DS-specific Feature request

[cde]

I'm kinda glad I forgot to check this thread for a few hours. First off let me try to appease things, I've been using scummVM since 0.7.x and love the project, and I would hate to see it get bloated or have irrelevant features. Evidently my idea of "relevant" is a bit more loose than some people's - understood.

@fingolfin - I was genuinely a little perturbed to see such a flame, I understand the need for a crystal clear project direction but with new engines being supported I am pretty sure that scummVM does more today than it was intended to do a few years ago.

Also, my thoughts were partly inspired by that other MASSIVELY popular app MAME, which has such a ridiculous collection of boxart etc. for each game that it becomes a kind of game library. Would it be so far-fetched to consider future scummVM releases having boxart, or fading in their title music when selected in the main list, or other "candy"? Not sure anyone would want this, but it was such as relief when the interface got a facelift that I can imagine *something* changing further in the future.

@agentq - not sure you should be quite so quick to say "it won't appear on the scummVM page", it wasn't so long ago that scummVMDS was officially embraced by the main project, with much rejoicing for those who wanted it. If anyone else can make a port/branch as good as yours (eew, butt kiss, sorry) it would probably have a chance at glory.

Maybe a Dreamcast user had one day quietly thought "On the DS? scummVM? That will ever be on the main page!"...

@everyone - OK, so scummVM isn't intended to be like MAME, and platform-specific feature requests seem veto-able by project leads. Fair enough. I just hope anyone with a better idea (voice chat? toaster control?) won't be put off suggesting them

[fingolfin]

@fingolfin - I was genuinely a little perturbed to see such a flame, I understand the need for a crystal clear project direction but with new engines being supported I am pretty sure that scummVM does more today than it was intended to do a few years ago.

The "flame" was quite clearly directed at PsYcO. Reading his further posts afterwards, I feel quite justified in doing so, too .

And yes, indeed, we support many many more games than we did years ago. Because those fit into the purpose and philosophy of ScummVM. So we didn't veto them, we actively supported them. I think I can claim that I am responsible for the majority of the ground work which ever allowed ScummVM to easily incorporate so many engines, and so many backends (I designed the game engine APIs, large parts of the backend system, and constantly run after people to get stuff portable, for years). And vetoed bloat which would have given small devices, with very limited memory and CPU, a hard time.

So I still think, and feel in fact reaffirmed by your very own words, that I am on the right track here .

Also, my thoughts were partly inspired by that other MASSIVELY popular app MAME, which has such a ridiculous collection of boxart etc. for each game that it becomes a kind of game library.

"ridiculous" is the word I'd use, too . BTW, just because somebody is MASSIVELY popular doesn't mean they are always right. Nor is what is right for MAME automatically right for us. We are talking about two projects which share many things, but also have some *major* differences.

Would it be so far-fetched to consider future scummVM releases having boxart, or fading in their title music when selected in the main list, or other "candy"? Not sure anyone would want this, but it was such as relief when the interface got a facelift that I can imagine *something* changing further in the future.

No, that's not completely far-fetched. It's in fact something very very different from a built-in text/image viewer to appease people who want to use walkthroughs or read baking recipes while playing ScummVM.

But we do have to keep resource constraints in view here, too. How well does that ridiculous MAME cover&boxart library run on your Nintendo DS?

@agentq - not sure you should be quite so quick to say "it won't appear on the scummVM page", it wasn't so long ago that scummVMDS was officially embraced by the main project, with much rejoicing for those who wanted it. If anyone else can make a port/branch as good as yours (eew, butt kiss, sorry) it would probably have a chance at glory.

First off: We were very quickly in contact with agentq to get his port on board. Secondly, we are not talking about a great new port here, we are talking about adding an image/text reader to an existing port.

If somebody made a great new port for ScummVM for the so-far unsupported device XYZ, with a built-in text viewer, we'd contact him and ask him to join us, too. But as always, we would first require the code to comply to our coding standards. And that text/image viewer to be removed.

