[Scummvm-devel] Global menu save/load dialogs

[Filippos K]

Greetings

Yesterday there have been some changes to the global save/load dialogs, completing some issues they had. They should now be complete, and ready to be used. Changes in a nutshell are:
- Both dialogs can now handle gaps in the list of save game slots. i.e., if you have a save in slot 1 and another in slot 3, but none in slot 2, slot 2 will now be shown correctly, instead of having slot 3 shown right below slot 1
- It's possible to write protect certain save game slots, which can be specified by each engine individually. This has already been done in the kyra engine, and the user can no longer overwrite quick saves or the special restart save game
- Engines can specify meta information for each save game, including a thumbnail, played time, creation time, if the save can be deleted and if it can be overwritten. This has already been implemented in the SCUMM and kyra engines

To support all the features in your engine, you can check Max's excellent "advanced game features" guide in our wiki:
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Advanced_Engine_Features

Also, the sound configuration and save/load dialogs in the SCUMM engine can now be removed altogether, since the GMM ones offer the same save functionality, plus more. The only thing that's not in the GMM dialogs is the "Help" menu of the SCUMM engine.

Now, it would be also great if all engines that support the GMM save/load dialogs would have some sort of unified save games. In particular:
- It would be great if save game indexes would not be used at all
- It would be nice if save game extensions would be 3 digits, which would allow us to use 1000 save slots in all engines. Currently, there are engines line cine which only support 10 save slots, because their save/load dialogs are very limited
- It would be fantastic if the default save/load dialogs for each engine can be changed to the GMM ones, using the same key binding (probably the F5 key?). The original save/load menus, if needed, can be shown with another key combination, like alt-F5, in the same way that's done in the SCUMM engine. And the limitations of the original save/load screens can be kept in the original screens only (e.g. a limited number of save slots, no thumbnails etc).

Some engines, like gob, cannot support all features, cause their save/load system is entirely script-based. But in engines where saves are handled by the engine code itself, I believe it would be nice to unify these features and offer a common user experience, which would be far better than the original engines offered.

Thoughts are always welcome :)

Regards
Filippos (md5/thebluegr)

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