[Scummvm-devel] Game enhancements

[Johannes Schickel]

On 11/05/2010 10:49 AM, Filippos Karapetis wrote:
> Gmail somehow ate my reply....
>
> On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Max Horn <max at quendi.de 
> <mailto:max at quendi.de>> wrote:
>
>
>     Am 05.11.2010 um 10:14 schrieb Filippos Karapetis:
>
>     >>
>     >> 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.
>     >
>     >
>     > That is a TODO then, isn't it?
>
>     No it isn't.
>
>
> Why?

Why should it be an TODO?

>
>     > I can't find it in the SCUMM TODO page.
>     > Judging by the discussion already made, this is a missing
>     feature of the
>     > SCUMM engine, and the goal should be to implement these screens
>     properly at some
>     > point.
>
>     No it isn't. And despite what you said before, I don't think we
>     have a consensus that "ScummVM aims to provide an experience as
>     close as possible to the original games". In this particular case,
>     several people already voiced differing opinions, and I also don't
>     think that makes sense in e.g. this particular case. Hence, no
>     consensus.
>
>
> So what does ScummVM aim to provide?

It aims to provide a program to play the supported games on multiple 
platforms.

I also noticed that you said "As discussed on -devel, game enhancements 
in ScummVM should be off by default" in the commit message for r54090. I 
don't think that reflects the overall opinion in this discussion (so 
far), i.e. there might be consensus that features like the undithering 
should be disabled by default (at least so far it seems like that to me, 
of course the discussion is still pretty young, so I would say it's 
rushed to say that at all or even make that change.).


In general I have to say I find that "either we enable all or none" idea 
some people seem to bring in here rather bad. Let me bring an example:

In Kyra Torbjörn "enhanced" in one AdLib music track, which caused some 
instruments to go out of sync after the song repeated over and over 
again. In practice I guess only a few players might have even noticed we 
patched that (or even know that such a "bug" existed in the original). 
So I don't see we should have that disabled by default (or even have a 
config option for that).

I can also only agree to Max's comparison about the GUI dialogs for 
SCUMM and the SCI undithering.

To summarize my point:
I think before we now try to force some consensus about all the 
enhancements we have, we should rather evaluate whether a specific 
enhancement alters the game experience by a lot, which is the case for 
SCI undithering IMHO, or whether it is just a minor change compared to 
he original, like the workaround I mentioned for Kyra or the SCUMM 
dialogs IMHO, and based on that we can decide whether to enable it by 
default or not.

// Johannes
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