[Scummvm-devel] Adding Frotz engine to ScummVM

Johannes Schickel lordhoto at gmail.com
Mon Sep 7 20:30:36 CEST 2009


> I don't think we can talk about scope anymore, as much as about technical
> limitations and relative advantages. If our backends right now don't support
> any of the functionality that would help text games, and an engine out there
> does it much better, then we can say (for now) there's no advantage in
> usurping the territory of that other engine. IIRC, similar sentiments were
> said about Freesci and Sarien at the time. Scummvm's scope definitely grows
> with time, and to say that it's still just about point & click adventures is
> (in my opinion) not to recognize what it has become. I think, however, that
> given what is currently defined as being within Scummvm, it simply doesn't
> seem reasonable to move into a very different engine type. With time, that
> may change.
>

Actually the FreeSCI merge discussion back in the days which was
always answered as "no we won't merge" was not about technical aspects
when it comes to what our 'backend' API provides or not. The reason
behind the "no" was that both teams did focus on different development
strategies, thus both teams decided not to merge.

I still think ScummVM *is* only about point & click adventures.
Neither AGI (which was merged to prevent rotting of the Sarien code)
nor FreeSCI merge did change that. Of course AGI games can't really be
called point & click games, but it is at least graphic adventure
enough to be included IMHO.

I'm unsure what you mean about "relative advantage" and the following
point. But IMHO ScummVM is not about "saving" all kind of old games by
supporting them, just because there are no other free software
reimplementations of them. ScummVM is only about point & click
adventures. All exceptions we made (like AGI or early SCI games) are
IMHO justified by them being similar enough.

As Max I'm having no problem with other people reusing our
"technology" (under the terms of the GPL of course) for their "ScummVM
engine" or separate project, BUT IMHO as project itself we should not
include non point & click adventures in our offical tree, because they
differ too much. I'm having no real problems in new point & click
adventure game engines to be merged into ScummVM, but when it comes to
other genres I'm for a clear rejection of them.

// Johannes




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