Hopkins

Hopkins
Engine developer	dreammaster, strangerke
Companies that used it	MP Entertainment
Games that use it	Hopkins FBI
Date added to ScummVM
First release containing it	N/A

The Hopkins engine was used by MP Entertainment for the game Hopkins FBI, the only game they ever published. The game was released for several different operating systems, and due to a fortunate oversight, debug information (names of variables and methods) was left embedded in most of the applications. This made it much easier to reverse engineer and implement a ScummVM engine.

Games

• Hopkins FBI

Status

• Linux full version and demo are completable
• Windows demos are compleatable
• Windows full version is playable, but the Doom-like maze is currently missing (so, not completable)
• OS/2 and BeOS are playable and don't require the Doom-like level, so they may be completable. They require a playthrough.
  • An OS/2 version has turned up (eriktorbjorn has a copy, and probably Strangerke as well) that isn't currently playable for (at least) the following reasons:
    • In FileManager::searchCat(), it should probably read ENG_VOI.CAT, not ENG_VOI.RES, or it will go into an infinitely loop whenever someone speaks. (Speech doesn't work anyway, since the sounds are .RAW, not .WAV or .APC.)
    • Resources are not named by language, e.g. there is no "fondan.pcx", only "fond.pcx".
• Polish and Spanish versions are yet to be tested, because they are not owned by developers

Known Bugs

• Palette glitches when exiting a dialog and when skipping cut-scenes. This is more visible now that a delay has been added in the fading animations.
• Some random crashes when hitting F5/F7 due to text arrays memory issues
• (to be compared to the original) some non-optimal path-finding issues
• Path-finding Teleport error: When leaving Samantha's office, directly 'talk' with the green guy in front. Hopkins will go left, then right, then will go towards the camera through the desk, then will teleport back. This is the easiest way to reproduce the "teleport" bug (but it was detected in several other places)
• Priority issue: In the parking lot, once Hopkins has looked at the corpse, the cat has a broken priority level.
• Menu: after the fading, a button is moved by 1 or 2 pixels
• City Map: The birds flying over the buildings are masked by the buildings. Same thing with the smoke from the chimney.
• Regression: When resurrecting Samantha's clone, there's an issue with her zoom ratio which is wrong when she becomes active, then is correct when she moves, then is wrong again with another value when Hopkins is activated. (1c5a6f8c74a794e9a913c9b2c0bebfd59ac0fd9e)
• Mouse cursors are slightly off. It seems that ScummVM ends up with the same colour both for transparency and for black, so parts that aren't supposed to be transparent are. This can be seen when the gun is the cursor, or every time text is drawn because it's missing a black outline.

Original bug fixed

• In the "Empty Lot", the animation when searching the empty box was corrupted and was crashing the game

Resources

Engine repository on github

External links

• MobyGames article