[Scummvm-devel] SCI: Some more TODOs

[Willem Jan Palenstijn]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:51:02AM -0500, Max Horn wrote:
> * I just made a big commit where I started to overhaul the file  
> handling in SCI. It's incomplete, and may cause regressions, but it is  
> a start. The biggest chunk left to take care of is engine/kfile.cpp,  
> and in there mostly handling of savegames (and possibly of writing to  
> other files -- if SCI ever does that?).

Recapping a discussion on IRC:

This is used for things like character exports and imports in the QfG
series, and for player name in Hoyle.

There's also a mention of this being used for deleting savegames where
the scripts try to manually rewrite the savegame index file.
(Search for __throwaway in kfile.cpp for this.)


FreeSCI stored the files that were written to in ~/.freesci , possibly
copying files from the resources first.  I suggest we do the same thing
in ~/.scummvm , and possibly prefix the names with the game target name.


One thing to worry about in the future: this makes it relatively hard to
import exported characters in QfG. We may be able to fake a directory
structure with different games in different (fake) directories.


> This needs to be switched to  
> the savefile API. One problem there is that FreeSCI apparently stored  
> saves as multiple files, grouped by a directory. Does anybody know  
> whether the original Sierra SCI also did this? Our savefile API does  
> not (and will not) support subdirs. Some ideas on how to resolve this:
> 1) Fake subdirs by turning save_0/FILE into save_0_FILE. Or even  
> better, into TARGET-FILE.0 or something like that.
> 2) Revise the save/load code in SCI to put all those files into some  
> kind of archive file.
> 3) Maybe we don't need all those files? In a KQ4 save I made, there  
> were only two files: state, and KQ4.id, which seems redundant (could  
> be encoded into a header prefixed to 'state', plus the filename)

I just overhauled the savegame system, and went with option 3.
To quote the commit message of r38649:

"Converted SCI saving to use saveFileMan. Instead of a savegame being a
directory with an id and a state file, a savegame now consists of two
consecutive CFSML-serialized structs: SavegameMetadata and state_t.  The
former contains the savegame title, and is loaded when scanning saves."


-Willem Jan