The "1.0" release

[fingolfin]

It's quite easy to determine which features to include and which not, actually: Anything not yet (or in the next couple weeks) there won't make it to the next release, which we will call 1.0 (or rather 1.0rc to be followed by 1.0).

There are countless features we could add but I think we've had enough of them to warrant a 1.0 release (or a 2.0, for that matter) by the standards of any commercial project out there, so I think waiting for any more makes no sense. The possibly only exception being a manual, but here the problem is that it simply might never happen; and after having waited for it for several years now, we simply decided to not wait for it any longer .

[bobdevis]

I have been thinking about the manual since your looking-for-writers announcement and I could just not come up with something useful to write that is not already in the documentation, read-me or on the forum.
Maybe I am missing something, but to me it seems to me that for something as dynamic and feature rich piece of software as ScummVM a clear-cut old fashioned manual is not very useful.

I see that with many other projects. Take VirtualBox for example. When you properly understand what a VM is, the not-so-updated manual becomes near useless. All the 'good stuff' is on the forum.
On the other hand, the not-so-clued people will be asking the same questions over-and-over anyway.

[fingolfin]

My vision of what the manual should do is this: It should be a place for beginners to start. It should be a reference for all the features in ScummVM. Of course it is a moving target, but some features that have been there for a long time are seriously underdocumented in the README. Sure, people can in theory find everything on the forums, but that is not always easy, and in a thread replying to such a question, there are often also many slightly incorrect to completely wrong answers. Sifting through all this is quite a task. Not to mention that you *have* to be online, while a manual could be converted to HTML/PDF and saved on your device.

Some examples of things that I think would be nice in the manual:
* Quick start guide: brief guide on how to add any game and start playing it
* Document all settings in the options dialog. And not just like this: "Aspect Ratio correction checkbox: When activated, this enables aspect ration correction" . It really should explain what that means (old screens had non-square pixels, modern ones have square pixels, hence image looks squashed, so we stretch it), and mention limitation / which engines/games/devices this applies to (e.g. ARC applies only to 320x200 games).

* It may also link to other places (forum posts, wikipedia, ScummVM wiki pages, ...) which provide more details; but it should try to be self-contained at least for the basics, so that is useful even when online.

* Some people like to print instructions, and that's not possible with our forums (resp. would require quite a lot of paper).

[Collector]

Some people like to print instructions, and that's not possible with our forums (resp. would require quite a lot of paper).

It could be made into a PDF. People that want print can then do so on their own.

[Kisdra]

Some people like to print instructions, and that's not possible with our forums (resp. would require quite a lot of paper).

It could be made into a PDF. People that want print can then do so on their own.

Yeah, but even this solution implies some work : someone have to compile all the usefull informations on the forums, putting away the useless parts.

[filipetolhuizen]

Was SCI support dropped?

[LordHoto]

Was SCI support dropped?

See the "Status of SCI games thread"

Short answer: No.

If it was depended on whether 1.0.0 will include SCI check this post in the aforementioned thread.