[Scummvm-devel] Fan translated versions of games

Simon Sawatzki SimSaw at gmx.de
Sat Nov 27 21:07:26 CET 2010


Hi Max, hi Johannes, hi all!

Thanks for joining the discussion!

First of all sorry for not being exact enough: Yes, the SCUMM engine still detects every single modified version (it just doesn't necessarily run them, see the cfg note in the second paragraph). It has very good fallback detection. However, there are other restrictions that make it more "prison-like" in my opinion. For example, it disables the possibility of choosing between "Speech only", "Both Voice and Subtitles" and "Subtitles only". When a Scumm V4 and up version is played that featured only text in original version, the modified version is only able to feature "Both Voice and Subtitles". The user can't switch.

The patch creator didn't have much to change on ScummVM. He just made an extra entry in the detection tables for his "Fan Patch" (for MI1+2). He also removed the restriction forbidding that the script deals with external config files (saving) and forbidding the existence of a .cfg in the game directory.
   All these changes were already submitted on the patch tracker. I'm suprrised nobody has noticed it yet. I thought there was another reason why it wasn't included yet: The user would always have to choose if he has the Fan Patch version or the normal version. The patch creator suggested that you should add to the detection a check whether there is a MONSTER.* file or not.

So the two restrictions (no free switching between subtitles and speech, forbidding of .cfg files) were the reason why I didn't make a major difference between SCUMM and other engines.

Now for these other engines: I haven't found any other engines besides the SCUMM engine that allows having game entries independent from MD5's.
It even gets most ridiculous with Draci Historie: When someone compiles a modified version of this game that was liberated under GPL (thus cannot be pirate-copied), the game isn't detected. That's why I feel it as prison-like - even open source games cannot be modified and played with ScummVM.

I generally feel like there should be a detection based on filenames only again that supports the MD5 detection when the latter one fails.

For the hard words: With "ScummVM for Prisoners" I just wanted to express how it feels to me. I expressly made it as an "I"-message, so not to generalise or stating that this is an undeniable fact.

For the competition: I had the impression that ScummVM wants the people to use ScummVM rather than alternatives when I talked to Kirben. I suggested to him that he could try to compile updated EXE files of some AGOS games for modern Windows systems, but he said that he prefers people to use ScummVM; that's why I thought it would be a good point, but I see I was wrong.

My message is absolutely not meant for starting a flamewar. I only want to point out my opinion clearly and to show the problems I see in ScummVM.
I'm already grateful for the two responses I could and hope we stay in the discussion and finally find a solution.

Regards
Simon Sawatzki
-- 
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