The D-Day

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4,000,000

Yes, we finally reached it. 4,000,123 official downloads (at least). It was a good time, and it was fun time to watch its progress.

This number comprises of downloads of only ScummVM binaries from SF.net servers. It it is 8.9 TB worth of data since October 2001. Wow, I hardly imagine who could host that for us for free besides SourceForge. That is a definitely great service.

If you talk about all ScummVM downloads from SF.net, including game data and cutscene packs, the figures are a bit more scary and that is 5.3 millions and whopping 61.7 TB. Unbelievable. This truly shows that ScummVM is one of the most successful open source projects in the world.

I hope that downloads will continue increasing, especially as we add more supported platforms and yet more supported games. Keep downloading! Read More...

(almost) Glitchless Boozooks

Someday I am going to translate that long letter of mine from Russian to English and tell the world true story of gob engine in ScummVM.

It used to be called dso module, and we are still not sure how it was called originally. In these days DrMcCoy drives most of the effort, he is our expert in this engine, dealing with its both graphical and code-wise weirdness.

Gob3 support was lightning fast because there are not much changes between those generations of the engine, but Woodruff made Sven stuck. Plainly stuck for several months. He could not dare to decipher hundreds of cryptic routines which deal with VMD movies playback, and since Woodruff is all about running those VMDs all over the screen, the progress was just zero.

However, recently there happened to be a breakthrough. He decided to ignore most of that code after he found out that it deals mostly with caching, as original game was intended to run directly from CD-ROM. After ignoring that and adding like 700 lines of code, he finally figured out most of the differences and is routinely moves forward since that. Among the things which were implemented recently are scrolling, text positioning, proper hotspots, sound in object videos and saving/loading.

As a side effect, The Last Dynasty intro is now playable, so it was added to detector. It may happen that we will see Woodruff completable (albeit with glitches) in nearest time.
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There is no Kyra4

That's truly amazing, but just in a slightly more than a month of development time, Kyrandia3 is playable until completion. Of course, there are lots of bugs, and the engine is not yet mature enough to be announced as supported, but the progress is enormous. Both LordHoto and athrxx added over 16,000 lines of code to kyra engine since 0.11.1.

There is no Kyra4 for them to continue their extraordinary work, as they seem to be on wave, but there are already certain plans from both. :)

So I suppose that pretty soon whole The Legend of Kyrandia series will be fully supported.

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Cheap-o-cheap

"Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game."

How laughable are these words when you look at this auction.

Yes, it is FM-TOWNS version of Zak McKracken, a game which originates from same folks whom I quoted above. And this game is being offered "just" for 599 EUR. With today's rates it goes as much as $932 USD. What amazes me even more is that shipping for this piece of art is not free, neither there is an insurance offered as a default option.

All of this is sad. Only couple of folks in ScummVM team own this game, and moreover, one of the owners is not active anymore. This makes even more difficult to squish bugs in this particular version of the game, and most of the work will go blind. Of course, we ourselves could be somewhat blamed for these rocket high prices, as this is basically the support by ScummVM what makes this item so popular on eBay.

So, never pay a grand for a computer game. Read More...