[Scummvm-devel] Scummvm-devel Digest, Vol 2, Issue 8

Neil Millstone neil at millstone.demon.co.uk
Sat Jul 22 22:33:04 CEST 2006



Max wrote:

>So, a better response would have been to start a discussion on how to  
>improve upon FSNode. But since typically my attempts to start  
>discussion on design of backend/frontend/glue code leads to no  
>response from the Big Black Hole, and in the end I am alone to decide  
>what to do anyway, I prematurely cut that discussion out. Which  
>clearly was not a good idea. :-/
>  
>
I would assume people trust your judgement, and don't feel it necessary 
to reply saying only "yep, that's ok with me". 

>Last night I just wanted to throw everything down and stop doing  
>anything with regards to ScummVM at all. Well, but I don't like  
>abandoning something w/o any warning or transition, as that's unfair  
>to the other people involved. So I will "fix" this particular issue  
>in Subversion now.
>  
>
I must say here that you (and Sev too) have been very encouraging to me 
to get the work done for the DS port and committed to ScummVM, and I 
think the project has gained massively from your leadership.  On the 
other hand, nobody wants to do stuff forever, and nobody would blame you 
if you wanted a break.

>Normally, I'd expect people to speak up when  
>they face problems, to ask for the API to be improved, but that  
>hardly ever happens -- people just grumble into their beards, then  
>implement something that "works good enough", cheat around the flaw,  
>abuse the API (sometimes because the API is not well documented, too,  
>of course -- though nobody complains about that either), or duplicate  
>code because the existing code is not doing exactly what they need.
>  
>
I have been guilty of that, but hopefully these things gradually go 
away, I have seen the code get cleaner over the time I've been working 
on it.  In fact, the ScummVM source is cleaner and more consistant than 
any of the commercial games I've worked on.  By the time they ship, they 
always have so many nasty hacks it's a wonder they even compile.  
ScummVM is a pleasure to work on in comparison.



sev wrote:

>Same thing is with OSystem. Even our porters, who should really express
>more thoughts about particular features as they will have to implement
>them, do that on rare occasions. There are several reasons, one of them
>is that we already have 20+ ports, and we got experience. We know what
>will not work for everyone and avoid it. That leads to fact that
>porters act in same way, i.e. use methods which are already present
>(remember that ConfMan abuse). But even here we have good sparks of
>life, take a look at Neil and his DS port.
>
Thank you.

On a related point, I would like to ask about deleting savegames.  The 
DS port needs this, as on a flashcart, saves are written in a custom 
filesystem to the 64Kb of battery-backed RAM on these cartridges.  As 
this is my own filesystem, there are no tools to delete files from it.  
I have added something on bootup that lets you delete all files, and I 
could extend that to deleting individual files, but it's not nice, and 
it only works at bootup, which is no help when you've played far into 
the game and need to save!

Although it would be quite easy to do this for Scumm games, I wonder 
about how feasable it would be for the other engines, which use their 
own save and load dialogs, which would need to be carefully modified to 
add the delete button.  Or perhaps there's another way?

In any case, I'd like to know what other people's thoughts on this are.

Thanks,

Neil




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