most of the algo work in the MacGUI side, but I needed to write a bit more interface and do lots of testing to discover what was behind a selection offset offset bug.

Once I finish up the palettes and add a few new targets that I found, I will be working on supporting movies that have >8-bit colour. If you look in the graphics code, there are tons of const byte * declarations everywhere, so those will be changed out for a more general implementation. There are also bitmap decoding issues with greater colour depths that I need to look into. This task, a fairly big one, will be a nice way to round out my GSoC work on our Director engine.