[Scummvm-devel] singleid/gameid etc

[Johannes Schickel]

On 02/29/2012 02:52 PM, A. Milburn wrote:
> A short summary of _singleid, as I understand it, is that it is used by the
> Advanced Detector to replace the gameid with an 'engineid' (unique to one
> engine) before storing the game settings to file, thus removing the
> potential for dangerous conflicts between internal engine gameids. However,
> it obviously also removes the gameid information from the config file.
>
> (Note that after the detection has *already run*, such as when games are
> starting up, or when game-specific options, this is NOT a problem, since the
> game descriptor for the individual game is available to the code, including
> the real gameid. So it should not be a technical problem for such cases.)
>
> However, surely a more sensible approach here would be to simply have an
> engineid stored in the configuration file, alongside an engine-specific
> gameid.
>
> This could be set by all our engines (so making non-AD or non-singleid work
> consistently with the singleid engines), could be easily migrated to (since
> we would simply have to store the new engineid/gameid after detection when
> no engineid was present), avoids problems with multiple games in a single
> directory and limits confusion.
>
> (Note that there is a workaround available for the 'multiple games' case,
> namely kADFlagUseExtraAsHint which uses the 'extra' field to distinguish
> between ambigious matches during detection, but it is not particularly
> elegant and leads to the use to need things like ADGF_USEEXTRAASTITLE
> in some cases too, which seems rather spectacularly overcomplicated.)
>
> This would simplify the situation for plugin caching, for example (since we
> would have a single 'engineid' to find a plugin for). And it would avoid
> any confusion in the future.
>
> Thoughts?

Sounds sensible, is there any proof of concept to look at?

// Johannes