Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity

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slypie
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Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity

Post by slypie »

Has anyone thought of supporting Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity in ScummVM? Would it be possible or is it a no no? As far as I know Viacom who published the game don't have any involvement in the industry anymore so the source code might possibly be available.
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noize
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Post by noize »

Stop it.
slypie
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Post by slypie »

Stop What?
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md5
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Post by md5 »

There are hundreds of adventure games out there, it's impossible to re-write the engines of all of them.
slypie
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Post by slypie »

I know that, I don't come from a coders background so I don't know whats involved in porting things over. I'm just a fan who misses these types of games and was just wondering if games like beavis and butthead were a possibility.
Maybe ScummVM will become the Mame of point and click games.
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olki
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Post by olki »

You cannot compare scummvm with mame. While scummvm is a collection of script interpreters, mame emulates CPUs. A better comparison to mame (though not quite either) would be dosbox, which supports way more games than scummvm does.
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eriktorbjorn
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Post by eriktorbjorn »

slypie wrote:I know that, I don't come from a coders background so I don't know whats involved in porting things over. I'm just a fan who misses these types of games and was just wondering if games like beavis and butthead were a possibility.
Maybe ScummVM will become the Mame of point and click games.
One very crude way of counting would be to count the number of lines of text in the source code files for each of the engines. That, of course, would include comments, blank lines, etc. so it's not a very good measure. Still, it might give some idea.

Measured that way, the "smallest" engine (not counting the still unfinished Kyrandia engine) is the Simon the Sorcerer engine, at close to 18,000 lines of text. Most of the engines are less than 25,000 lines of text. Only one is more than 30,000 lines, and that's the SCUMM engine, which is nearing 100,000 lines. (This is not because the SCUMM engine is drastically more complicated, but because we have to support several generations of it.)

Bottom line, adding support for a new family of games will always be quite a bit of work, even in the cases where we have the original source code to work with.
slypie
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Post by slypie »

olki wrote:You cannot compare scummvm with mame. While scummvm is a collection of script interpreters, mame emulates CPUs. A better comparison to mame (though not quite either) would be dosbox, which supports way more games than scummvm does.
I didn't mean that in a bad way. I think ScummVM is an excellent program and so is mame. I'm a bit ignorant when it comes to coding. ScummVM is already evolving and expanding into other engines just like mame and thats the point I was trying to make.
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olki
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Post by olki »

slypie wrote:I didn't mean that in a bad way. I think ScummVM is an excellent program and so is mame. I'm a bit ignorant when it comes to coding. ScummVM is already evolving and expanding into other engines just like mame and thats the point I was trying to make.
I wasn't implying that you meant it in a bad way. I was just stating that you cannot compare Mame and ScummVM. While once a new CPU has been added to Mame, it is very easy to add support for a couple of hundreds or even thousands of games. Adding a single game to ScummVM on the other hand, does require a LOT of work, even if ScummVM already has a version of the game engine on which a particular game is based on. It would be a lot of work for instance to add support for Gobliins 2. Worse, adding support for a completely unrelated game (such as Beavis and Butthead) would require months of work.
slypie
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Post by slypie »

Point taken... :) Anyway keep up the good work guys it's great to see games like Monkey Island and Sam and Max playable again. I owned nearly all of lucasarts point and click games and think that people coming into gaming now are really missing out of a generation of games.
shnutman
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Support for BBVS

Post by shnutman »

I actually played through that game on an Android port of ScummVM. It was an unstable build about 6 months back. I saw the apk for bbvs in the build pack and installed it, copied the datafiles for the game and viola!

What's weird is newer installs no longer have the bbvs package included anymore. I don't know if the programmers decided to not support it after all or what, but hopefully it's just being developed further.

I completed the game with no errors or bugs and can say from my experience that the game is fully completeable.
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clone2727
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Re: Support for BBVS

Post by clone2727 »

shnutman wrote:What's weird is newer installs no longer have the bbvs package included anymore. I don't know if the programmers decided to not support it after all or what, but hopefully it's just being developed further.
The Android daily builds are now monolithic and do not require engine plugins.
scoriae
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Post by scoriae »

Good job guys. I was afraid the old timers wouldn't respond with enough sarcasm and disgust at a newbs attempt to ask about a game they enjoyed and would like to play again.

I'd hate to see the scummvm forums ever come across as welcoming or helpful. Keep up the good work!
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md5
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Post by md5 »

scoriae wrote:Good job guys. I was afraid the old timers wouldn't respond with enough sarcasm and disgust at a newbs attempt to ask about a game they enjoyed and would like to play again.

I'd hate to see the scummvm forums ever come across as welcoming or helpful. Keep up the good work!
Wow. Loads of hate here... for what?

Yes, BBVS has been included in the latest development build.
Yes, it is playable - thanks shnutman for the play through and the feedback!
No, it still needs to have some minor details fixed before it can be announced.

shnutman asked why there is no bbvs package (i.e. plugin) available, and clone2727 responded that the new Android builds do not require plugins (so-called "monolithic builds").

I don't understand the need to be sarcastic here, scoriae. Perhaps you could have provided better answers to the questions? If so, how?
scoriae
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Post by scoriae »

Well, I've been around a lot longer than just 2008, but that's when this name dates me. And in that time I could have made a fortune if I could have placed a bet on the general response a user would receive (specifically users who are new to the forums) when they asked if X game would be supported.

2:1 odds: sure, you can add it yourself
3:1 odds: do you have any idea how difficult it is to add a game
4:1 odds: that game is totally out of scope of this project (even though several games this excuse was used for back in the mid 2000's have since been added
5:1 odds: some insult or other post that simply tells the OP to go away or stop asking questions.

My point is simple - spend enough time on the forums and you see how hostile they can be to new people. Unless a guy (or gal) shows up who is an adept programmer and ready to start reverse engineering, the woe be to them if they ask about the status of a game not currently implemented.

All forums get their fair share of folks who ask silly questions or don't read through the entire forum before asking something, I just disagree with the general attitude that is used to respond to such queries.

In this case the guy asked a fairly open ended question. has anyone "thought" about supporting B&B. First response? "Stop it." Second is yours, which does not address the question but rather states that it is impossible to support all adventure games (I don't recall him asking whether or not this was possible).

The guy specifically states he isn't from a coders background and goes on to explain that he sees mame and scummvm similar ONLY in that they both support a lot of games, and that scummvm specializes in adventure games. He is correct on that view. He is also not incorrect in fundamentally assuming that more adventure games will be added to scummvm in time. So his, innocuous, query is, "has anyone looked into/considered B&B?"

The fact that most new posters don't come back after asking their initial question should be a sign of how their experience went. The fact that many of them end up apologizing for their question should give perspective into the way they are made to feel for asking the question in the first place.

My post was simply pointing out that these forums have a way of dealing with people who ask questions, and I would have been disappointed if someone had honestly answered the guys question by saying "Yes, it has been considered however the particular engine that the game runs on is currently not implemented in any fashion, so it will be quite a lot of work to get the game running and currently no one is working on that particular engine. But hopefully one day it will work." Or any variation thereof. Why would I be disappointed, because then i couldn't grab a beer and sit down every few months and go read the scummvm forums looking at 'noobs getting pwowned".

Take it any way you want, I have years of forum posts proving my point.
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