As of last night, I finished fixing the last of the remaining issues I knew about. The Bellbot now correctly understands 'goodbye', and I fixed some issues with his animation when leaving. Since these touched core parts of the conversation and animation systems, this may have helped fixed all sorts of obscure glitches elsewhere that I hadn't previously noticed. So in a sense it was good that they were such obvious problems that were easy to replicate. I also fixed the fires in the canal.. again it turned out to be a problem with all game objects with an automatically playing video.. the fires were just the most noticeable example.

Anyway, I plan to go ahead with a full play-through of the game on the weekend to see if I can notice any remaining issues to fix. Depending on whether any other problems come up, I should be ready to announce official testing within a week. So not long now.. those of you who've had trouble with the original executable will be able to properly experience the game, and take advantage of ScummVM multi-platform support, and more than 5 save slots :)

PS: I can't remember off the top of my head if I've previously mentioned this or not, but this will be only for the English version. The German does at least start up in my ScummVM engine, but there's various extra functionality that would be required for it to be properly supported.

Further on from my previous posting, regarding the German version. I'm not sure how much further work would/will be required to get it fully supported. I do already have a lot of the needed functionality that it's supposed to need in place, such as the special "translation" tab in the PET that shows up in certain areas to show what the English text in the pictures mean.. not sure why they didn't just do translation on the images. I'm a bit burnt out on Titanic from all the work done on the starfield puzzle, but if it turns out there aren't any other major remaining changes, I'll try looking into taking care of them in the following week. It would certainly be nice for both languages to be properly supported.

If there are any any German speaking fans of the game, I could use a bit of translation help. I wrote a tool that extracts needed data out of the executables. Part of that is a list of text strings. I have the English versions, but it would be easier to get a German native to provide the German equivalents for rather than me trying to track down where each string is in the German executable and getting the translated version.

See the URL below for the text strings needing translation. Any help would be appreciated:
create_titanic tool

Wohooo! This is such great news! :) If we're ever in the same public house, please let me buy you a pint!

My own German is probably no better than yours, but I've contacted some German Adams-fans. Hopefully it will result in a pull-request sooner rather than later!

No worries. I've just gotten an offer for help from one of the users in the ScummVM IRC channel. So that should be taken care of shortly. Though it's definite now that the initial testing period will only be for the English version. Whilst I've taken care of some new code added in the German version, such as the translation tab in the PET, and some extra code in the parser, there are still two areas remaining. Firstly, and somewhat bizarrely, it looks like they changed over lots of the WAV filenames used for sounds in the game. Which means that for every single sound in the game, I'd need to figure out where the method calling it is in the German version and find out what filename it uses. Lot of drudgery. :P. The second is somewhat more understandable.. the NPC scripts have some variation in logic for handling the different language semantics for German.

I'll quite possibly spend some time during the testing period implementing some of these further changes for German, I'm not going to commit to having it supported in the near term. It may be left to someone else, particularly the tracking down of all the sound calls.

Speaking of testing period, whilst I had hoped to announce testing at the start of the week, my second playthrough identified several further errors that I'd like to fix first. One in particular touches on the decoding of the transparency (alpha) layer for some videos, and how it's used to draw the video frames. This could potentially affect multiple videos throughout the game, so I figured it will be best to have it sorted out before I make the announcement.

At most, this will just be a delay of a few days, and an announcement for testing will still go ahead this weekend.

Seems like I caught a break in the whole decoding/rendering issue I was looking into. It turned out to be a somewhat weird, but understandable case of doubling down on transparencies. In the video sequence right at the beginning of the game with the Doorbot, some of his animation frames turned out to be only partially drawn - they were using transparent regions to reuse parts of the previous frames, and this is what I wasn't handling. Then, with the image of the Doorbot fully formed, it was then making use of a separate video track that contained transparency information for the Doorbot overall, showing which parts of each frame of the Doorbot should be drawn into the scene. So hence a case of double transparencies.

That takes care of the only real remaining major issue I wanted to look into, apart from the occasional Indeo 4 videos, whose transparency data I still haven't figured out, and won't be fully supported during the testing phase. The other remaining bugs I know about are pretty minor, and could be worked on further during the testing period. So definitely expect a call for testing announcement in the next few days :)

Wonderful news! Can't wait to be a beta tester :D

I remember going through the game files when it first came out and thinking the transparencies were quite an unusual way of doing things...but I guess it reduces the number of different gesture videos needed...

Ah. Never mind. It broke before I even got into the elevator...and Github doesn't seem to be accepting my registration....

After I say "Yes", Fentible SHOULD look over and suggest you take the photograph...instead, the game seems to start playing every single Fentible video in order, resulting in him jumping around the screen....it then hangs.

Sorry about that. A recent change to properly handle reverse video playback broke that. The new daily build should let you get beyond that point. There's still some minor corruption because the wrong frames are used from the transparency track, but it's not blocking anymore.

Thank you! Seems to be working fine now...I have found quite a few bugs, but github still won't accept my registration and I don't want to derail this topic any more than I already have...

Well, the important thing is for bugs to be identified, and fixed. Whilst it's generally preferred people use the issue tracker so that we track what bugs have been fixed, if you're having trouble, feel free to post a summary to the testing announcement thread I started.

I thought I'd give it a go, but I'm getting "Could not find titanic.dat data file". I'm guessing I'm missing something fairly obvious, but I can't quite work out what... :-/

EDIT: Never mind! Found the new forum thread for testing! (
https://www.gog.com/forum/starship_titanic/testing_period_now_open_for_starship_titanic_in_scummvm)