Avalanche

Avalanche
Engine developer	uruk
Companies that used it	Thorsoft of Letchworth
Games that use it	Lord Avalot d'Argent
Date added to ScummVM
First release containing it	N/A

The Avalanche engine was used in Lord Avalot d'Argent.

This engine is being added by the GSoC student uruk to ScummVM as part of the GSoC 2013. The source code was provided by the authors, Mike, Mark and Thomas Thurman, who released it under the GNU GPL version 2 license.

Status

A couple of missing optional mini-games, completable

TO-DO

• Class refactoring (WIP)
• Sounds (WIP)
• Help
• Main menu
• Control of the drop-down menu with keyboard shortcuts
• Status leds and buttons on the toolbar
• A shoot-em'-up mini game after the first encounter with Robin Hood.
• Whole-screen animations (Intro/outro animations, the ghost room in Avalot's castle.)
• Demo mode (If the player doesn't start playing and being idle for a certain time in the main menu, the games starts to demo itself.)

Differences from the original

• The ScummVM version uses a different font for some of the texts in the game. (For example: Nim.) Maybe they'll be replaced later.

Outstanding bugs

• The global 'mute all' option in ScummVM is not always working.

Outstanding original bugs

• The original game doesn't update the little icon which represents the direction Avalot is facing if you control him with the mouse by clicking on the background. At the moment, this bug is also present in the ScummVM version of the game.
• After you rescued Geida and leave the screen in front of the Baron's castle to the right, Robin Hood won't come to take the girl away. You have to go back to the screen to trigger the event. There's a missing 'also line', which causes the bug.

Fixed original bugs

• There was a bug in the original engine that caused the internal timers of the game to mess up when a savegame is loaded. The problem was that when you loaded a savegame, the engine set the internal timers for the room by default and after that loaded the timers you saved when you saved the game. For example in the first room, if you made a save while Avvy was sleeping and loaded it back, you may have noticed that his wife, Arkata's timer was messed up: she shouted every time she should counted from the time you saved, and shouted every time the room's newly set internal timer told her to do so. Now it is fixed: if you load a savegame, the engine only loads the saved timer, and leave the default one for the cases when you enter a room newly.
• The original game didn't load properly the state of Avvy's speed (walking/running) from a savegame: The little yellow dot at the bottom of the toolbar was always set to "walk" state, even if at the moment of the saving Avalot was currently running. In the ScummVM version, this bug is fixed.
• In the original, when you play the harp in the abbey, the game doesn't always hide the mouse cursor. In the ScummVM version, it works properly.
• The spiderweb on the ghostroom scene was misplaced in the original (it wasn't exactly at the right corner of the screen). Now it's fixed.

External links

• Current WIP for the avalanche engine, on a git fork from ScummVM
• Repository of the original sourcecode, licensed under GPL v2