[Scummvm-devel] KYRA - Eye of the Beholder extension

[Johannes Schickel]

On 11/30/2011 01:45 AM, Florian Kagerer wrote:
> as some of you guys might know I'd like to extend the Kyra engine with
> support for Eye of the Beholder I + II.
>
> Would it be acceptable to merge the EOB code into the main tree of ScummVM?
> Please let me know what you think.

I am still torn on this. It seems most people would just accept it, just 
because it means yet again more supported games.

As Florian correctly points out, EoB I+II (and also LoL) just mostly 
share file format code with the Kyra games. That mostly comes down to 
the PAK (resource bundles) file code, the CPS (static images) code, FNT 
(DOS font) code, WSA (graphical animations) code, ADL (AdLib sound 
format) code, EMC (script format) code. I didn't check all of the code 
yet, but I think Florian once mentioned EoB (1) is even using a 
different script format. Apart from that code mostly only some shared 
graphics related routines are used by both parts (i.e. RPG and 
Adventure) of the Kyra "engine". I put the "engine" in quotation marks, 
since basically most games using it are using some shared file format 
code and minor other things plus a lot of game specific code.

To me all this is related to our old "informal" rule, that stated we 
don't want support for non-adventure games, which only share file format 
code with existing engines. It seems nowadays nobody cares about that 
anymore, a bit more drastic put: nobody cares about the focus of ScummVM 
anymore.

Frankly it is a true point that LoL addition in this regard was a 
violation of this rule too. In fact probably more of a violation than 
adding EoB 1+2 support, which might share more code with LoL than LoL 
shared with Kyra1-3 back in the days. So now it might seem less of a bad 
thing to add it, because we maybe made a "mistake" in the past.

Maybe it's just me who wonders now why we have a big strict saying that 
we focus on adventure games, while we add non-adventures with only small 
parts of code shared with existing engines.

Anyway I'm not saying I'm against adding EoB. On the other hand I can't 
say I'm all for it.

// Johannes