[Scummvm-devel] Unifying data loading, saving and printing (SCUMM, Tinsel & Cine, maybe others?)

[Max Horn]

Am 30.07.2008 um 13:20 schrieb Kari Salminen:

>  Hi everyone,

Hi Kari!

Since so far nobody said anything, I guess we are mostly alone with  
this one :)

>
> Max threw the idea that at some point we might combine
> the savegame handling so that at least SCUMM, Tinsel and
> Cine could use the same code for handling their savegames.
> I really like this idea but it also brought another thing to my mind:
> How about also putting debug printing into the mix (As saving
> and loading of data is already combined into a single function in
> the SCUMM engine).
>
> Using the same structs that describe what variables to load or
> save we could make a printout of the variables' values (The
> structs contain information about what type the variables are,
> their signedness, size etc). That'd be a big help in debugging
> and it'd be nice to not have to generate those debug printing
> routines by hand ;-).

That might be a nice touch, it could even be automatically hooked to  
the debugger, to make it possible to read (and even write) all of  
these values from there. However, I would consider it as a secondary  
feature.

Plus, in the approach we chose in Tinsel, it wouldn't work like that,  
because we don't store the required data in a struct there, like SCUMM  
does. One of the reasons being that the code in SCUMM requires a nasty  
hack in order to derive offsets for class members relative to the  
start of an arbitrary instance, thus resulting in code which violates  
the C++ standard a bit, and thus in theory could lead to problems in  
some future compiler (it does not cause any problems with any existing  
C++ compiler, AFAIK, and it seems unlikely that it ever will, but it  
could...)


Bye,
Max