Hi, I’m Shivang Nagta, a pre-final year Computer Science undergraduate. I’ll be sharing my weekly blogs here, with updates on my GSoC project — “System for Checking Game Files Integrity.”
My mentors for this project are Sev and Rvanlaar, and I’m really grateful to have them guiding me. This project has been part of the last two GSoC years, so a lot of work has already been done. Here’s the current status:
Work done by the previous developers :
1. Server Side –
The server has been written in Flask. There’s a dashboard for proper visualization. The database schema and logic for feeding/updating the database have been implemented.
2. Client Side / ScummVM App :
There’s a Check Integrity button in the ScummVM application, which hits the server endpoint for validation with the checksum data of the game files.
Work done by me previously :
1. Client Side / ScummVM App :
- Fixed the freezing issue in the Check Integrity dialog box. It was caused by the MD5 calculation of large files, which blocked synchronous screen updates. I solved it by implementing a callback system.
- Engines like GLK and Scumm don’t use the Advanced Detector, so I worked on implementing a custom system to dump their detection entries. Some verification is still needed, as the current logic of these engines introduces complications in the implementation of the custom dumping systems.
2. Server Side :
- I worked on two particular tasks: Punycode names and the different Mac files portability. Both tasks require final verification and testing. I’ve already mentioned them in the last section of the blog.
Work plan for Official Coding Phase:
1. Testing all the workflows on the server side :
- Initial seeding by scummvm.dat (checksum data from the detection entries)
- Uploading set.dat (checksum data from some old collections)
- Uploading scan.dat (checksum uploaded by developers by scanning the local files using a command line utlility provided on the server)
- user.dat from api (checksum coming from the client by the Check Integrity feature added on the ScummVM application)
- Reupload scummvm.dat / set.dat
2. Moderation features :
- Review the user submitted fileset
- Have a list of unmatched fileset
- Manual merge with search feature for a particular fileset ID followed by a merge screen
- Remove filesets / undo changes, on a new upload (roll back feature)
- Easy searching and filters of filesets by different field
3. Some fixes :
- Different types of Mac files (like Appledouble, Macbinary, and Rsrc) have forks represented differently for the same game data. The checksums of Resource forks and Dataforks need to be extracted separately to create correct entries.
- Often, filenames from one OS are not supported on another. To tackle this, Sev built a method on top of the classic Punycode encoding method (used for URL encoding), but it needs proper integration and testing in this project.
Tomorrow marks the beginning of the offical coding phase. Thank you for reading.