[Scummvm-devel] Status update #2

[Max Horn]

At 11:26 Uhr -0500 23.10.2002, J.Brown (Ender/Amigo) wrote:
>No word on the legal situation yet.
>
>We now have www.scummvm.org and www.scummvm.com - if any developers wish
>e-mail forwarders for these domains, please contact me.
>
>Thanks to some AMAZING work by aquadran, with ludde then making it work,
>akos16 is now implemented for The Dig and Full Throttle. The Dig is now
>pretty much complete, apart from a NASTY memory corruption bug that needs
>fixing. The details on that:
>
>  - The nexus room should wrap, when you walk far enough around it.
>However, after walking around the room once, memory corruption occurs and
>will corrupt any future saved games. If you walk around the room several
>times, eventually the game will simply segfault.
>
>  - There is currently a hack in place to fix this, by doing a height-- in
>scumm/gfx.cpp:Gdi::decompressMaskImg() - this however is a dodgy fix and
>breaks other situations.

If you give me a savegame, I'll take a look.. :-)


>If someone could find out the REAL cause and submit a patch, it'd be
>greatly appretiated.
>
>---
>
>Also, a new save/load system is now considered CRITICAL for an 0.3.0
>release.
>
>  Due to many quirks that have shown up, the save game system needs
>an overhaul. We cannot easily overhaul the existing system because it
>doesn't provide for any real backwards compatability between format
>changes.
>
>The new save-load system should be implemented for 0.3.0, to ensure it is
>widly adopted. This will have the advantage of allowing us to remove some
>obscure bugs for this next major release, and implementing a new save
>system that has far better support for future changes to the format
>without breaking compatability.

Actually, unless we are going to make a release before 0.3.0, I 
*strongly* oppose this. The current save game is nasty and bad and 
ugly, but right now it works. If we keep going like this, we will 
*never* make a release. IMHO a release should be done really really 
soon. Whatever you tell me, I don't think there is any reason to hold 
it back, even the nexus bug, while being bad, is tiny compared to the 
HUGE amount of fixes and major improvements that have accumulated 
since 0.2.0.

So IMHO we should really really release 0.2.8 latest next weekend (if 
you want to save 0.3.0 for a new release). Though IMHO it would make 
much more sense to call this now 0.3.0, and then for the new save 
game system assign 0.4.0

Also, I don't even think the legal situation should hold back the 
release. Or do you think we get into troubles with LA if we make a 
release now, and start using the new license only with 0.4.0 ? Unless 
you are sure you know the answer, it might not hurt to ask.

Finally, "wide adoption" doesn't count IMHO, either. The current save 
game system is widly adopted already. A last release with it won't 
hurt us much either way.

But delaying the release for *at least* another month to implement 
the save game system and sort out all bugs of it (and that assumes 
somebody with the time and knowledge required for it starts on it 
right now, and we do a sloppy QA job) *will* hurt us on the long run.


And in any case, we should release much much more often in the 
future. The goal of only making new releases when major changes are 
done is IMHO nonsense. Why not make a 0.3.1 release after 0.3.0 even 
if we "only" fixed e.g. ten bugs? Or maybe aim at bimonthly releases. 
Whatever. We don't have to have all ports ready each time, either: if 
we set fixed releases dates, we can nag porters one week in advance, 
and if they fail to act, well, people can still use the build from 
before that.



>If anyone wants to do this, please discuss taking up the task with
>Fingolfin ASAP.

That holds true anyway :-) Together with ludde we worked out a save 
game format, and an approach on how to implement it. In fact i'd go 
for this myself, but I already am working on three projects right 
now, I don't have the time.



Max
-- 
-----------------------------------------------
Max Horn
Software Developer

email: <mailto:max at quendi.de>
phone: (+49) 6151-494890