[Scummvm-devel] Release plans, once again

Max Horn max at quendi.de
Fri Aug 20 01:07:04 CEST 2004


Am 20.08.2004 um 04:05 schrieb Tim Ansell:

>
[...]


>
> I play ScummVM mainly on my Zaurus so I guess I'm biased towards 
> features which benefit it, however I would like to see the following:

Actually, yes, you seem a bit biased, but of course so am I :-). I 
would rate none of the items you list below as release critical, 
neither for 0.7.0 nor 1.0 ...


> - Much improved mpeg2 rendering in Broken Sword series - It's way too 
> slow even on my p333 laptop. Everything else runs well and even some 
> unoptimised players get better speeds then ScummVM.

Patches welcome. Hardly of high importance, though. Personally it runs 
smoothly on my system. I think libmpeg2 is fine speed wise, but the 
ScummVM backend simply isn't designed for movie playback (to many 
scaling stages etc.). Nevertheless, somebody might want to take a look 
at this with a profiler and try to speed up things. Of course, running 
on a 8bit device will always be slow due to color conversions.

> - Consistent compression support for all music and sounds. (It would 
> be nice if Broken Sword could get this).

There are various FR items open for this. Again, patches are welcome, 
but its not of high priorty. Doing this is rather difficult in many 
cases because the sounds are interwoven with the rest of the data, so 
compressing it separately is not possible.


> - Support for reading from the whole game in compressed zip file or 
> ISO image. This would make it a lot easier to use the original the CD 
> (as they appear as an ISO on /dev/<bla>) or images of the CD.

As Ender said: Never!

> - Porting the pop-up keyboard, buttons to all (from WinCE) to all 
> platforms. Would use it on a keyboard less console then. (Which seems 
> like most games are suited to.)

I see how this could benefit a Zaurus (and there is an open FR item for 
this, I think). The virtual keyboard from WinCE is implemented in the 
WinCE backend. What you are asking for is to implement one in the SDL 
backend (implement it outside of the backend is problematic because 
then we'd have to add support to the backend for injecting events, 
something I'd rathe avoid). This certainly should be possible.
But support for the Zaurus, while nice, is not a top priority item for 
us.  None of us has a Zaurus, hence we rely on some 3rd party to 
provide a patch.


> I think most of them should be required for a 1.0 release. But thats 
> just me.

See above :-).

Our goal for 1.0 is not to support every target system perfectly out 
there. Rather, it's to be easy to use (new docs, maybe improved GUI), 
good to perfect support of our games, and stability. Everything else is 
nice but can wait for 1.1 or later releases. And there is always room 
for a 2.0 and a 3.0, too, of course :-)



Bye,

Max





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