[Scummvm-devel] Re : Dreamweb for 1.5.0?

Sun Nov 13 22:14:39 CET 2011

Sorry to have triggered all this :/
But I think we could reach a consensus with a mixed approach.

There were some bugs in the original asm source (mostly buffer overruns), all of which spotted were fixed so the code now is much cleaner and the game is completable so I think there has been at least *some* benefit with porting some pseudo-code to proper C++. Performance is much better too. And you can quit the game when in inventory or dialog which wasn't possible. The common saving code is plugged also. So it is getting better.

It will be a long time before every offset in the code becomes a struct member, and the less often the ported code is invoked, the more difficult regression-testing will be, making it riskier and riskier. Should we wait for total purity before shipping?
It could be beneficial for the users to play dreamweb now because *external quality* of the engine is good. The end-user should be satisfied with what they got.
Internal quality is debatable, of course, and I see the debate is quite heated :)
It seems logical that we can't ship a modified dosbox linked to scummvm and a huge byte array with a dos executable. A custom VM with static recompiled code is much better. Porting to proper C++ is even better. Where is the slider to be acceptable is open to discussion, no need to go to war about this.  And taking it personally won't make it any better. 

So it is more a question of policy, and I understand that it is feared that as soon as the engine is released, it will stay this way, but stay assured I'll stay commited in the near future to porting the engine to C++. It's just I don't have lots of time with the beta of the game I work on professionally.

Anyway there's no urgency in releasing the engine either. As fuzzie said, there are lots of engines in the pipeline :) 

Cheers everyone,

Bertrand

________________________________
De : Filippos Karapetis <bluegr at gmail.com>
À : ScummVM devel <scummvm-devel at lists.sourceforge.net>
Envoyé le : Dimanche 13 Novembre 2011 21h42
Objet : Re: [Scummvm-devel] Dreamweb for 1.5.0?

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 8:53 PM, Vladimir Menshakov <whoozle at yandex.ru> wrote:

It was completable since addition to the trunk. :) But I think you could forget about it.

The fact that a game is completable was never the main issue here. Yes, it's cool that you did this automated Assembly to C conversion, but the end result is clearly not C++, and certainly NOT what all of the other engines are. Automated assembly converters are not what this project is about. Our aim is to rewrite original game engines into clean and readable C++... and dreamweb in its current state is not C++, it's pseudo-assembly. The fact that the game is completable doesn't change this.

Many people here too bothered with HOW it was added. And they does not care about the scummvm users and does not care about the mission of the scummvm,

A lot of people have praised you for your idea of this automated conversion script. But, the end result, although better than the original Assembly code (but without comments)  is not what is expected in this project. Our "mission" is what makes us what we are... otherwise ScummVM's whole code could be about platform games running on toasters, or it could all be in Assembly... why bother to write everything in C++ when we can just use the original assembly? We have an aim, and we stick to it, otherwise we're not a project, but a big blob of messy code.

but only for their egoes.All moaning about stability and support (of dreamweb engine) are now looked like BS to me.
Excuse me, but this is blatant trolling and I really don't feel like starting a flame war with you. You have an attitude problem here, and please accept it. We want a rewritten engine in C++, not half-baked Assembly code. Calling other people names really doesn't help.

The main work in the engine had been done
A lot of work has been done, yes. But clearly, the current state of the engine is far from complete, and no, the MAIN work (i.e. the Assembly -> C++ conversion) has not been done.

(after I'd lost my motivation, because of stupid drama here) by the new guy and he prove it.
>
You lost your motivation? Why? Because we didn't want to have Assembly-like C code in our tree, created by an automated tool? The engine in its current state is not maintainable, and this has been mentioned in the past. You wanted to have the code supported in this state, which can't be done, and then you got bored of doing the actual conversion. It was you who lost your motivation without reason, as you did something and expected everyone else to applaud, pat you on the back and accept it without disagreement. Once you saw that this code couldn't be supported in its current state, you decided not to do anything about it and let someone else do the real conversion. This is what Bertrand has been trying to do, and you never helped him in this at all. 

Anyway, I'm sorry that you felt insulted and decided to leave, but you have an ego problem here, and your attitude here does not help at all. Please try to be more cooperative in the future, and don't assume that everyone will agree to your ideas all the time, otherwise you'll be living in a dream world, and it's time you snapped out of it.

Best of luck to your future endeavors

Regards
Filippos

-- 
"Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes" - Oscar Wilde 

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