The Junkyard (or: what might Residual someday support?)

[unwashedmass]

Over at the SCUMMVM forums, naturally great sport is made of idle speculation about what kinds of other, not-currently-supported games might lie within their project's scope and perhaps someday be brought in under its umbrella.

This daydreaming irks the project developers to no end since the fanboys know what they want, but of course have nothing to offer to further their wishes; all they can contribute to the project is a list of demands and lots of impatience.

That said, the lists have some use, to help determine where the project's scope is or wants to be, as proscribed by genre or convenience (eg. a shared engine with a supported game.)

For instance, there's excitement that ResidualVM might someday support Escape from Monkey Island on account of adventure game genre and engine similarities with Grim Fandango. People might similarly be intrigued at the possibility of someday supporting Lucasfilm's Sith engine on which GrimE was ostensibly based, allowing (with backbreaking work) play of such titles as Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith, Star Wars: Droid Works, and maybe even Indiana Jones and the Infernal Engine. Or those might all get thrown out the window as falling outside the adventure game scope.

Lists can also be useful and inspiring toward suggesting future avenues of investigation; one must of course first be aware of a game to want to support it, but getting it in your sights can be the first step toward determining if use can be made of other work others have done in attempts to virtualize old 3D adventure games. It can prompt research into rights and ownership and, on occasion, the sharing of original source code and enhanced game assets beyond the game's original capabilities.

So let's join me and dream for a few minutes.

Myst 3: Exile gets bandied about as a good potential candidate for someday future support here in Residual. It was made by Presto and hence doesn't share engine resources with earlier or later Myst games, but perhaps with other Presto games such as the Journeyman Project series or Star Trek: Hidden Evil using the Sprint engine.

I see talk here about two series of 3D adventure games by French companies, Adeline's Little Big Adventure series and Infogrames' Alone in the Dark series which began with many of the same developers. If supported, engine hooks might be found suggesting fruitful investigation into Adeline's work in Time Commando and Fade to Black (or not, if they are deemed to fall out of scope of the project's genre restrictions -- though sometimes, games which are out of scope but "easy" to support end up included anyhow 8) The AITD games, if someday supported, might also point at support for Time Gate: Knight's Chase, which is based on their engine.

As adventure games jumped from 2D to 3D, so too series supported by SCUMMVM sprouted 3D sequels which fall out of their scope but potentially in the scope of this project: it brings us Simon the Sorcerer 3D from Adventuresoft, Discworld Noir, and Broken Sword 3: the Sleeping Dragon (which might, or might not, yield hooks to other Revolution-developed contemporary games such as Gold and Glory: the Road to El Dorado, and In Cold Blood.)

Also there is interest in Sierra's Gabriel Knight 3 and its G-Engine, as well as its King's Quest 8 and its respective 3D engine (which leads to speculation about versions of Dynamix's "3space" engine which it was to have used, which was used elsewhere in a range of flight simulators and mech combat games -- out of scope here for genre reasons -- but also in vehicular parts of the 2D adventure Heart of China and perhaps earlier games like David Wolf. 3space could have applications in some way from games as early as Stellar 7 straight through to Torque games today.)

There's speculation about the suitability of Access' Tex Murphy games -- Under a Killing Moon, Overseer, the Pandora Directive. On a sci-fi tangent, I've also seen people here discussing Westwood's Blade Runner, which runs on a voxel engine.

Also seen mentioned: The Longest Journey

Then the slope gets slipperier, with "if you're interested in supporting game X, why not game Y that is very similar to X?" The AITD games, for instance, inspired a few that look and play very similarly, such as Psygnosis' City of Lost Children and Ecstatica 1 & 2. (Also: Capcom's entire PS1 roster of Resident Evil games and its engine derivatives such as Dino Crisis and Onimusha.)

