[Scummvm-devel] Game enhancements

[Johannes Schickel]

On 11/05/2010 02:26 PM, Filippos Karapetis wrote:
>
>     Anyway since this thread (and the SCI undithering discussion on the
>     forums) seems to have caused to make some rushed changes to our code
>     (like first disable undithering and adding that checkbox without prior
>     discussion, then re-enabling undithering by default and now
>     disabling it
>     again), I would like to propose that before we actually change
>     anything
>     in this area we should make some design and talk about it.
>
> The current state should now reflect the consensus on this matter.


Right, it reflects what was said on -devel *so far*, then again consider 
that m_kiewitz, who seems to be a major supporter of the "enable 
undithering by default" idea hasn't even replied so far. Thus I think 
it's rushed.


> As for rushed changes...
> with the current state of the options dialog, this is an acceptable 
> solution, until we come
> up with a redesign and something better. Few people tinker with the 
> render mode, so
> hiding major features in a pulldown few people change seems like a bad 
> design to me.

Well here you see the problem, you think B is a bad idea, thus your idea 
A is acceptable (for you). While I think A just clutters the option 
dialogs even more and I think it's already cluttered enough to add more 
options without any prior discussion.

And now I dislike it even more because of the generalization, which you 
say later on was just made because Strangereke wanted to add (as in he 
doesn't know when he will do it, whether he will really do it) the same 
feature to Hugo. Making changes for the future, where we do not know too 
much about, which affect the GUI experience that much, is a bad design IMHO.

We now have that "Disable EGA dithering" checkbox, with the tooltip 
"Disable dithering in EGA games" and in the README the config option 
still says: "Remove dithering artifacts from EGA games" . On the other 
hand we already have the Render mode box, which features this tooltip: 
"Special dithering modes supported by some games", so that seems the 
most natural place to me.

Furthermore now that we shortly had that sci_undither setting as global 
setting that might have cluttered the config files of users which used 
that specific baily build (or custom build) with a now useless config 
option in case the fiddled with the setting.

Apart I couldn't say that I find any documentation where it says which 
engines support the checkbox you added. I know that I can't say we 
document that for say the Mixed MIDI/AdLib mode, but then again because 
we have made that mistake in the past, doesn't really give any reason to 
make it again. That should rather make us want to add proper 
documentation for that too.

> After all, this is what daily
> builds are for... to view a new feature and tweak it accordingly. 
> There's nothing final until
> a stable version is released.

I disagree that daily builds are for rushed design changes that we might 
fix or not fix depending on whether one person complains when using a 
daily build or not (at least it sounds like you say that this is the 
idea behind it).
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