So, in an earlier post, I made an outline of the steps in front of me:
Because of how quickly this project has been moving, I’ve managed to lose all track of where I am and where I’m going.
So, in order to collect my thoughts, I’m referring back to that outline, and taking stock of the steps, their completion status, and their relationship to reality:
- Modify the Scumm HE engine to display a 16-bit background resource when the freddicove demo is loaded (to test my understanding of the resource format and standard rendering process).
- Integrate this functionality into the standard running of the Scumm HE engines. — Kirben did these three.
- Add 16-bit support in place for other resource types. — Kirben did these three.
- Modify rendering, for 16-bit HE games, such that the 8-bit resources are rendered using the palette->rgb mapping system that the game engine provides. (possibly involves implementing this functionality) — Kirben did these three.
- Perform unit tests to ensure that all 16-bit Scumm HE games are rendering properly — Partially done, remainder delayed until completion of API work
- Hack the mouse cursor for 16-bit support because the erroneous display is incredibly annoying.
- Reimplement 16-bit cursor support in a less hackish manner because that was ugly.
- Discuss with mentor at length to determine ideal API behavior for bit-depth/pixel format negotiation between game engines and backends. — Not just my mentor, but most of the dev community. (Here are the final results.)
- Implement hackish proof-of-concept API while awaiting discussion from dev community.
- Implement support for this API in SDL backend and Scumm HE engine. (The real one) — This is basically done, although I want to change the behavior of a few things slightly. — (This is the point at which the mouse cursor will be upgraded, because between the in-game mouse cursor and the in-game menu, at least one must be assured to display properly if any meaningful testing is to be done.) — This turned out to be a lie. See steps 6 and 7
- Document this API exhaustively. — This may be difficult, and I will have to discuss with Sev about where and how I should do this.
- Finish testing 16-bit Scumm HE games. — I think I have all of them but pjgames, now.
- See what can be done about engines other than Scumm.
- NEW! See about fixing up the gui, SDL backend, and scalers for 24/32 bit color support.
Because of Kirben’s intervention, this whole task has been going much more quickly than even my most optimistic expectations. I imagine that, on my own, I might have finished step 3 by now, but I really am not sure. Certainly I was expecting it to take at least another month to get to this point.