Hello, dear reader!
I am Tobia, a CompSci student from Italy who has been accepted to work on ScummVM’s WME engine as part of Google Summer of Code 2013.
In case you don’t know ScummVM is an awesome little piece of software that allows you to play, by means of black magick, countless classic adventure games on a wide range of platforms by replicating the functionality of their original engines.
WME is one such engine – instead of being developed in-house for a specific series of games, though, it is a general-purpose piece of software for which a wide range of games has been written, encompassing freeware, commercial and student projects.
Although the games made with WME are hardly classic today, being relatively recent, they could very well be in a couple years.
A port of WME exists (thanks to fellow GSoCer somaen), but it is a bit lacking in certain areas.
My work will consist of filling some gaps, specifically:
- implementing zoom/rotate functionality (which is notably used in a puzzle in J.U.L.I.A.)
- implementing a debugger (which will help development of the engine itself and may make the ScummVM “target” more attractive to WME developers)
- doing some optimization and refactoring, especially with rendering paths
- random bugfixing
Stay tuned for more; during the next few days I expect to get a bit more technical as I start doing some research and try to fix one or two bugs.
Of course, I’ll blog about games when I can, too – games are the whole point, after all, aren’t they?
About me?
Well, I’m a fairly normal guy.
I have a soft spot for black humor, adventure games (guess you didn’t see that coming), reading (all-time favorites: Bulgakov, Hemingway, Vonnegut, Ellison, Ende, Bradbury, Buzzati), obsessing over all sorts of music and doing some jogging when the weather is clear.
Most of all, though, I like doing none of the above, just sitting still on the grass and listening to the birds singing ?