Beginging or the Ending – GSoC Summary
Hi, Crane here. Also know as sheep in ScummVM. Here i’m going to make a summary of my work during GSoC time.
I’ve make about 500 commits. As you can see on this picture
The first commit in the official GSoC period is this one fdc5e88e30751285ac4f0fcc936c5ccb0b01eae4
After sev give me the permission of the codebase, i started to commit to master branch directly. And before that, i mostly use the pull request to arrange my codes.
This is the link to my pull requests
And this is the link to all of my commits, so anyone can check it at anytime.
With the help of sev, djsrv, rvanlaar and other guys in the director group. I’ve managed to make a big progress for developing and fixing director.
For the milestones that i’ve achieved and the time those tasks consumed. Let me describe more precisely here.
First is for fixing the bugs that already exists. During the community binding period before GSoC officially started, sev have gave me some tasks in trello card for me to get familiar with director. This didn’t takes much time, maybe a week or less.
Then i’ve head to the apartment, fixing the existing bugs and implementing the stuffs we lacked. This takes me about one month. And also gives me a better view of the whole director. While doing this task, i’ve also continue reading the blog post of the students who have developed director previously. Since my taks is mostly related to the rendering part, those blog posts gives me a great sight of the rendering part of director.
As you can see on the picture, i’ve fixed the parts in the red box, which is nearly the most of the rendering parts of director.
After done with the task about apartment, i think i’ve enough ability to test and fix the director in real games.
So next task is about fixing the director to run the real director based games.
I started fixing warlock first, which is a fantastic D2 game. It took me about 3 weeks to test and fix warlock. During that time, i’ve help to enhance the sounds in director. Fixing the graphics part of game, including texts and images.
Here are some screenshots of warlock
green girl in the bar of stambul. I’ve implemented the stretched bitmap images to fix this.
At that time, the rendering code of director is kind of good, and we won’t be able to find some big issues related to the graphics. I think maybe we’ve finished 90% of it. And for the rest part, we still need more games to test.
So then the next week, i started to fix l-zone, which is a another sci-fi game in D3. And after testing l-zone, there is only few bugs related to D3 image decoding and videos. Thanks to the help of sev, i didn’t take much time to fix it.
Then for the last part to complete D3, we have a big guy waiting to solve, which is JourneyManProject. Since the time is not enough, i’ve only fixed the part of JMP now. But we have solved most of the issues in JMP, and i believe we will announce support that game soon.
Pictures in L-zone, this one is related to the video overflow problem.
Screenshot in JMP, look this beautiful interfaces
And while i was fixing those games i mentioned above. I’ve also been fixing the movies in dictionary. Whenever i have the problems about behaviour, i will refer to dictionary. We have the documents about it, also we have Basilisk to run the original one. So it’s very convenient for us to implement the correct behaviour.
Yes, that’s nearly all of it.
Another excited thing is last night, sev, djsrv and me, we have had a meeting with John Henry Thompson, who is the inventor of lingo. By this meeting, i’ve recognized that our project is very meaningful. Also when we are supporting director games, there are guys come in our channel, discussing about the engine and games. I noticed that director really support many games, and to complete it is really a hard work. But challenging works is more interesting and meaningful. With our work, people can play games from the very beginging. Those are the inheritance of predecessors, and we need to protect it.
And at the time i realized, we are actually doing things. It’s not the toy programs we made in school, we are making the actual stuffs. Here are all the OSS enthusiast. We gathered here to develop, to create. And we can coding here, solving problems, meet more friends who has the same interest like us.
At last, again, thank you so much. The guys in ScummVM, and the guys in the director group. Without your help, i couldn’t proceed so far like today. I may not express much by words, but i think the action is more important. This will be the last of GSoC, but only the begining of my developing life. Thanks you guys in ScummVM, this community have broaden my view and makes me feel like, yes this is coding. And i will continue contributing to ScummVM on the director, and also other engines.
See you guys. 🙂