GSoC Week 5: Star Trek Teaches Chemistry: How to Make Laughing Gas
Mission 3: Love’s Labor Jeopardized. It’s about 90% finished.
The mission starts with a rather ear-grating computer voice. Thank god they got Majel Barrett for the sequel.
That said, this is a neat mission. You’re given information about various chemical compounds that may be useful in the mission, then you need to figure out which ones are important and mix up some ingredients to cure a virus that’s running loose through the station.
Or you can just, you know, inhale some laughing gas instead.
Mission bugs
Last week, I promised there would be bugs in this mission. There’s nothing mission-breaking that I’ve found, though, mostly text stuff.
The most eggregious is a weird textbox I encountered in my casual playthrough. As far as I know, you’ll always encounter this if you take long enough during the mission.
I also encountered this following bug while writing this blog post. This is part of the 10% of the mission I haven’t rewritten yet, though, so I can’t explain what it’s about.
Aside from that, there are a couple of cases where voice acting doesn’t play when it should. And, if you look at Dr. Marcus when she’s tied up, it plays the wrong file entirely; only narrating the first half of the textbox. There was an unused audio file that narrated the entire textbox, so I replaced it with that.
The one thing that might be considered a bug in the mission mechanics, is the way you can give water to the Romulans. Apparently you can get a point in your mission score for doing that. But, sometimes, if they’re unconscious, nothing happens. You lose the water, you don’t get any points, and not even a textbox is shown. It’s honestly kind of odd. I’m still debating what to do about that; for now I’ve made it so you can’t give water to them while they’re unconscious.
Other oddities
There are a number of cases where a single line is read multiple times by the actors, simply because the same textbox is shown in multiple different rooms. For example, if you scan the air with the medical tricorder, McCoy says the exact same line, but with a different voice clip depending on the room. I can just imagine the cast complaining about why they have to record the same voice clip three times.
Anyway, this mission should be completable in ScummVM within the next day or two. Next week will feature the return of Harry Mudd in one of this game’s weirder missions.