[Scummvm-devel] Fan translated versions of games

[Johannes Schickel]

On 11/27/2010 09:07 PM, Simon Sawatzki wrote:
> 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 speech mode selection is actually an UI improvement, since we had 
many users wondering why they could select say "Speech only", when it 
would not affect the settings at all in games which have no voice over. 
On the other hand I think you can still change those settings in the 
config file, but I am not sure right now.

In the end if the detector thinks it's a game without speech, then it 
will set a flag, which indicates that this version only supports text, 
thus the UI will disable it. So one could argue that this is a detector 
bug. On the other hand personally I have to say, since the detection 
etc. code was made with the original games in mind, I would rather say 
that's something you have to expect when you try to use user modified 
content, i.e. it is/was just out of scope.

> 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.

Actually the only tracker entry I can see right now is a entry on the 
feature request tracker about it, i.e. this one: 
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3076698&group_id=37116&atid=418823

It is true that it contains a patch file, which seems to do the changes 
you mentioned. Then again the feature request tracker is not the patch 
tracker.

> 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.

Actually when you don't release the modifications you made for creating 
your Draci Historie version, it is still violating the GPL AFAIK. So 
there can be legal issues there too. I do not have downloaded Draci 
myself, so I can't say whether it is easily possible to detect the game 
language from the filenames or not.

For other engines allowing entries independent from the MD5 based 
entries, check the list I gave in my other mail.

> 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 certain engines/games that is not possible though. One of the 
reasons why some engines use a MD5 based detection I guess. At least for 
KYRA it is pretty hard to detect the language of say HoF floppy via the 
filenames, since it should actually have the same filenames (at least in 
the user FS, might even be that the files, which are embedded in the PAK 
files, use the same names) with all language variants.

// Johannes