Goodsoup - Curse Of Monkey Island on Amiga

[Kang]

Awesome!

[Flimbo]

This is an incredible project, Betajaen. Really appreciate this.

[betajaen]

"Little" Update.

I have got it to read and process the NUT fonts. I have come up with a RLE format that should make it more memory friendly on the Amiga, and its disk-cachable too.

The main new feature is managed to get most of the SMUSH/Codec47 video decoder ported and working. It requires some optimization to get it more 68k friendly, but works pretty well so far, very good frame rates on my Vampire. Audio is coming, once I understand AHI and general audio programming.

In other words - I have got cutscenes working!

I am hoping to put out a special build soon, for those who have a copy of the game, to try out the opening cutscene and see how well it performs on their Amiga.

Pictures attached! Video of it from my recent VOD

[TCD]

Originally Posted by betajaen

In other words - I have got cutscenes working!

Nice one Thank you for keeping us updated.

[Kang]

[vulture]

oh man, looks great!

[manossg]

Excitement building up!

[Tigerskunk]

Amazing.

Never played this before, so probably will if and when this gets finished.

[grond]

Absolutely impressive! Some historic injustice is being rectified...

[sean_sk]

Oh, I am looking forward to THIS!

[betajaen]

Thanks guys for the kind words. I will keep plugging away at it, as I want to play it too.

[TuKo]

I see you're very active on GitHub betajaen ! Keep up the motivation !
For my poor soul, could you sum up what is current state since last v0.5 ?

[betajaen]

Originally Posted by TuKo

I see you're very active on GitHub betajaen ! Keep up the motivation !
For my poor soul, could you sum up what is current state since last v0.5 ?

Hi!

I didnt really want to post anything, until I had well tested builds.

I have been working on the SMUSH decoder, which handles the cutscene videos (SAN files). I have it fully working now, it will decode the video, subtitles and audio correctly now.

The subtitles use the NUT font system, which is a little inefficient. I came up with my own system (GSF - GoodSoup Font), that can handle transparency and compression as the same thing. It only requires writing to a bitmap, rather than the NUT files which require a read and then a write.

In SMUSH - I have been working on the audio playback (IACT) (which works on Linux), and have been working on getting it working on the Amiga. The frame rate is variable dependent, and depends on the audio to be synced perfectly.

The current decoder is a bit of a mess, so I have been rewriting it from scratch this weekend. Video, and subtitles work awesome now. Audio is being decoded, but I need to solve the timing problem.

Meanwhile, I have been working on an alternative more Amiga friendly codec that Goodsoup can convert the video files ahead of time into. They will be much larger (about 12x) as much, but with some reasonable compression, they should be mostly streamable from the standard IDE. This will be provided as an option. This part I have been working on today. A rough experiment, converted the OPENING.SAN file from 70MiB, to 1.04GiB. I think that's fine, we all have big hard drives on the Amiga now, and 4GiB limits are no longer a thing.

From what I can tell, the SMUSH decoder is the most system heavy part of the Monkey Island 3 code. So I want to get it right, and proper. Then I can go back to Gameplay.

If you want to see it in action, recently I showed it off on one of my streams. Here is it running in Linux. The audio is a bit rough, but that is because it is running in a Virtual Machine, and it is being recorded by OBS, so the CPU was being swamped at the time and the code at the time, was a bit rubbish:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1557966945?t=1h50m11s

If you want to see it running on my Amiga without Audio:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1557966945?t=2h11m13s

[betajaen]

Just a small update. The video code is mostly complete now, there are some bugs and things I want to get back to, but I need to resume the gameplay part.

I invented a new lossless codec GoodSoupVideo (GSV) that the SMUSH files can be converted into - GoodSoup can do this for you and will be an optional part of the install process.

The file sizes are bigger (typically 4x) than the original, but they are very Amiga friendly (everything is encoded as ulongs so pixels written 4 at a time. Changes are written at 20 pixels each per line. No RLE. Just pointer math.)

I even do some tricks by baking the subtitles into the video, working out the right keyframes. I even do crazy stuff with the credits to ensure the minimum amount of frame updates as possible. There is even a 320x240 option (although ironically, its more CPU expensive to draw than the larger 640x480 option)

The audio is working now, and so is the timing.

Here is a demo video/stream of it running through the converted videos:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1567665920?t=00h08m40s

[TCD]

Looks great Looking forward to the next updates regarding the actual game.

[vulture]

great progress!

[gimbal]

Yep, that looks and sounds like Monkey Island 3 alright.

[lesta_smsc]

Amazing project. I loved this graphics for MI series. I wish they maintained it for the future releases rather than going 3D.

Keep up the good work!

[betajaen]

Thankyou all.

I am currently writing the general Amiga Audio code this week. The AHI documentation is a little confusing to me, and I think I have done something wrong.

I will keep at it though, as we know the audio works as shown in the Linux videos.

[8bitbubsy]

Any updates?