I’ve decided to settle on Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional as my development platform of choice for this project. I have not made the move to Linux where there are more free tools available by choice since adapting to Linux will take some valuable time out my schedule. Sticking strictly to Windows where I have the most experience and using Visual Studio, which I also use for work, seems like the best idea. The great thing is Microsoft is offering a whole boatload of expensive development software to students for free, including Visual Studio 2008. This is probably a great opportunity for other GSOC students out there so if you didn’t already know, check out Microsoft DreamSpark.
ScummVM is hosted on SourceForge.net like many other open-source projects and uses Subversion for version control. My SourceForge username is marwanhilmi and I’ve been attached to the ScummVM project. You can view the repositories here. A branch was created for my work on the project named “gsoc2008-tfmx” which you can view here.
In order to handle code updates and commits with Subversion, I’ve opted to use TortoiseSVN client for Windows. You can find it here. It is very slick and interfaces directly into Windows right-click context menus. You can update code and make commits with a couple of clicks.
If you are not familiar with Subversion, there is a great O’Reilly book available for free here.
Compiling my ScummVM branch with Visual Studio proved to be a little tricky initially. Fortunately, some of the other ScummVM developers also use Visual Studio and some fixes and updates were already committed to the main trunk. After downloading the new VC-Project files and some other updates, I was able to properly compile and run the code. Some information regarding compiling ScummVM in Visual Studio can be found here.