@everyone - OK, so scummVM isn't intended to be like MAME, and platform-specific feature requests seem veto-able by project leads. Fair enough. I just hope anyone with a better idea (voice chat? toaster control?) won't be put off suggesting them

We do listen to user requests, and we already implemented countless of them, but we also rejected a long list. Everybody can check that by looking through the closed item sin our feature request tracker. In this like think it's rather unfair to tell us that we would reject all feature requests without thought (a claim PsYcO made, not you, BTW, just to make this clear).

[fingolfin]

your obviously living in a world of ignorance, have you even seen any of the new phones out there? namely the iphone.
you can do pretty much everything and anything while talking to someone, it wouldn't be hard(once people can crack it) to talk to someone and play on ScummVM, you wouldn't even need to write any more code for it to work

I'll ignore the ad hominem parts of your postings, and most of them in fact, as others already answered them. But this one is just too good to resist ...

You are right: there is absolutely no reason to add support for a built-in text/image viewer on a device like the iPhone (if somebody people can crack it, or there'll be a 3rd part devkit), because you don't *need* it -- just switch to that note application, and use that. Or use the iPhone to call your mommy and ask her how to get past those cannibals in MI2 (I am sure she can also provide you that baking recipe you really needed).

So, your argument is -- what?

[PsYcO]

your obviously living in a world of ignorance, have you even seen any of the new phones out there? namely the iphone.
you can do pretty much everything and anything while talking to someone, it wouldn't be hard(once people can crack it) to talk to someone and play on ScummVM, you wouldn't even need to write any more code for it to work

I'll ignore the ad hominem parts of your postings, and most of them in fact, as others already answered them. But this one is just too good to resist ...

You are right: there is absolutely no reason to add support for a built-in text/image viewer on a device like the iPhone (if somebody people can crack it, or there'll be a 3rd part devkit), because you don't *need* it -- just switch to that note application, and use that. Or use the iPhone to call your mommy and ask her how to get past those cannibals in MI2 (I am sure she can also provide you that baking recipe you really needed).

So, your argument is -- what?

there is a market for using a object(or app in this instance) for other things

could we come up with something more original than the your mum thing? gosh it wares thin, fast

[cde]

Thanks for clearing up the prime target of your flames... I can see why MAME/sVM features aren't - and should not be - automatically comparable, and I agree that the DS could struggle with many more features...

I still think it wasn't *that* stupid an idea for a non-multitasking system to allow some kind of extra info or view-switching. It's a bit like ID3 tags supporting lyrics - I never use it, but I'm glad it's there. Sort of.

Besides, how many Windows scummVM users do you think have notepad or IE/Firefox open with a walkthrough in it so they can alt-tab when going crazy over some of the more obscure puzzles?

(Yes, walkthroughs are for the weak. Yes, cheats never win. Doesn't necessarily mean people don't want to use them...)

Anyway, bring on the boxart and interface music, let's get the DS smouldering

[Tybee]

Anyway, bring on the boxart and interface music, let's get the DS smouldering

Ooh... I like that idea...So you'd have thumbnails of box art to select games instead of text. Interface music or sounds would be nice as well.

Actually, I'd just be happy to have a slightly more readable font or some themes for the interface.

[agentq]

The new front-end which runs on may of the other ScummVM ports is too memory intensive to be used on the DS, so I'll be sticking with the classic frontend. As for boxart, it might be worth putting in a feature request. Adding a library to decode jpegs or pngs wouldn't be possible on the DS because of limited memory.

Interface sounds wouldn't be something I'd be interested in working on, and I doubt the team would find it worthwhile adding sounds to the UI.

As for the text being unclear, there is a software scalar in the works which scales down the image much more cleanly, and makes the text much more readable. It won't be ready for this version though.

but surly, once the bugs are fixed there's no more work to be done on it?
it wouldn't loose focus, it wont be a leviathan, currently scummvm is only 3MB if its as big as you say it is, then a few little utility's wont make a huge difference.

No non-trivial code is ever free of bugs. Just when you think it's bullet-proof, something else pops up. It's just the way life is.

3MB might be small to you, but it's massive on a machine with just 4MB of RAM like the DS. In fact, the whole ScummVM executable on the DS must be under 1.5Mb in order to have enough space to load the game on top. So I'm not sure where I'm going to find memory for 300Kb of code for a text/image viewer, and then somewhere to put the text and images too. It's just not going to happen.

So yeah, the DS is already smouldering.