Monday, May 26, 2008

Official Start of Summer of Code

Today marks the official start of Google Summer of Code. For those who asked, here's what the tentative schedule for the next few months looks like:

May 26 - June 8 : Official start of GSoC. Alter FreeSCI's file I/O routines and any other OS-specific code to use ScummVM's OSystem class.

June 9 - June 22 : Implement a ScummVM sound driver for FreeSCI. This driver will use ScummVM's sound methods as its backend, replacing the existing platform-specific drivers.

June 23 - June 29 : Debug and document existing code, finish all file and audio work.

June 30 - July 13 : Modify the engine to use configuration settings specified in the ScummVM options menu whenever possible. For example, setting the music driver in ScummVM should cause our engine to choose the appropriate resource files and output driver. In any instance where the engine would query FreeSCI's configuration data, we modify it to instead consult the ScummVM configuration manager.

It should be noted that the the FreeSCI configuration system has some options that cannot be set using ScummVM's menu. For these options, the engine should still query the ScummVM configuration manager. This way, anyone seeking to add a more general configuration utility later on will not need to modify the engine extensively.


July 14 - July 20 : Modify game detection code. Currently, the FreeSCI engine uses its own detection algorithms to decide which interpreter to invoke. We want to modify it to use ScummVM's Md5-based game detection, resorting to the FreeSCI code as a fallback

July 21 - July 26 : Integrate FreeSCI debugger as a subclass of the ScummVM console.

July 27 - August 4 : Polish the user interface. Test on multiple non-Windows/Linux platforms. Resolve any outstanding portability issues.

August 4 - August 18 : Debug and document code.