[Scummvm-devel] scumm game creation? scumm resource extraction and a scummvm capable of dealing with the content?

[Jeroen Janssen]

Hello,

This is probably not the right place to ask, but I was wondering if 
anyone knows of a public project to create 'scumm' games that can be 
played with scummvm.
(Now this is probably not why you're all working on this thing, but 
wouldn't it be nice if people could someday work on creating new games 
that can be played with scummvm? - I don't know if other people have 
suggested something like this, my guess is they have, but please bare 
with me for a few moments).

I've been thinking about how this could work and there are a couple of 
'roadblocks'.
What tools do we currently have:
* extraction : scummvm itself (for scripts it encounters), rescumm, 
extract and some other public available tools like scumm revisited
* decompilation : descumm

* game construction : none (this means no code compiler, no animation 
encoder, room generator, 'container file' creator, etc)

So the problem on the compilation/construction part is that as far as I 
know it, there are currently absolutely no public available tools. That 
means if you want to create game/tools 'from scratch' you will probably 
never get it done within a 'decent' amount of time.

On the other hand (if you take a look at the 'modding' kind of games, 
like Unreal,etc) there is also another way to work on it.

If you could extract the enitire resource content of a game to disk 
(having a subdirectory hierarchy of the resources in a game AND having  
a scummvm capable of accessing this instead of the normal 'combined' 
resource files), one could start experiment modifying existing resources 
& writing tools that could be used to 'kickstart' the entire process of 
writing a new game. Example: you could start by adding a new room to an 
existing game using existing content.

Please mind that I'm not suggesting reusing content of an official 
LucasArts game and releasing the result.

If this makes sense to people, I think it would be helpfull if you one 
could reuse existing content to experiment on, in order to create tools 
that eventually will be able to generate complete game content.

Maybe it's not entirely clear, but my main issue now is whether it is 
feasible to have:
* an extraction tool that can extract the game resources into a 
subdirectory hierarchy
* a scummvm capable of using this hierarchy to 'run' the game from 
(probably by extending resource*.cpp)

Then the "next" step would be to work on something that can modify such 
existing content/create content from scratch and "inject" them in this 
directory structure and hopefully that will eventually lead to something 
that will be able to create a new game from scratch.

I hope this doesn't sound too crazy, and I'm not asking anyone of you to 
start working on this idea (yet).
I just want to know if you think it's feasable (maybe this can also be 
helpfull when working on debugging certain problems?),
I'm a programmer myself (so I can work on this) but I'm a bit at lost at 
the entire scummvm resource handling stuff so someone of you guys is 
probably better capable of answering this question.

Best regards,

Jeroen Janssen
(yes, I'm also in the contributer list, but that's been a very long 
while - I had some other things on my mind too)