[Scummvm-devel] Dreamweb engine inclusion.

Eugene Sandulenko sev at scummvm.org
Tue Jun 14 13:17:21 CEST 2011


On 14 June 2011 12:32, Willem Jan Palenstijn <wjp at usecode.org> wrote:
> Apparently there's a restricted .asm file that is the input for this
> recompiler?
>
> If so, this makes me wonder if this is sufficiently open source for us (and for
> the GPL). Note that the GPLv2 defines source as "the preferred form of the work
> for making modifications to it". So this depends on your intentions for the
> future.
No, this is not that way.

We got original sources from the authors, and as usual, they're under
NDA, i.e. ScummVM Team only.
Together with it we got an explicit permission to use it as we want
for implementing a GPL licensed engine.

The sources (besides, they include the game editor too) are written in
ASM, and they required manual translation, which we started. Then
Vladimir came with an idea of automatical preprocessing, and instead
of generating pseudocode like we do with some of the engines, he
generates C code.

So basically dreamgen.cpp is equivalent to a .dat file in other
engines. After several developments it will be practically static.

I do not think that there is a real sense of making that code readable
or something, but we can fix bugs in it as we do with other engines.

Of course, a bit more brains could be added to the translator, such as
loop detection, but all in all, refactoring those 20k lines of
basically assembly code will bring us no gain.


Eugene




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