[Scummvm-devel] engine-data file licenses

[Johannes Schickel]

Max Horn wrote:
> OK (and thanks for augmenting the README -- hopefully many others will  
> follow this good example ASAP ;).
>
> However, I am now concerned that this puts us into a questionable  
> situation, from a legal point of view. It would seem much preferable  
> to get rid of kyra.dat and instead extract the required information on- 
> the-fly. I mean, if create_kyradat can extract it, then we should also  
> be able to extract it on the fly, right?
> The only problem with that I am aware of right now are fan- 
> translations, which might involve a custom kyra.data right now. Well,  
> for those, a compromise could be made -- don't store the actual data  
> in kyra.dat, but rather, only store the relevant file offsets in  
> kyra.dat (data which is currently hardcoded in the create_kyradat code).
> Of course, I am not very familiar with the kyra engine, so there might  
> be tons of other serious issues with this -- I am looking forward to  
> hearing them :-).
>   

Due to slight differences in various executables out there, which result 
in offset changes even for the same language, it would be a required to 
get *all* versions. Next one would have to take on the task to create a 
list of offsets for all game executables out there. Currently we have 
the possibility to avoid a full list of offsets for translations 
(including official ones that is), since main static data can usually be 
used from the English version, thus we just have to add offsets for 
translated strings. Actually if we really would want to get rid of 
kyra.dat, I fear we can only support a few Kyrandia versions out there.

// Johannes