I saw discussion here about how it would be nice to support Telltale's adventure games, but that they would be likely quite uncooperative 8)

Finally, a frequent hobby in the SCUMMVM forums is to dismiss suggestions of games proposed under their umbrella, saying that it would be more under Residual's scope. A quick survey reveals a pile of suggestions:

* Diablo (a controversial proposition, due to its non-adventure-gameplay. Also a pile of clones that work very similarly.)
* Runaway - a road adventure
* Azrael's Tear
* Bioforge
* Ark of Time
* Albion
* Quest for Glory 5

Anyhow, I'm sure this dreaming will be as unwelcome here as it is over on the SCUMMVM forums... I just can't help but make lists. Congratulations on the huge progress you have made on your core scope material and I look forward to seeing what the future holds for ResidualVM 8)

[somaen]

Status quo:
* Myst 3 currently has some early support in our dev-tree.
* EMI currently plays through the intro, and can have it's first puzzle solved in the retail PC/MAC-versions (with major glitches like not seeing Guybrush at all ) The demo completes it's intro scene, and allows you to talk to the catapult guy.
* The Longest Journey has a quite dormant work-branch in a fork of ResidualVM out on github.
* Alone in the Dark is supposedly completable in Free in the Dark, which is itself quite dead as a project, but the source code exists, sadly I only own the gog-version, which is the CD-version, and FITD only supports the floppy-version through to completion. (And, given that I can get hold of floppies, I'd need a floppy drive and a bunch of spare time I was willing to give up)
* Grim Fandango - works through to completion

Well, that's the state of things, no promises in any direction though.

Regarding Diablo, I thought some guy was working on a separate project in that regard, knowing how Blizzard treats such projects, he should expect a Cease and Decist-letter any day now.

[unwashedmass]

Hm. Perhaps I asked too much. Is there any interest or appetite among the devs here to suss out whether supporting Lucasfilm's antecedent Sith/Jones engine games (or still-earlier Jedi engine games: Dark Forces, Outlaws) would be easier or more desirable than any other old arbitrary engine?

[MeddlingMonk]

There is already a project creating an interpreter for Dark Forces and Outlaws. Why should Residual duplicate that effort? And why did you call those games "antecedent"? Although Dark Forces and Outlaws preceded Grim Fandango in time, I wasn't aware that they shared the same engine. In fact, I always got the idea that there was no such relationship.

[somaen]

There is some sharing between the Sith-engine and the GrimE-engine, but not really much. I guess renderDroid was used in both, the file formats for the 3d-models are somewhat similar atleast.

From reading through the rather interesting stuff Bret Mogilefsky had to say about the project over on some Grim-site, I think they started out with the sith-engine for rendering, added in Lua, and then forked of heavily from there.

Whatever was left from Sith is quite gone in EMI, which uses an entirely different render-engine btw. (With different model-formats and all that jazz).

To add something usefull to this discussion, my personal wish is for something rather bizarre, "Det magiske jordbæret", which is niche enough that the only decent place I could even find any information was on a danish Facebook-group: http://da-dk.facebook.com/group.php?gid=30754329259. Now, if anyone adds support for THAT, I would donate a decent amount.

I should of course do it myself instead of listing it here, but then again, working on EMI is more fullfilling as there is showable progress there

[Morden]

I, for one, would really like to see the Ecstatica games revived through Residual, as well as The City of Lost Children. They well deserve it. Certainly more than Diablo, since, in my opinion, it's outside of the scope for Residual.

I'm actually quite surprised that Residual never enjoyed as much support as ScummVM did. While ScummVM was swallowing up new engines, including Sierra ones [who would have thought this would happen?], Residual development seemed to be on hiatus. I know it always comes down to people willing to invest their time, but you need to get the ball rolling, I guess. Once ScummVM grew sufficiently, more people were willing to work on the project. I just wish Residual got the same kind of attention and I hope that someday it will. Hopefully sooner than later.

[Harrypoppins]

There is already a project creating an interpreter for Dark Forces and Outlaws. Why should Residual duplicate that effort? And why did you call those games "antecedent"? Although Dark Forces and Outlaws preceded Grim Fandango in time, I wasn't aware that they shared the same engine. In fact, I always got the idea that there was no such relationship.

