[Scummvm-devel] Another plugin question

[yotam barnoy]

>
> In the case of the DC, this also has the additional disadvantage that
> the plugins would need to be present on the same disc which is scanned
> for games, or else 100 disc swaps would be required by the user.
>

Wow Marcus -- I completely forgot about that limitation of the DC. The
PS2 would probably have a similar issue then, right?

> In the scenario with separate plugins for detection, three swaps would
> still be required if the game plugin is not on the game disc.

Nevertheless, I think the best overall solution is to have separate
detection plugins -- how often does one add games anyway? For now
though, it would still be nice if we could choose via a variable or a
#define whether to load all plugins at once for detection (option 1)
or to load them one at a time (option 2). To sum up:

NDS: MUST have option 2.
DC: MUST have option 1.
PS2: Probably must have option 1.
PSP: Can work with option 1, but much better with option 2.
Planning ahead: option 3 (detection plugins) is (probably) best.

Max, I looked a little more into the code, and I see what you mean
with the overhead. The problem is in  MassAddDialog::handleTickle(),
where we recurse through directories, calling EngineMan.detectgames()
over and over. However, I think we could restructure it so that we
first recurse through the directories, building up the file list, and
only after that do we call EngineMan.detectgames() which will
load/unload the plugins to check. If our concern is a list that's too
big because of a monstrously huge file system, we can set a limit to
the maximum list size to fill up and then call EngineMan.detectgames()
on it and then resume.

Yotam