DrMcCoy wrote:Time that you could have spent doing something useful instead...
Hey, be nice -- I made the effort to make my list of unreasonable proposals one that wouldn't just be the broken record of ones you've heard here a thousand times
As one of my existing specialties is populating wikis with content (as at Mobygames: I don't know how to program, but I'm certainly qualified to type in credits from manuals -- which at some point may yield the right name for a researcher to contact about permission or help making an old game work correctly
, one useful thing I could do is get in there and make entries for everyone's dumb suggestions, accompanied where possible by its priority status or reason why it will explicitly NEVER be supported by SCUMMVM (or rather, the mountains that will have to be moved until a given title is ready for consideration.)
DrMcCoy wrote:Then I've got great news for you: there's now a process which helps you aquire missing knowledge! It's called "learning".
It occurred to me that the sort of people with the spare time needed to work on projects like this are retired ones, who must in some cases also be the people sitting on the original knowledge that put the games together in the first place!
While SCUMMVM is an excellent excuse to start to learn how to program (and disassemble, etc), just-started-learning programmers aren't very useful for the project; rather than learning how to program, I'd figure my time would be much better spent evangelising SCUMMVM to people who already know how to program
DrMcCoy wrote:Yeah, there already was a discussion about that. And the final decision was that it doesn't belong into ScummVM.
Well, it was worth a shot. And that decision being made doesn't mean it's impossible it might be revisited again in the future!
Apropos of nothing, it seems to me that the holy grail for the project given its look-and-feel mandate will really be getting AGS support; I understand that general policy for SCUMMVM is to present a public position that support for a given game will never be undertaken and is not planned for any time in the future until it's well enough along that it will soon be complete: as with SCI games, the party line has been something like No NO NO no NO no No no Never not a chance actually it's looking more likely now.
I understand that AGS is somewhere on the fifth no and that the main obstacle is on its gatekeeper's side. From the outside (for non-programmers, "outside" in this case is a very large area) the precise reasons for this remain somewhat elusive. So Chris Jones won't make his source available while he's alive -- but can we compel him to make preparations to spill the goods in some decades when he eventually passes on so those games can finally be brought into the fold? Or does he plan for AGS registrations to support his grandchildren in luxury? Maybe it's a financial matter? I'm sure most AGS authors would love to have their games supported on all the platforms SCUMMVM runs on. If he named a ridiculous fee (as the Rolling Stones did when asked by Bill Gates how much it would cost to license "Start Me Up" for the Win95 launch) it might be a trivial matter of a kickstarter account and a few months of facebook campaigning to generate the revenue neded to overcome the obstacle.
