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

[Florian Kagerer]

Hi all,


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.


EOB II is basically the precedessor of LOL. After completing EOB I + II
Westwood quit the cooperation with SSI (who held the AD&D license) and made
LOL for Virgin. This means the engine uses the same typical code portions,
file formats etc. as our other supported Westwood games and share quite some
code with these engines.


The EOB implementation is mostly finished. DOS versions of both games are
completable. Known bugs have been fixed.
What you can't do at the moment is transferring an EOB 1 party to EOB 2 via
the main menu option or load original save files (including the "Quick Start
Party" game). I also don't support PC Speaker sound and non-DOS game
versions yet.


As everyone know lots of targets have been added in the past which aren't
adventure games. Some targets are similar in game play to EOB.
As Eugene pointed out in the recent GeekWad debate there wouldn't really be
new precedence for adding more non-adventure games if we restrict this to a
handful of games using an already existing adventure game engine. I'd like
to add EOB, fuzzie would like to have Zombini and dreammaster would like
Geekwad. There might be some more. We wouldn't include a complete
non-adventure engine in ScummVM.


Fuzzie pointed out that it is particularly annoying to maintain a sub engine
in a separate project or fork, since you have to maintain two repos with the
same code. It is difficult enough for people to find the time to work on
their ScummVM code as it is.
If the code is tightly interwoven with another sub engine (mostly between
EOB and LOL) it may also be tedious to make backport fixes for the official
code parts. This means that the EOB code is not disruptive to other parts of
the engine, but other parts might actually have been improved.


Eye of the Beholder I + II are good and well-known games. Here are some
press reviews:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/eye-of-the-beholder
http://www.mobygames.com/game/eye-of-the-beholder-ii-the-legend-of-darkmoon


I won't pretend that the code size of ScummVM would not increase. Of course
it would. For most platforms code size and exe size is irrelevant, though.
The few porters who have to care about such things may handle it in whatever
way they think fit - making dynamic modules or just disable certain engines
or engine parts. There are separate ENABLE_LOL and ENABLE_EOB defines.
People may really do what they want here.




Cheers,

Florian