[Scummvm-devel] The Situation (omnious music..)

[David Given]

On Thursday 06 May 2004 10:13, Max Horn wrote:
[...]
> Maybe it is indeed time to fan out into multiple projects... One which
> deals with the OSystem stuff (and the rest of the infrastructure, so:
> backends/, common/, graphics/, gui/, sound/). And then ScummVM
> (=AdventureVM... ), and residual, and awe, and anything else which
> might want to make use of it... of course that would decouple
> development of the backends from the frontend, meaning slightly less
> flexibility... OTOH, having "stable" release of the backend stuff to
> work against might indeed have its very own advantages... projects
> would use "OSystem 1.0.4" or "OSystem 1.2.1" etc..

Would this be a good time to bring up the old idea of dynamically loaded 
backends? So that the core system just provides an (extremely high-level) 
game engine, which the various engines plug in to?

This means you can get the best of both worlds; those people who want to port 
new engines can do so without having to touch the core, and those people who 
don't want to touch a particular engine don't have to concern themselves with 
it. You can have Supported engines, such as SCUMM, and Unsupported engines, 
such as RAW.

(After all, since ScummVM has done such a good job of abstracting over the 
hardware, it seems a pity not to use it.)

Dynamic loading probably wouldn't even be terribly hard. On platforms that 
support dlopen(), you could just use that. On platforms that don't... well, 
you'd either have to fake it or statically bind the engine modules into the 
core at compile time.

(It suddenly occurs to me that this could very well help solve the memory 
problem on systems like the Dreamcast, too. If you don't have to have an 
unused engine in memory, you've got more memory to play with. How big *are* 
the various engines?)

[...]
> I am afraid, we are humans, which are known to have this bad habit of
> making arguments out of thin air. Alas, we can try :-)

A wise man once said: line ten humans up along a piece of rope, and shout 
'Pull!'. Four of them will push, and two will say "What?"

-- 
+- David Given --McQ-+ "If Alan Turing was alive today, the homosexuality
|  dg at cowlark.com    | would be OK but he'd be in trouble for
| (dg at tao-group.com) | codebreaking." --- Martin Bacon
+- www.cowlark.com --+