[Scummvm-devel] Game enhancements

[Travis Howell]

On 5/11/2010 7:09 PM, Filippos Karapetis wrote:
> However, currently we do *not* offer that purist behavior to users.
> SCUMM games do not offer the original save/load
> dialogs, and that, in my opinion, is a *bug*, after the consensus on
> what we should aim on. SCUMM games don't offer
> the full experience that the original games did. The fact that the
> original save/load screens have issues doesn't
> change this fact, so we should aim to support them, instead of forcing
> our own on the users.

The original load/save screen currently don't exist for most SCUMM games 
(LOOM CD, MI1, MI2, INDY4, DOTT, SAMNMAX, FT, DIG) in ScummVM. They were 
hard coded as I mentioned before, and I don't think anyone has even 
shown interest in adding support.

 > I, for example,
 > would like to have the ScummVM save/load screens in HE games. They
 > should be disabled by default since they cause
 > issues, but it would be very nice if they could be enabled, if a user
 > wants them (with an appropriate warning dialog, perhaps).

It doesn't make any sense to enable options, that only lead to bugs, 
which can't be worked around. We have had several bugs reports about 
these glitches after loading saved games in HE games via our GUI, in the 
past.

> I would also like to have the option of enabling simultaneous speech and
> subtitles in Simon the Sorcerer 2, with a game
> specific option, even with a warning. If it's possible, why can't we
> provide it to users, if they want to enable it?

The majority of the subtitles in the English and German versions of 
Simon the Sorcerer 1 don't exist in the data files, and wait timeouts 
can be triggered during conversations. Again, it doesn't make any sense 
to add support for an option that is buggy, incomplete, and can't be 
worked around.

Notes and warnings doesn't seem to make much difference, as people will 
still continue to complain about broken support. I still frequently see 
people complaining about speech been cut off, when using combined 
subtitles in Simon the Sorcerer 2. Which has been noted as known issue 
in our readme for a long time now.