[Scummvm-devel] Understaffing (Was: What is happening to the ScummVM team?)

[Filippos Karapetis]

 > 
> BTW, one thing that also bothers me a bit are engines that languish in  
> a half-ready state. I wonder if any of cruise, igor, m4, made will  
> ever see the light of day (= be completed) ?

I got some details on these:
- cruise: dreammaster has been working lately on it. I'm not sure how far he
wishes to work on it though
- made: this is practically complete. All four games supported by it (Return to
Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2, The Manhole and Rodney's Funscreen)
are in a very good state and completable. I don't know about the Manhole, as
it doesn't have any "ending" as far as I know (you just wonder around in it),
but Return to Zork and LGoP2 have been completable for some time now.
johndoe fixed some leftover issues, and the engine is practically complete.
However, since a new stable version of ScummVM will be released shortly,
the plan was to announce the engine as complete after the stable version is
released. There are some minor things left, which include screen shaking in
Return to Zork (used in one screen I think) and some music notes which
are not played in one screen in The Manhole, but that's it. You can also
check the TODO page for the engine in the wiki:
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/MADE/TODO
- igor: I'm not sure about this, most of the game seems to be hardcoded.
Were we given the original source of the game, or is this all based on
dissassembly? I think that the demo works, but the game itself doesn't
(or only parts of it are working)
- m4: well... this is a sad tale, really. The m4/mads engine is very big,
complex and hardcoded, with various parts which are small engine on their
own, and are responsible for different parts of the games. For example,
there is a whole conversation subengine, with its own scripting system,
as well as a complex animation subengine, with another different and difficult
script system of its own (woodscript). There's also a complex GUI system,
for the menus in the games. We've reached a point where a lot of the game
resources read and parts of the engine are in good shape, but the game logic
is all hardcoded. I don't know if anyone will work on this, it seems that the
people who worked on this engine (myself included) have lost interest, due to
the overall complexity of the engine :(

 Regards
Filippos

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