[Scummvm-devel] Avoiding loading of all plugins during startup

[Matthew Hoops]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 10:09 AM, Filippos Karapetis
<philipk79 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> For SCI, only the fallback detection code uses the SCI
>> ResourceManager. I've always been iffy with this in the first place:
>> We have a chance of erroring out on detection. I don't think we really
>> need all of this fallback code. The filename fallback (as done with
>> several other engines) should be good enough for most cases. The only
>> time it would fail would be for other Sierra games with similar file
>> names.
>
> The reason why the fallback detection code was written is because of the
> multitude of SCI games and versions out there. We could revert to an
> "Unknown SCI game" or something along these lines, but I fail to see the
> reasoning behind this, since Sierra itself embedded IDs in all of its
> games,
> thus we can find the real name of the game from its data, together with
> other
> information, such as the language it uses. If there is a good reason why
> this
> detection scheme should be removed, please explain it, and I'll be quite
> happy
> to remove it, if you feel it's not needed.
Because we already have the md5's of the games, we don't need to have
the fallback for all of those games. "Unknown SCI game" is fine,
because the user can just report the md5 to us so we can add it to the
table.

> With this reasoning though, we
> could
> remove and simplify the detection code of the SCUMM engine, too (which
> uses a more advanced detection scheme too), but I find this idea to be a
> step backwards myself. If you do feel that the detection code is iffy, we
> should have a policy not to have complex detection code in all of our
> engines,
> and simplify this task (this includes SCUMM, SCI and AGI, afaik). If not, a
> different plan for detection needs to be devised, one that doesn't require
> splitting the detection code separately from the engine.
SCUMM's fallback detects based on file names only and AGI uses the WAG
files for detecting AGI fan games made with WinAGI. Either way, those
engines do not use a part of the engine that is used during runtime.
It is separate detection code.

-Matt