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This wasn't an issue in the previous install by me (Galahad), Wepl has taken over this install so you would be wise to ask him as he redid the install completely. |
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The chopper is there on both english versions. It's not there in DE/FR/IT versions. I think this is an original game bug. I'm not going to fix that. |
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Pre-mission helicopter missing in the German/French/Italian versions — won't fix (not a WHDLoad bug) The little helicopter that flies across the pre-mission parallax screen is present in the two English versions but absent in the German, French and Italian versions. This was investigated in detail (comparing the disassembled executables and memory dumps of the English and French versions, and decoding the relevant graphics). Result: the helicopter is missing because the localisers deliberately removed it from the original DE/FR/IT game, not because of the WHDLoad conversion. It cannot be re-enabled cleanly, for the following reasons: The helicopter is drawn from a shared glyph sheet (pstuff.lbm) via a shared glyph-descriptor table in the executable. The same sheet and table also hold the in-game fonts. The localised versions needed more room in that sheet for their larger fonts (the small font was enlarged to fit accented characters like ä/ö/ü, and the large font was made smaller and re-flowed from 2 lines to 3). To make space, the localisers: 1. reused the helicopter's glyph-table slots for font characters (the indices that point at the heli body and its animated rotor in English now point at font glyphs in DE/FR/IT — the heli descriptors no longer exist anywhere in the table); 2. reused the helicopter's hardware-sprite buffer for the larger fonts; and 3. parked the helicopter sprite off-screen so the now-meaningless leftovers wouldn't show. The helicopter's pixels still exist inside the graphics sheet (that part of the image is byte-for-byte identical across all language versions), but nothing in the code references them any more, and the slots that used to address the heli now address fonts. Re-enabling it would require re-creating the removed glyph descriptors in free table slots, re-pointing the renderer, restoring the body draw, and resolving the buffer/slot conflict with the localised fonts — a fragile, multi-part change that would risk corrupting the localised on-screen text. This is almost certainly why the original developers gave up on it and disabled the helicopter for these versions in the first place. Conclusion: the absence of the helicopter in the German/French/Italian versions is original-game behaviour, faithfully reproduced. It is left disabled, exactly as those versions shipped. (The English versions are unaffected and keep the helicopter.) |
- Anonymous
