[Scummvm-devel] Improving scummvm's mobile experience.

[John Willis]

Dear Vladimir,

> Recently tried scummvm on iPad and could say that scummvm sucks. Really.
> Relative mouse movement, inability to select buttons(!) with single tap,
> obscure gestures and such. Also iphone port has very weird scaler - chunky
> and blurry.

The 1st thing to mention here is that I am not aware we offer an official
version of ScummVM for the iPad (do we?), I think the unofficial versions
that are floating about are just that, unofficial and unsupported ;).

I believe Oystein provides official builds from his iPhone backend for the
iPhones (inc. 4) but not the iPad. The iPhone builds may well work on the
iPad (I can't say for sure as I don't have an iPad) but if they do they will
be using the same Apple compatibility shims that any other iPhone apps use
when run on the iPad.

Any versions specifically for the iPad are hacked off the iPhone codebase
and I don't think the team have been offered any patches to improve the
experience on the iPad (I can see nothing checking the tracker). Nor has any
work been undertaken to deal with cleanly scaling games onto the iPads
1024*768 screen. This is not going to be improved unless some motivated team
members get an iPad's or the people building unofficial iPad releases of
ScummVM take a desire to submit their patches back upstream to the project
and/or offer to take on the maintenance tasks that such a backend entails.

> It would be great improvement if we implement some sort of engine-to-ui
> hinting to improve experience at least for mature engines.
> Here's approx. plan:
> 1. Engine reports hotpots to ui and registers actions(show inventory and
> such). Some engines already have on-screen buttons.
> 2. Engine reacts on extended actions (maybe reported via the same event
> system) 3. UI highlights hotspots and ask extended engine interface for a
> possible actions. Look on BS Director's Cut, we could do the same.
> 3a. As a positive side effect we could include 'gimme a hint' button on PC
> which shows hotspots or something. :) I think it could major move toward
> for scummvm besides new games addition.

While you make some good points you may want t0 search the mailing list
archives to see that this has been discussed a few times over the years and
some of the major technical issues that it throws up.

This has been tried with a few backends over the years (DS springs to mind,
PalmOS used to do something similar back in the day I seem to recall) the
abstraction and standardisation of the hinting systems and how you deal with
it in the backend becomes a bit of a mindfield. It's no small amount of work
and would need a lot of time sunk into it, which is not always the easiest
thing to coordinate in an open source project such as ScummVM. 

As they say, patches welcome. If you want to work on the design of such a
system (and maybe code) you're very welcome to and I am sure you would get
constructive feedback (feature requests, patch trackers and the mailing list
are ideal for such things) and maybe it would motivate people to help but
unfortunately I am not sure it is something that would have time sunk into
it as a priority (a personal opinion).

Regards,

John