[Scummvm-devel] Status of M4/MADS engine?

[Max Horn]

Am 26.11.2009 um 10:25 schrieb Paul Gilbert:

> On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 8:17 PM, Eugene Sandulenko <sev at scummvm.org>  
> wrote:
> 2009/11/26 Max Horn <max at quendi.de>:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > so, what's it with this M4 engine? Like Igor, I see no real
> > development on it. It was merged in April 2008. As far as I can  
> tell,
> > since then *no* serious development on it has happened.
> As I saw, dreammaster renewed his work on the engine recently.
>
> Johndoe was the primary contributor, and I believe he has some
> uncommitted experimental development.
>
> The engine is incomplete and is able to show location and run some
> scripts, too far from having some game completable.
>
>
> Eugene
>
> Hi all,
>
> That's correct - I'm now working actively on Rex Nebular, and thus  
> the MADS side of the M4 engine. Progress is going to vary in  
> intensity, since I'm simultaneously working on further disassembling  
> the game as I implement code.

OK. Could you please document this in the namespace doxygen comment in  
m4/m4.h ? I.e. add a list of supported games and status of the engine  
there (informally, just describe it with your own words).

Would be nice if we had this for all engines -- I added stub comments  
for this some time ago. Maybe we should also add a list of  
"maintainers" for each engine.

At times, it's very annoying to figure out which engine does what and  
how well each game is supported. Yes, we have the Wiki and  
compatibiliy matrix on the website, but you have to correlate data  
from multiple sources to figure things out, which is annoying. Like, I  
need to look at AUTHORS to figure out works on an engine; then compare  
that with the "svn log" to see if the list is really complete; then  
look at the detection.cpp file and/or the wiki to find out for which  
games the engine is responsible; then use the scummvm.org  
compatibility chart to figure out how well-supported the games of the  
engine are supposed to be (if they are listed at all, which for e.g.  
m4 is not the case).

Bye,
Max