[Scummvm-devel] Adding 'Beneath A Steel Sky' support to ScummVM

[Joost Peters]

Hi there,

As some of you may have already read in the forum or heard elsewhere, I am
currently rewriting the original source for 'Beneath a Steel Sky' (BASS) in
(portable) C to produce a multi-platform sky.exe replacement; basically a
ScummVM for BASS.

Ender convinced me to merge my sources for this project into the ScummVM
tree as a seperate BASS-module, similar to the way
Simon is supported...so that's what I want to discuss with this posting.

A small introduction to the project (in it's current form) is at:
http://0x.7fc1.org/projects/BASS/ (That site will soon be taken down), I
have currently rewritten about 20% of the original source code.

There are some things I'd like to do prior to merging:

- Clean up the code a bit
- Remove redundant code (SDL initialisation, etc) that ScummVM already
provides.
- Encapsulate all the global var's and internal engine functions in a
'BassState'/'BASSState' Class. (it's all C global var's now)
- Make it fit/work in the ScummVM-framework (duh!)

And when done commit the sources and continue development from there.
I would appreciate opinions and feedback (suggestions/advice) on this from
the ScummVM development team.

Also, I hope someone is able to answer the following:

- What are the "rules" (if any) for modules?
Is it desired to have as few source files as possible, or is this not really
relevant?
For example (referencing the original BASS sources now):
The RNC-Unpacker "UnpackM1()" function that's in rn_deco.asm is only used in
disk.asm.
Would it be preferred if the extra file (rn_deco.c(pp)) would be omitted and
that the Unpack function would reside in disk.c(pp)? Please reflect on this.

Well, that's it for now..thanks a lot for your time.

Regards,
Joost