[Scummvm-devel] Release plans, once again

[Max Horn]

Yo folks, relax :-)

It just seems that different people have different opinions about how 
they want to (or "should") use their games and ScummVM. Some prefer to 
use the original media, some to use a "compilation CD" they made 
themselves... fine, no need to start a war about that.

Marcus, if you could make an alternate MP3 enabled build, I am sure a 
lot of people would appreciate that. If keeping a non-MP3 version is 
good due to size reasons, that's properly a good idea, too.


As to loading plugins dynamically: not only is this problematic because 
you have to know in advance which CD the user will insert; but also 
because we need to have the plugins loaded for the autodetector, target 
lists etc.
One solution would be to keep that data outside of the plugin, and 
static link it into the engine; that's not so elegeant and destroys the 
clear separation between engine and plugin, but should work.

Or we could simply do the opposite: dynamic *un*loading of the 
plugins... So the idea would be to first load all plugins; do all 
autodetection/target discovery/whatever we me might need. Once the user 
inserts that other CD and decides he wants to start to play, we can 
then unload all plugins except the one which is needed for that game. 
That should solve both problems mentioned above, actually. However 
it'll only work if the dynamic linker allows unloading. On Unixish 
systems, there is dlclose() (though I haven't actually tried it yet).



Bye,

Max