[Scummvm-devel] FreeDink/Dink Smallwood in ScummVM?

Paul Gilbert paulfgilbert at gmail.com
Mon Jun 9 22:57:07 CEST 2014


Hi Sylvain,

As the first to reply to your email, let me just say welcome.

>From a technical standpoint, there are a lot of advantages to working with
the ScummVM project source to re-implement games, irrespective of whether
they're traditional point and click adventures or not. After all, as you
said, the project already contains the build environments for a large
number of systems, and we have the code base for a variety of different
sound and graphic formats, meaning you don't have to reimplement all of
that from scratch. Some of our existing engines also already have had to
deal with lots of different supported game variations, so nothing you're
talking about is completely new to us. We also have the IRC channel which
normally has developers on it for most of the day if you have any technical
questions.

The downside is that Dink is not really in the scope of the project, since
ScummVM is focused on point and click adventures. This is not necessarily a
bad thing, since you can easily fork the project and provide your own
repository that adds the Dink Smallword game in as an engine, benefiting
from the codebase even if your engine is never part of the official
distribution. You could also build executables with only the Dink engine
enabled.

In fact, there have some informal discussions to having a splinter project
that focuses on RPGs already. Both myself and Strangerke are particularly
interested in several RPGs, such as Al Qadim, and the earlier Might & Magic
games. Time constraints, though, working on existing adventure games like
Rex Nebular, and GSOC mentoring, meant that we haven't been able to devote
much time to work on them. But if we could complete several RPGs, including
Dink Smallwood, we could maybe package them together and start a 'RogueVM'
as a separate sub-project.   From that perspective, I'd be more than happy
to see you use ScummVM for Dink. :)

DreamMaster.



On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Beuc <beuc at beuc.net> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm the maintainer of GNU FreeDink, which is a GPL'd, portable version
> of the Dink Smallwood game engine.
>
> Dink Smallwood is an action/adventure game from the late 90's.
> https://www.gnu.org/software/freedink/
> Its main interested is the hundreds (I mean Nx100!) game extensions
> over the past 15+ years:
> http://www.dinknetwork.com/files/category_dmod/
>
> I'm currently facing a few challenges: handling palettes in an
> OpenGL(ES) world, porting to new mobile platforms, playing old MIDI
> files, and above all maintaining backward compatibility with an
> originally windows-centric game.
>
> I realized that most of these challenges are shared by ScummVM, so it
> could be mutually beneficial to make FreeDink an engine for ScummVM :)
>
> The pros are all the shared infrastructure and developer's expertise.
> Possibly new challenges include handling a keyboard-based gameplay,
> gettext translations, installing lots of game extensions and running
> the game editor somehow.
>
> I'm interested in your thoughts on this - is this worth a try?
>
> Cheers!
> Sylvain
>
>
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