[Scummvm-devel] Status update #2

J.Brown (Ender/Amigo) ender at enderboi.com
Wed Oct 23 23:54:01 CEST 2002


> If you give me a savegame, I'll take a look.. :-)

http://www.enderboi.com/misc/dig.s05

The crash is reproducable by walking around the Nexus about twice, that's
when the memory corruption becomes bad enough to cause a noticable crash.
Even just walking around it once is bad enough to make the game
incompletable. To reproduce, delete my height-- fixme in scumm/gfx.cpp

> Actually, unless we are going to make a release before 0.3.0, I
> *strongly* oppose this.

The next release should be 0.3.0, as I think (if the nexus bug is fixed)
adding support for a new game is enough to bump the mini-major version
number.

> IMHO a release should be done really really soon. Whatever you tell me,
> I don't think there is any reason to hold it back, even the nexus bug,
> while being bad, is tiny compared to the HUGE amount of fixes and major
> improvements that have accumulated since 0.2.0.

I do agree completely, we should have released at least another four
releases by now.. but because of the legal situation we havn't been able
to (see below).

> Also, I don't even think the legal situation should hold back the
> release. Or do you think we get into troubles with LA if we make a
> release now, and start using the new license only with 0.4.0 ? Unless
> you are sure you know the answer, it might not hurt to ask.

When LucasArts began negotiations, the deal was they would negotiate with
us (instead of taking legal action), and unofficially it was that we could
continue development in the meanwhile. My understanding is that we cannot
however make another release containing what LEC consider to be
'violating' code.

However I'll drop their lawyer an email and issue a kind of ultimatium,
asking if we can make another release if they don't expect to be able to
resolve this within another week.

Anyone know how we're going on code seperation? If we -do- get a license
by say Tuesday, give it a few days for people to comment on it.. post it
to debian-legal, let slashdot go over it maybe... say finalise things by
Friday - would we be ready to relicense over the weekend? If not, I would
suggest (besides any major release critical bugs, such as the Nexus) we
focus on that.

> Finally, "wide adoption" doesn't count IMHO, either. The current save
> game system is widly adopted already. A last release with it won't
> hurt us much either way.

I'd disagree, but whatever. I -would- far prefer to have a new save system
implemented by then.. and imho it wouldn't take THAT long to implement, as
the majority of data we are saving is already serialised anyway. All we
need to implement is the file format framework, we already know what we
need to save from the existing system.

I however am kind of busy on other things right now, myself.

> And in any case, we should release much much more often in the
> future. The goal of only making new releases when major changes are
> done is IMHO nonsense. Why not make a 0.3.1 release after 0.3.0 even
> if we "only" fixed e.g. ten bugs? Or maybe aim at bimonthly releases.

As I said, I agree completely. I would aim to have at least one release a
month in the future... depending on progress, of course.

 - Ender





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