I'm agree this had nothing to do with residual.

[opitzs]

I'm actually quite surprised that Residual never enjoyed as much support as ScummVM did. While ScummVM was swallowing up new engines, including Sierra ones [who would have thought this would happen?], Residual development seemed to be on hiatus. I know it always comes down to people willing to invest their time, but you need to get the ball rolling, I guess. Once ScummVM grew sufficiently, more people were willing to work on the project. I just wish Residual got the same kind of attention and I hope that someday it will. Hopefully sooner than later.

I am not, the beginning of ScummVM AFAIK was like this, small scope, so you have a real chance to reach something. The explosion came much later, when ScummVM was, at least for the players of old Adventures, a brand name. Interestingly enough, I think there name helped, too, scumm in connection with vm just gets stuck in my brain
I found residual yesterday, I searched for a way to run Grim on Linux and expected to find Wine configs, but found ResidualVM instead. I think that is the crux, there are two game names connected to Residual, only people interested in one of those 2 games even find the project.

[somaen]

To be fair, there's really 3 (nee 4) games connected to the project, where
1 is working (Grim Fandango),
1 was stated to be completable (Myst 3) but I haven't tried it myself,
1 starts up (Escape From Monkey Island), and
1 has zero support at the moment (Journeyman Project 3).

So, putting a name like GrimeVM on it wouldn't really be fair either (nor really helpfull, as the GrimE-engine is nowhere near as known as the famous SCUMM-engine. Even the old SCUMM-bar wasn't renamed GrimE-bar, but rather Lua-bar, and well, we aren't a generic Lua-project).

That said, I do see the point, but still, the project has gotten out of a hiatus, and is rolling along nicely. As for recognition, I'm satisified that Tim Schafer knows we exist

[topolinik]

* Alone in the Dark is supposedly completable in Free in the Dark, which is itself quite dead as a project, but the source code exists, sadly I only own the gog-version, which is the CD-version, and FITD only supports the floppy-version through to completion. (And, given that I can get hold of floppies, I'd need a floppy drive and a bunch of spare time I was willing to give up)

Hey, guys, wait a minute!
The project page hosts no files at all, why?
Were they removed? I'm sure I have an old backup of those tarballs but it looks like sourceforge had a bug or something?

BTW, I also own the same CD-version of the aitd games and so the latest fitd will be useless.

[somaen]

https://github.com/somaen/fitd-residualvm

Still quite early work, and really not fit for play, but it does start up with the CD-version (although you'll have to work a bit with the ISO if you have the GoG-version). Probably will work worse on 64-bit than on 32-bit (the current code is VERY hard on assuming 32-bit).

No promises at all, as I have other stuff to work on at the moment, but the code is there atleast.

[topolinik]

https://github.com/somaen/fitd-residualvm

I'm glad the source code didn't go lost.

I see your code is now in C++, while fitd was written in C, so is yours a code adaptation from yazoo source? Or is it a complete rewrite?

[somaen]

It is an adaptation of yazoo's work, and well, most of the files are C++ in name only (all of them were renamed from *.c to *.cpp), the aim is at some point to make it mergeable with the ResidualVM-codebase, which would mean lots of cleanup, objectification etc.

But, that won't happen in the next year or so atleast.

[sloppycrap]

so I suppose I should set up pspdev on my windows machine here

Is there enough in common with scummvm that a PSP port should be fairly straightforward? I'm a linux sysadmin (not developer) in real life but GODDAMN I would get things working if I could play GF on my PSP.

[klusark]

so I suppose I should set up pspdev on my windows machine here

Is there enough in common with scummvm that a PSP port should be fairly straightforward? I'm a linux sysadmin (not developer) in real life but GODDAMN I would get things working if I could play GF on my PSP.

It shouldn't be too hard to get it running as it does indeed share quite a bit with ScummVM. The hard part though is getting it to run well as you will need to port the rendering to whatever the PSP supports.