[Scummvm-devel] state of the Mohawk engine

[Matthew Hoops]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 1:14 PM, A. Milburn
<fuzzie at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> I think it might be a good time to write a little to the list about the
> state of the Mohawk engine. As mentioned in the recent thread about
> what's ready to be released, Living Books v1/2 games should be ready
> (and clone2727 enabled Mohawk in trunk for them, although we need to
> disable all the other Mohawk games by default..). I hope that sounds
> reasonable, although I have no idea what the usual procedure is for
> this kind of thing and will happily leave it all to other people.
Yes, I've now disabled Myst/Riven/CSTime by default. Mohawk feels so
modular now. ;)

> Some notes about specific subengines:
>
> * Riven: Support is coming along really well. I have successfully
> completed the whole game in ScummVM, and at this point it's mostly just
> missing some video code, although clone2727 tells me it's quite tricky
> to implement those last pieces and so it's indeed not likely to be ready
> for the next release.
More specifically, there's a few logic things left (finishing the
storeMovieOpcode() opcode, the sunners, viewing marbles from away from
the waffle, and background whark sounds) and missing 'enhancements'
such as the 'flies' effect (which throws annoying flies in your face),
transitions, and sound fading. None of things affect the outcome of
the game.

The video parts mentioned here cause a few glitches with videos that
can be annoying. Basically, we need to implement a 'QuickTime overlay'
in which I can update the screen separately for videos and game
graphics and have everything work fine. There's only a few locations
where a slight 'flash' or no-update occurs: finding the linking book
to Tay, rotating the sub, the two video easter eggs, and when skipping
some videos.

Riven is in good shape, but IMO, not ready for a release yet.

> As mentioned when discussing adding the Mohawk engine, it was used for
> various other non-adventure-game children's educational software. While
> a lot of the code (resources, sound/music, scene management) was shared
> among the games, the game logic for these tended to be hardcoded..
>
> I implemented a lot of the logic for one of those (The Logical Journey
> of the Zoombinis) out-of-tree, and while it's nowhere near finished nor
> likely to be any time soon, I'd like to hear opinions on eventually
> merging this if ever complete -- it is not simply sharing resource code,
> so it would be quite a pain to maintain as an external subengine (although
> git makes it considerably easier), but it ends up being many thousands
> of lines of hard-coded logic simply because that's how the game was
> written.
I would like to keep this in-tree if at all possible.

-Matt