[Scummvm-devel] Proposal for 2-bytes characters support feature as GSoC Program

[chenbo li]

Hello everyone,

I’m Chenbo Li, a current master student at Digipen Institute of Technology making video games. I get to know about ScummVM one month ago searching for video game related Google Summer of Code programs. I’m interested in graphics programming and I’ve built a simple game engine with OpenGL during the class. However, when I tried to fix some known bugs in ScummVM, I find that there’s no translation for Chinese or any eastern asian languages. After some simple research, it turns out to be that ScummVM do not support 2-bytes character set in the first place.

So I joined the IRC and have some simple discussion with the developers. Then I knew that the reason is because some of the retro machine has strict memory limit, and it’s unlikely to store the whole UTF-8 or other font file (or it would be a huge waste). But it would’t be a problem with relatively modern platform like Windows or OS X. So we came up with the idea that we could use compiler flag to built in different platform with different language profiles. And that’s just my first idea on how to do it. In order to get familiar with the translation related work, I’ve already translated the GUI of ScummVM into Romanized Chinese with use the standard English alphabets and could fit into the current system. (Pull Request #712)

I’m willing to work on this during the GSoC and hopefully could have more time do it further after the period. But for GSoC, I don’t have former experience with it and I couldn’t have a fair estimate of the amount of work should be done. So the main purpose of this email is to asking about whether it’s enough for the whole GSoC project. And if it is not enough, I would like to combine it with other ideas on the list like:

* Improve GUI					- I like to make nice looking GUI (Are we reconstructing the GUI system?)
* Hardware accelerated blitting	- I have experience in C++ and OpenGL (Actually I don’t quite get it, I guess you just draw a quad filling the window with bitmap textures and blit it?)
* Native OS X port				- I have a Mac, but no Obj-C experience (But I’d like to do the transport from SDL to SDL2, if that’s still part of the plan)

So, I really need your help and advice of the potential work could be done with GSoC and thus I could work on my formal proposal. And also for the most important part, any advice or suggestions with the 2-bytes characters support is welcome. I’m eager to hear from you guys.

Best wishes,

Chenbo Li