Updating Wiki

[maioni]

Hello,

In the last couple of days, I was trying to figure out how to play some AGS games with a gamepad, and discovered that ScummVM also supports AGS games and many others engines like AGI.

I found out some game's ID in the Wiki page: https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=AGS/Games

But some others are not listed there, I was trying to play the fangame "King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella Retold" and found out in a Issue that's was asking to change it's ID to kq4retold

Unfortunately, some others game's I could find it's ID on any place like "6 Day Assassin".

Searching for some days, I found in GitHub the file with all supported games for AGS: https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/blob ... n_tables.h

Now I ask, why the Wiki don't have all those information? Not only AGS but all the others engines (a lot, thank you!)

Could someone please update the wiki? I know that some sources in other website points to this Wiki for user know how to play those games, but its not accurated/updated with new game's IDs.

Thank you again for this worderful engine! And for this awesome development job!

[criezy]

You don't normally need to know the game IDs. That's something ScummVM uses internally to recognize the games and store settings for those, but not something users have to see or use in most cases. May I ask why do you need to know them?

By the way, if you really need to know the game ID of a game you have, the best way to find it is to use scummvm with the --detect option:

Code: Select all

criezy% ./scummvm --detect -p /Applications/Games/6DaysASacrifice
GameID                   Description                                        Full Path
------------------------ -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------
ags:6daysasacrifice      6 Days A Sacrifice (Special Edition/English)       /Applications/Games/6DaysASacrifice

[maioni]

I play ScummVM in batocera frontend, and to recognize that a game is a ScummVM game, you have to create a empty file in the game's root directory with the syntaxe GAMEID.SCUMMVM, otherwise the game will not be detected as a ScummVM game:
More info: https://wiki.batocera.org/systems:scummvm#game_files

Batocera.linux: https://batocera.org/

Batocera Wiki for ScummVM games: https://wiki.batocera.org/systems:scummvm

The Batocera wiki, and others like this, points to the ScummVM Wiki to the user knows what are the Game's ID, but it's not updated.

[criezy]

Thank you. I understand better why you need the game IDs now.

Indeed, historically the wiki listed most supported games. But sadly with thousands of games being now supported with the addition of the AGS and Glk engines, and many more coming in with the Director engine, having all the games listed in the wiki is a lost cause. We simply don't have enough contributors to keep such a list up to date. The compatibility list on the website has been similarly simplified to not list all the individual Glk and AGS games.

So the only comprehensive resource for the game ids is, and will remain, the source code and the scummvm command I gave previously.

Also I don't know how that impacts batocera, but we changed game ids in recent version to also include the engine id. You can see this in the example I gave in my previous message (ags:6daysasacrifice). This was done because we were getting conflicts with games from different engines having the same ID (this was especially an issue with Glk and AGS game due to the sheer number of those games). In most cases using the game id without the engine will still work, but in some cases where a clash exists the full ID will be needed. Fortunately having colon in the name should not be an issue on Linux, so that might work with Batocera already.

As a note, maybe batocera could be updated somehow to detect automatically the game ids from the game path using the command I provided (or the --auto-detect command, which also start the game in addition to detecting it). That would remove the requirement for users to hunt for the ids.

[sev]

I play ScummVM in batocera frontend, and to recognize that a game is a ScummVM game, you have to create a empty file in the game's root directory

This is so sad, lame and frustrating to see that people of RetroArch (your frontend is using their plugin) just destroyed ScummVM game detection.

We cannot help with this, this is poor engineering, leads only to problems and confusion like you have.

And when I see "ScummVM is an emulator that runs" on the batocera Wiki, this just shows how those devs simply have no understanding of what ScummVM is, thus, there are no sentiments in trampling our functionality in those forks.

We cannot provide support, neither we will waste time on enlisting gameids. They are NOT intended for detection purposes, they do change, get upgraded and are not unique between the engines.


Eugene

[maioni]

I got a solution, just opening the ScummVM on batocera, open the game folder, and verify the game's ID.
After that I configure the game ID on batocera, and everything works fine.

Also found out that is possible to launcher a game in an specific version or language with some game ID options like:
gameid-win-cd-fr > That launch the Windows CD version in french.

Thank you!

The batocera needs to know the gameid before open it, it's like a prefix to launch the game and show it in the gallery, it's not a bad development or been destroying the ScummVM project.

With this, I can play ScummVM games on my TV with a GamePad, it's marvelous! That's one reason why ScummVM has so many platforms, to make people play the way they want and fit better!

I also updated the Batocera's Wiki with those information: https://wiki.batocera.org/systems:scummvm

Regards!

[criezy]

The batocera needs to know the gameid before open it, it's like a prefix to launch the game and show it in the gallery

That I understand. But what we suggested is that it could possibly be improved so that rather than require the user to manually provide this gameid, it could run scummvm --detect and parse the output to automatically detect the gameid from the game files. Other frontends are already doing this. There were discussions in the past related to this, for example this one: viewtopic.php?t=14408

[sev]

Also found out that is possible to launcher a game in an specific version or language with some game ID options like:
gameid-win-cd-fr > That launch the Windows CD version in french.

No, that is NOT a gameid, that is a generated target name. It could be anything and you can go and change it. Without a correct scummvm.ini those targets will not work: they are just referring to a specific section in the .ini. I have to disappoint you, but the information you added on that Wiki is incorrect.


Eugene

[criezy]

To expand a bit on Eugene's reply, in ScummVM we have:

• A game ID that uniquely identifies every game supported by ScummVM.
• A game target that uniquely identifies every game added to the ScummVM launcher by the user.

For example when the user adds the same game twice to the ScummVM launcher, it gets two different game targets (one for each entry in the launcher). The targets are also editable by the user and could be anything.

However to make things a bit more confusing, the game ID does not appear anywhere in the ScummVM user interface. Only the game target is visible, and it is labeled "ID". After you have added a game to the launcher, its gameid can however be seen in the .ini file. For example:

Code: Select all

[my-custom-sq4-entry]
engineid=sci
gameid=sq4
platform=windows
guioptions=midiGM gameOption1 gameOption2 gameOption3 gameOption6 gameOptionE lang_English
description=Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers (CD/Windows/English)
path=/Path/to/Space Quest Collection/Space Quest 4
language=en

In this example the game target is "my-custom-sq4-entry" (which I edited, the default one was "sq4-cd-win"), and the game id is "sq4".

When you start ScummVM on the command line, you can specify a <gameid>, <engineid:gameid>, or <game target> to start the game directly instead of going to the launcher. I suspect this is what batocera is doing. However using the <game target> only works as long as the game has been added to the ScummVM launcher, which adds it to the .ini file, and is kept in that .ini file, and not renamed. On the other hand the <gameid> and <engineid:gameid> can be used also for games that have not been added to the ScummVM launcher, and are predefined names that the user cannot change (although for engines in development they can be changed between releases, and we have already renamed some gameids for the AGS engine since the 2.5 release).

[maioni]

A friend told me that I can export the game's ID with this command:

./scummvm --list-games --engine=ags | >> AGS_Game_ID.txt

I just need to know, what's the game engine.

All engines: https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/tree/master/engines

[maioni]

Talking to Batocera developers, they are trying to figure out a better way to autodetect the games.

Were could I find more about it?

[criezy]

Our documentation could be a good start: https://docs.scummvm.org/en/v2.5.1/adva ... _line.html

Running scummvm --help will also provide similar information.