[Scummvm-devel] New developer, introductory mail

[Max Horn]

Am 01.03.2009 um 07:00 schrieb Fabio Battaglia:

> On Sun, 2009-03-01 at 11:17 +0000, Thierry Crozat (Yahoo! Mail) wrote:
>
[...]
>> One remark though: why adding the files to read vag format in the
>> sword1 engine directory? It seems to be it would be better to have
>> them in the sound directory, especially if you want to add support
>> for other PSX games.
>
> You have a point there, i think those files will indeed be moved to
> sound, where they can be used by other engines too.

Please *only* do that if you really, really can take advantage of them  
in other games. This holds fore everybody: Do not proactively move  
stuff to common, graphics, sound etc. unless you are sure it will be  
of use for multiple engines.

I am unhappy about the apparent trend we have to move everything to  
the common dirs, just because we can. Like we have a flic player in  
graphics/ which is only used by one engine. I wonder why it is in  
graphics... Mind you, it's good to base stuff on our common APIs; that  
way, if people really want to reuse stuff in their own engines, it  
becomes a simple matter of moving

So, if you really want to move the VAG decoders to sound/, then please  
tell us which other games you want to work on use VAG games, and  
document them in the header file of the vag decoder for future use.  
Please understand that I do not want to burden you unfairly with work  
that for some reason others before you didn't have to perform --  
rather, it was a mistake, IMHO, not to ask for that in the case of  
other decoders :-(. So, I really think we should start adding comments  
to all our video & sound decoders stating which engines use them.

Moreover, we should consider the following: If we are compiling with  
plugin support *off*, then we could only compile each decoder if any  
engine using it is also compiled. E.g. SMKPlayer is used by agos,  
saga, scumm, sword1, sword2 -- so only compile it in if any of these  
engines is enabled OR if plugin support is enabled.

Another possibility (orthogonal to the above) : Add a big #ifdef  
ENABLE_PSX_GAMES / #endif pair. That way, ports with limited memory  
can disable support for these obscure game variants, in order to  
conserve precious space.




Bye,
Max