[Scummvm-devel] kaminari's recent feature request / unofficial game versions

[Torbjorn.E.Andersson at personec.com]

There's a recent feature request in the tracker about third-party
translations [1]. At first I took it for yet another "please make it easier
to translate SCUMM games to other languages" request, but that turned out
not to be the case this time.

Apparently there already are unofficial translation projects for some of the
games, and it used to be possible to run them in ScummVM. However, as
ScummVM gets more and more clever about automatically identifying the
official versions, it has apparently started to reject the unofficial ones
as unknown.

This raises the question: What should our policy on this be? Here's my take
on it:

I'm assuming that these unofficial translations require you to have a copy
of the original game. In that case, no piracy is involved. (At least not to
any greater extent than there is with the official versions.) While I
don't think we should go out of our way to support unofficial versions, I
do think it would be nice if the user still had the option to run them at
his own risk. To allow that, there would have to be a way to override the
auto-detection of what game it is.

I'm told that a not-very-user-friendly-but-workable solution would be a
matter of just a few extra lines of code, so it wouldn't be any great
inconvenience to us. We could probably leave it to the translators to
explain to their users how to set it up.

As an aside, we'd probably need something like this anyway if the ScummC
project ever grows into something usable. My thoughts on that are pretty
much the same, by the way: we shouldn't actively discourage it, as long as
the effort of supporting it is small enough.

What do the rest of you think?

Torbjörn Andersson

[1] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1286150&group_id=37116&atid=418823