ScummVM full release detecting unsupported games

[scoriae]

I'm not sure if this was a conscious decision or not, but in the past the full release versions did not detect games that were typically only detectable with the SVN version.

I have a few games sitting around that have WIP engines, and occasionally I scan them just to see if they play any differently than the last release or to see if one is supported in the main branch and I missed it.

So I was surprised to find that the 1.9.0 release (technically the current 1.9.0.2) detected many games that aren't "officially" supported. One example is Dragonsphere.

My guess is this is simply, an oversight, so I figured I'd point it out. Thanks!

[dreammaster]

My guess is this is simply, an oversight, so I figured I'd point it out. Thanks!

You're right. The games other than Rex Nebular for that engine should be marked as unstable. I'll commit a fix for the engines I'm familiar with when I get home, unless someone beats me to it. Generally speaking, many of the engines ScummVM supports are for single games, so the entire engine itself isn't included until it's officially supported. It's only in engines like MADS, where only a subset of the detected games are officially supported, that we need to be careful about marking stuff as unsupported.

[scoriae]

There were plenty more beyond just Dragonsphere that I thought weren't supported yet (at least, they've never been announced in the main release threads).

I can do a scan and list out various titles if that is helpful.

edit (and I believe these are all different engines):
Hi-Res Adventure #6 - The Dark Crystal
Martian Memorandum
Operation Stealth
Wintermute games, such as Pigeons in the Park
Riven & Rugrats
The Last Dynasty
Donald Duck's Playground

[criezy]

All these games have in common to use an engine for which we support at least one game. As dreammaster wrote we have to be more careful with those, and obviously we were not. Thank you for reporting the issue.

Note that this is not a new issue. I tried 3 games from the list (Riven, Dragonsphere and Operation Stealth) and they are all detected with version 1.8.0 as well.

[criezy]

I just had a quick look at the code, and the games I looked at are correctly marked as unstable. This doesn't prevent the game from being detected in release builds, but it causes a warning message to be displayed when trying to start it, indicating the game is unsupported. So maybe that behaviour was done on purpose.

[tsoliman]

I'm not sure if this was a conscious decision or not, but in the past the full release versions did not detect games that were typically only detectable with the SVN version.

The situation is different with engines that have sub-engines (e.g. SCI32 is a sub-engine of SCI) where the code for the unstable sub-engines is entirely missing from a stable/release build, including the detection entries.

For regular engines, the expected behavior is that it gets detected and you get a warning on launch. Not ideal probably now that I write it "out loud".

Dragonsphere isn't part of a sub-engine at all so it gets detected but say QFG4/KQ7/etc don't because they are part of a disabled sub-engine.

[scoriae]

This is different compared to pre 1.0.0 release I suppose. Back then, even with games that had a shared engine, only fully stable games were detected in the "main" releases. I always had to download an SVN version to even try to detect anything that was not fully supported.

It doesn't bother me either way, I was just surprised to see it detecting incomplete games.