So I was creating a Picture resource for KQ2SCI on stream yesterday and towards the end I decided to test it. I saved it and loaded up the game and half my work wasn't showing up. The commands were all there in the Pic, but it wasn't working. I tried closing the Pic and reopening it and...it was all messed up. Most of my work was lost and only some of it persisted in being saved. Since I was streaming, though, I had all the commands listed on video so I painstakingly went through the video frame by frame and reimplemented each draw tool command from the draw command list on the video. That took ages. And then....it got even worse. Commands I didn't even make started garbling the screen in the Visual, Priority, and Control screens alike.
I narrowed the problem down to the Pen tool using the randomized pattern (specifically size 2). So I figure something isn't saving right when it comes to that specific draw command. It recorded two of the pen tool draw commands fine, but by the third it randomly decided to turn on the Visual tool and start painting on coordinates that aren't even on the picture (like in the thousands) and randomly appearing in a bunch of places on the screen and the entire rest of the picture ended up being corrupted. I had to remove the Randomized Pen Pattern tool commands entirely and it saved just fine.
This may be something we're already aware of I don't know. Now that I've run into it like this, though, I do remember running into it in the past and remembered trying to avoid using the randomized pattern pen tool. I've used it on other pictures in KQ2SCI, but with those I used SCI Studio to draw the pictures way back when. So I guess I'll have to use Studio sometimes for those details. I haven't nailed down exactly how or why it's corrupting but I intend to do further testing and experimenting with the SCI Pic resource file specs closeby.
