[Scummvm-devel] Avoiding loading of all plugins during startup

[Angus Lees]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 23:09, Max Horn <max at quendi.de> wrote:
> Am 23.06.2010 um 14:54 schrieb Angus Lees:
>> I understand if it is considered out of scope for this GSoC project,
>> but I would be very happy to see the detection code separated from the
>> engines.
>
> It's not just out of scope -- I also think it may not work well in general, and described why so for the SCI engine :).

Oh ok.  I figured a reasonable first attempt could be made using a
list of known file names or checksums, but clearly I don't know the
details.

>> For the Android port, I have the engine plugins all split out into
>> separate optional packages since having all of them at once is much
>> too big for a typical Android app.
>
> In what way is it "too big" ? Does the Android store impose limitations on the binary size or what?

No, this is a real limit - many Android devices only have ~100MB
internal flash to actually store installed apps.  Even the recent
Android 2.2 feature to allow apps on the SD card, still requires
native libraries to reside on internal flash.  ScummVM with all
engines enabled is about a 10MB binary (+ data files, java code,
themes, and the compressed binary still in the package file) -
extremely large for an Android app.

>>  At the moment, users have to
>> install the right engine "plugin" packages themselves - and it would
>> be great if I could instead suggest which ones were needed
>> automatically.
>
> It would be even greater if all engine plugins were always installed... *g*.

It would indeed make everything simpler.  It just isn't possible right
now without excluding large groups of users.

> BTW, Gus, I am still awaiting replies to my mails from June 16 and June 8 :-).

(Oh sorry - I'll go find them)

 - Gus