[Scummvm-devel] Out of This World / Another World?

Jonathan Gray khalek at linuxgamers.net
Thu May 6 00:46:02 CEST 2004


On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 17:17, Torbjorn.E.Andersson at tietoenator.com wrote:
> Travis Howell [kirben at optusnet.com.au] wrote:
> 
> > The main problem seems to be the non-adventure type of this game engine.
> 
> Actually, my main concern is that ScummVM currently doesn't have any
> infrastructure for handling polygon-based games. Perhaps this is easy to
> add but I was wondering if it belongs in ScummVM, or if it's better suited
> for, say, residual.

What is it that is so attractive about adding a game engine to ScummVM?
Is it the MIDI abstractions/graphic filters?  Maybe some of these things
could be broken out into separate libraries.  I think realistically most
(all?) of the backends could be replaced via dedicated SDL ports to some
extent.

Maybe it is having the attention of additional developers?

> Whether or not Out of This World is an adventure game or not is an
> interesting academic question that I'm sure we could spend many weeks
> discussing. However, there's no question in my mind that it's a *different*
> kind of adventure than the ones we are currently supporting.
> 
> I agree with the points that have been made that Out of This World is a very
> nice game, and that it's a quite small game engine. But the same thing could
> be said about the Infocom text adventures and their "Z machine", and I don't
> see anyone arguing that we should support those. Not outside of April 1, at
> least.

I think the distinction that comes to mind here is that there are
established Z machine interpreters like frotz around.  Where as there
isn't anything competing with AWE besides well raw seemingly.

> But as I said, I don't care much either way. Technical considerations can be
> resolved, I see nothing inherently wrong with mixing genres (that's for our
> esteemed project leaders to decide, I guess), and "bloat" does not concern
> me since we already have ways of dealing with that. My reaction was one of
> surprise, not, I hope, hysteria.
> 
> The most compelling argument I've seen so far is that cyx says he's planning
> on maintaining raw separately from ScummVM. That, to my mind, is an awkward
> situation. Do we really want to assimilate projects while they are still
> being actively maintained?
> 

No I think its a mistake to do that, maybe we need to better establish
why people want it to become part of ScummVM and work from there.

regards
Jonathan





More information about the Scummvm-devel mailing list