A Branded Desktop

It’s been a hectic week since I attended two online conferences going on at the same time, and I had to prepare a talk for one of them, but I still have some exciting progress to share!

This week I got desktop/window border textures working, so the environment surrounding the Director movies looks closer to how it would have back in the day. Though the ScummVM branding would’ve been Mac OS branding, of course.

This was a real pain to get to, since I needed to make all these textures myself, and our MacWindowManager’s hard-coded defaults never work quite right for the Director engine’s use cases. But now it (mostly) works. I just need to fix up a few bugs and rewrite the desktop background code to make it more efficient.

On Friday, we met with John Henry Thomspon, the inventor of Lingo, to show off this and our other progress. It’s always nice to hear the thoughts of such an important Director developer. :)

I also rewrote my Lingo decompiler, ProjectorRays, in C++ so that it can more easily share code with ScummVM, and I’m working to bring it in line with the Lingo discoveries we’ve made while working on the Director engine. I just got it working on Director 4 movies! The output for these older movies isn’t great yet, but that will quickly change.