[Scummvm-devel] TsAGE engine and Geekwad

[Paul Gilbert]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 10:36 PM, Eugene Sandulenko <sev.mail at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 31 October 2011 11:16, Willem Jan Palenstijn <wjp at usecode.org> wrote:
> > I agree with Johannes on this. I wouldn't be a happy with a ton of
> hardcoded
> > logic specifically for arcade games.
> I requested dreammaster to post this on -devel because I have same stance.
>
> If the arcade scenes would be small part of the game, i.e. like space
> flight scenes in The Last Dynasty, that could be OK. But here we are
> talking about reusing game formats, and hardcode for the _all_ game
> logic. Too big stretch in my opinion.
>

The previous suggestion by Lordhoto is possibly a good one.. if I develop
Geekwad in a separate branch, then when it's done we could evaluate how
much code is required by the game and determine what to do with it then.


> What I would like to encourage is to work on support for external
> plugins for ScummVM. Thus projects like scummvm-misc, or scummvm-rpg
> could be easily integrated at run-time. I even would vote for
> supporting of such projects on our project facilities, just like we do
> for Residual. I.e. provide cross-linking, server space, hosting etc.
> Just let have ScummVM to be focused on adventures.
>

This would be an excellent step for ScummVM, IMHO. It's becoming a more
generalised cross platform game framework, and even if we don't provide
official distributions with non-adventure game plugins, it would allow
other developers to at least make use of the framework and be listed; this
would effectively allow users to play extra other games as people support
them. There have also been several other engines previously, such as my
Gargoyle engine, Another World, Little Big Adventure, etc. in various
states of completion.

The only real concern I have is with engine fragmentation. Even with
plugins, in this case we'd be ending up with two different versions of the
TsAGE engine, both supporting different games. This may or may not be an
issue on it's face, though.. Tsunami released several other games that I
*think* are TsAGE - Man Enough, Flash Traffic, Protostar, and Wacky
Funsters. Given each will require hard coding of game logic, on further
thought, I think it may be more effective to end up with two separate
'TsAGE' engines/plugins, one for the adventure games, and another for other
games.

Since the majority of replies are also already in favour of not having it
part of trunk, I'll make a branch later today, and then back out the
Geekwad changes in trunk.

On a final note, I've never actually looked at the existing plugin code, so
maybe someone can tell me.. what's the current state of plugin
functionality? Is there more that needs to be done to effectively support
them? Or is it just that some systems don't support plugins yet? Will
ScummVM support plugins out of the box, even if other engines are
statically compiled in?

Paul.
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