Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity

md5 · Post by **md5** » Mon Jun 22, 2015 9:29 pm

I don't like repeating myself but...

It takes absolute ages to reverse a game. It needs time, resources, reversing skills, programming skills, loads of patience, debugging and testing.

Adding a new game isn't a magical do-it-all button. This is not a movie. You can't sit down for 30 minutes (with epic music in the background) and have a fully working game. It takes ages. It takes time, and tons of work. It's hard, it's a pain in the ass. So, you can imagine the reaction, when someone comes and asks for X game to be added, along the lines of "why haven't you added this game up to now?" Well, because we have our jobs and our lives to attend to. This is a non-profit project. We do it because we like what we're doing.

At some point, it would be nice if each and every adventure game was added to ScummVM. But that will take ages. And work, and... (you know the rest).

There are tons of people who would like to have X game added. But none willing to work on adding it. So, this isn't about "noob bashing". It's about setting things straight. And again, yes, adding a new game isn't easy. This isn't hostility. It's more along the lines of "we do not have the resources to do this, if you want, you can spend your free time and help us". So far, we don't have many volunteers for that.

Finally, the fact that a lot of new posters don't come back is this: they don't bother to check what this project is about, they don't check our FAQ, or our rules, and come to ask if a game they love can be added or not. And then they get disappointed that there's no magical way to add their game, and try looking for some other project. And a lot of people think that this project is "similar to DOSBox". Well, it isn't. And that makes it different, but with a better end result, IMHO.

After answering the same thing over and over, it gets tedious, and people tend to become more abrupt in their replies. Try working on tech support and answering "have you tried turning it off and then on again" over and over....

Mobygames lists 5918 adventure games. Now, try answering the same thing for all the unsupported games and you can see how things are from our perspective...

LordHoto · Post by **LordHoto** » Mon Jun 22, 2015 11:13 pm

scoriae wrote:I just disagree with the general attitude that is used to respond to such queries.

I am not sure if I understand you correctly, but let's clarify this: You complain about the attitude people show. You do this by showing a similar attitude. And you expect people to change because of this? Even though you said yourself that you wouldn't like to be shown that attitude?

filipetolhuizen · Post by **filipetolhuizen** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 1:50 am

I'm far from being a programmer, but the game itself shows lots of similarities with scumm games, specially Full Throttle. Just take a look at their command menus, inventory, maps, side games... If their animation weren't so different, I'd say Beavis & Butthead used the scumm engine.

Seldon · Post by **Seldon** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 7:11 am

filipetolhuizen wrote:I'm far from being a programmer, but the game itself shows lots of similarities with scumm games, specially Full Throttle. Just take a look at their command menus, inventory, maps, side games... If their animation weren't so different, I'd say Beavis & Butthead used the scumm engine.

First, I'd like to explain to you filipetolhuizen, that most of what I'm going to write is not directed to you. Your post just inspired me. And I understand you didn't mean anything wrong.
So, why people come to the forum asking for support of new games? Well, obviously because they want to play them through ScummVM. They may not be aware of the enormity of work needed to implement it. Most of them are new to the forum and this particular post is their first, with the same date as their registration. In my opinion they just try to play the game and if they can't they just go to the forum, because they want to play it as fast as possible.

That's annoying to developers. Maybe someone is not aware, but registering at the forum, he should look at it first, get to know it. Read forum rules and so on before asking or even sometimes demanding. No wonder that developers are angry with such behaviour.

The problem is more complex. In most cases this simple desire to play unsupported game can be a realized in much simple way - using for example dosbox. It doesn't require months or even years of work by developers, just few minutes or hours to install and configure appropriate environment.

From this perspective asking for support of game, which requires tons of tiresome work, just because one person has whim to play it is simply unfair and extremely selfish. It's particularly selfish when sometimes people ask for support of totally unknown game, that few people would play besides the asker. Let's stress it again - months of work for few hours of fun for few people unknown to developer, people who mostly demand and rush.

I want to say that it is fair to ask someone on the forum for help which requires minutes, hours, maybe even days of involvement. But asking for support of the game is practically useless. No one will start this work just because some stranger from forum asked or impolitely demanded. Developers add support mostly for games that they like to play, so in my opinion any attempt to force them is futile and pitiful. Repetitive nagging actually discourages people.

Some people would like to have game supported beacause the would like to play it on other platform, for example android phone. One could say that their asking is fair, because scummvm is their only option (there is dosbox for android actually, but it doesn't solve all problems). I would say - don't be lazy and go play it on PC, instead of putting loads of work on developers.

And now we come to filipetolhuzen comment, which is also very developer-annoying. This is the comment that tries to tell: "well this game looks similar to other supported games, it probably uses the same or very similar engine, you won't have that much work supporting it, you just make few corrections to existing one and voila - we have support". Actually this thinking is totally false. External similarity has nothing to do with internal engine. Actually all point&click adventure games have similar interface because most of them are modeled either on Lucas Arts or Sierra games.

I understand that people have their desires and they deserve respect and polite answer (and shattering their dreams). But they need to respect the other side, too. Especially when they ask someone to do something. At least by reading forum rules.

filipetolhuizen · Post by **filipetolhuizen** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 1:49 pm

I understand it, Seldon. If I were a programmer I would help to make desires come true, believe me, and I would have a better idea on how busy the developers actually are to make their best efforts.

JohnnyLurg · Post by **JohnnyLurg** » Mon Aug 24, 2015 1:46 am

I get the feeling that a lot of this animosity towards ''Beavis and Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity'' is simply due to the fact that the show it is inspired by had a bad reputation among moral guardians in the 90s. It should not be overlooked that the game was awarded "Best Adventure Game of 1995" by PC Gamer. Furthermore, its gameplay is very similar to that of ''Full Throttle'' and ''The Curse of Monkey Island''.

Post by **digitall** » Mon Aug 24, 2015 9:03 am

NO. The only reason for the "animosity" is due to violation of Forum Rule #1: http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=17

This is specifically mentioned in the ScummVM FAQ:
http://www.scummvm.org/faq/#question.add-new-games

If you had searched further, you would find that work on this engine is in progress and the code is in tree, but still marked as development / unstable, so will only be available on Buildbot and other Daily Builds:
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/BBVS
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/tree ... gines/bbvs