ScummVM development and whatnot from ScummVM team leader
In the years I had the numerous requests to add a Patreon page. There you go: https://www.patreon.com/_sev. It is a way to support me personally (if you care) and if there will be at least several patreons, I plan to use this platform for helping me to choose the area where I spend my time. In the meantime, I will be posting assorted reports on the things I added to ScummVM. There are so many
After a long while I finally managed to get first graphics displayed in ScummVM... Of course, this also includes full code for scene loading. I would say, that the engine is way over-engineered.
A new nice port is in the works:It is the very first screen shot. Hkz is working on it. ScummVM portability is demonstrated at its most.
Today LucasArts re-released some of their adventure classics on Steam. Immediately people started to wonder about ScummVM. Let's see...It came out of the blue, and nobody ever expected such turn. We even had internal jokes that LEC would rather release "Jedi Fights the Green Tentacle" than another Monkey Island game or any of their old adventures.I think ScummVM did its job really well. We kept a
I am sure you saw the news post item about certain GPL violation.Let me present here some more details about the case.DisclaimerFingolfin and cyx are bound by the agreement signed by the lawyers. They are not allowed to talk about the case. Other developers are not, and there is pretty handful of them who know at least beginning of the situation. We are not happy about the outcome, cyx and
In the last years ScummVM became one of the most known open source projects. But it was not always like this.Today eriktorbjorn stumbled upon the very first mention of ScummVM on Slashdot. What is amazing about this that some comments have links to screenshots posted, and one of them is still alive! I'm attaching the mentioned screenshot, as the server which hosts the original is quite slow. The
I think you're aware of James Woodcock's Music Enhancement Project. James was applying his talent to rearranging music for several titles supported by ScummVM.One of his projects included complete soundtrack for Discworld.During last several weeks he renewed his work on this project, and finally there are noticeable results. This is a huge step forward in the game atmosphere (though some may
As you perhaps know, for last 1.5 years ScummVM serves as an Ultimate AGI engine, especially since Kari Salminen aka Buddha^ joined us first as a GSoC member and then as a full-blown developer.To the date ScummVM covered more AGI games than any other open AGI interpreter. The missings are AGI0, AGI1, AGI2.01 games as well as Tandy CoCo3 conversions.Though there was a thing which bothered me for
I wanted to tell this story for a quite long time. A draft of it was sitting on my HD for couple of years. And now, there finally it is. A piece of ScummVM story, a saga.All of this started back in May 2000. Daniel Balsom was so delighted in furry Inherit the Earth game, so he began to peek into its executables in order to make it run on his Windows XP. YARN (Yet Another Remake? Nifty!) was born.
Basically that means that there are just a few days that Tinsel engine will be in SVN. No, 0.12.0 will not contain it, as the engine is too raw, and there are still some legal questions to resolve.I really hope that this will not interfere much with the testing season, as it will still not appear in the daily builds. But for our porters it will mean that we the compile-testing ;) will start on it
Here is a short note from one of the playtesters:"I have played Discworld on an 80486 originally and then a Pentium and many years later on DOS Box and I can say without any doubt that the ScummVM version is the smoothest and most pleasurable Discworld experience ever!Congratulations to the ScummVM team for such a wonderous achievement in such an early private build of the engine."
Here it is. It was made just yesterday with current code base. Libcoro was so non-portable, that it did not work well even under Windows. Now when it's gone, we're portable enough, so we expect it to work across all ports.
Our Tinsel team finally got rid of unportable libcoro in the favor or method described by Simon Tatham here. This means that soon, very soon Tinsel engine may appear in the SVN trunk.I do not have an end game screenshot handy, but I suppose that you will be able to produce it by yourself pretty soon.So, yet another important part of adventure gaming history will get a second life soon.
Yes, it has been less than a month, and Discworld 1 is completable. Actually it is completable since last Sunday, just afer 215 commits. Now the commit count is 320, as the Tinsel engine team works pretty fast. It has been mentioned on the forums that there are few glitches and some portability issues (mainly endianness, 64-bitness and alignment), but the engine itself is in a very good
Today we finally accepted patches by dhewg which implement Wii port of ScummVM. It is one of long awaited ports, and we're happy to have dhewg onboard. That means that this port will be official with our next release, and that users of this port can get some help even now. There has been created another subform specially for port-related discussions.It is yet another great platform, and I myself
Yes, we finally reached it. 4,000,123 official downloads (at least). It was a good time, and it was fun time to watch its progress.This number comprises of downloads of only ScummVM binaries from SF.net servers. It it is 8.9 TB worth of data since October 2001. Wow, I hardly imagine who could host that for us for free besides SourceForge. That is a definitely great service.If you talk about all
Someday I am going to translate that long letter of mine from Russian to English and tell the world true story of gob engine in ScummVM.It used to be called dso module, and we are still not sure how it was called originally. In these days DrMcCoy drives most of the effort, he is our expert in this engine, dealing with its both graphical and code-wise weirdness.Gob3 support was lightning fast
That's truly amazing, but just in a slightly more than a month of development time, Kyrandia3 is playable until completion. Of course, there are lots of bugs, and the engine is not yet mature enough to be announced as supported, but the progress is enormous. Both LordHoto and athrxx added over 16,000 lines of code to kyra engine since 0.11.1.There is no Kyra4 for them to continue their
"Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game."How laughable are these words when you look at this auction. Yes, it is FM-TOWNS version of Zak McKracken, a game which originates from same folks whom I quoted above. And this game is being offered "just" for 599 EUR. With today's rates it goes as much as $932 USD. What amazes me even more is that shipping for this piece of art is not free,
Further investigations and comparisons finally lead to success. Now Japanese DIG looks very close to original. There are still slight differences in how the subtitles are positioned on the screen, but I consider it as a good enough (ScummVM is on the right): Our code differs too much from the original Blast Text rendering routines, so to make a pixel perfect rendeting I would need to rewrite all
Finally I managed to make all Kanji in Japanese DIG rendered. It appeared that somebody (ahem) just is not able to count, even with help of a calculator. japanese.fnt was not read completely and thus it got read past the array bounds. Still there are certain problems with rendering. As seen on the right screenshot, proper line breaks for Kanji just do not work, also text positioning is not
Yesterday final list of Google Summer of Code was settled down. Six students for ScummVM this year, and they have exciting skills.Christopher Page will drive Return to Launcher / Global Savestate task. It is a long awaited one, when users finally will have possibility to return to launcher after their game play. The main obstacle with this feature was that the engines did not clean up after
Today, after 802 internal commits we finally went public with M4 engine. In fact, our team did not want to go public until some viable results were achieved.The M4 engine is used for Riddle of Master Lu and Orion Burger games. Also historically it evolved from MADS engine which was used for at least three more games. Currently scripts work, although there are many missing opcodes; animation,
For the last several days I was trying to add support for Japanese DIG. It was reported in this bug report.For some reason there is a bug with Kanji processing in our code. You may see it in these two screenshots (on the left is original and ScummVM is on the right): As you may see, Kanji 出 (de) is rendered as garbage. Basically it looks like all Kanji is rendered bad. Investigations and test