[Scummvm-devel] Re : Dreamweb for 1.5.0?

[A. Milburn]

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 09:14:39PM +0000, Bertrand Augereau wrote:
> It could be beneficial for the users to play dreamweb now because *external
> quality* of the engine is good. The end-user should be satisfied with what
> they got.

I'm not sure I agree. I tried it earlier: If I go to save a game, it is still
using the built-in UI by default. It doesn't pop the virtual keyboard when
I'm meant to type a save name. Hitting enter doesn't make it save. Simple
user-visible stuff, and it seems obvious in the current state where to add
the code to improve that, I think, so that not so bad..

But I also had input issues, and when I went to look, it's using an internal
single-key buffer and peeking at the mouse state rather than handling events.
That is the kind of refactoring I had in mind, and I guess it's a lot more
annoying to do than I thought, since it's really emulating the *entire game*
rather than just the logic.

It really seems like it is still more of an emulator which is using ScummVM
as a host, rather than being a ScummVM engine. And I think trying to claim
that it's just some internal quality stuff is misleading. If it were just
the typical 'game logic' which was like this, it would be no huge problem
to me, but it *isn't* - the event code, the UI, the save/load, sound, it
is all largely intertwined with this x86 emulation model.

At a glance it seems *much* improved after your work. But I think this
argument about porting the engine to C++ is hiding the larger issue, which
is that it's unmaintainable as it is, and the unmaintainable code is stuff
like the actual event/UI/etc code which we want to be able to maintain and
improve, so that the ScummVM experience is much better than just running
the original engine in dosbox. 

> Anyway there's no urgency in releasing the engine either. As fuzzie said,
> there are lots of engines in the pipeline :) 

I don't think that should be a consideration. Our project goal is not to
have lots of engines, it's to provide a good, portable experience for
playing the classic adventure games people want to play, and Dreamweb is
surely high on people's wishlists.

- fuzzie