[Scummvm-devel] Adding Frotz engine to ScummVM

[Johannes Schickel]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 10:54 AM, Filippos
Karapetis<philipk79 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I was thinking... would it make sense to create a subproject for
> non-adventure games in ScummVM's repo, somewhat like residual?
>

I do not think a subproject, which is officially supported by us,
would be a good place to support non-adventure games. Also residual is
now a separate project. Our only "supported" subproject currently is
the (dead) ScummEX. After all whether we now have a subproject, which
is supported by the team and which enables support for non-adventure
engines or just supporting them in the main source tree, will leave
the same impression for the users: "Hey now they support all kind of
games, let's ask for support for game XYZ, which is a cool strategy
game/jump & run/whatever". Both are just "violating" the same idea: we
are aimed at point & click adventures.

IMHO the way to go is: change our build system so it is possible to
allow building of plugins of engine, which are not in the main source
tree (IIRC Eugene said that already too), and then let the people who
want to use it just create their own project for their engines.

Of course so far none of our official builds includes built in support
for the plugin system (at least when it comes to desktop ports). So if
the above mentioned is the way we want to go we might at least want to
think of enabling plugin support for our release builds. Of course
there's no need to do that ASAP.

If we do not want to allow third party plugins in the way mentioned
above, of course projects, which want to benefit from our "framework",
might just use it like the Discworld Noir project does. After all the
code is GPL and everyone can use it, when he/she honors the terms of
the GPL. Of course they would need to sync their code by hand. But
that is IMHO fine, when the project using it is not in our scope
anyway.

The only possibility for reusing our framework without the
abovementioned need to sync by hand and without more work on the
plugin system from our side would be to create a separate project,
which would be basically a library like SDL. (Of course only aimed for
classic game reimplementations). I'm again this though, since our code
is currently just not aimed at being a library, which is developed
separately from the engines (just think of the audio decoders, which
are currently in sound/ and sometimes need additions when we support a
new engine etc.).

// Johannes