Google Summer of Code with ScummVM

Hello! So, this week I have done things that ranged across all my tasks. Recently I checked out our sister project, ResidualVM. ResidualVM's codebase is largely similar to ScummVM, but the main difference is the addition of capabilities to run 3D games. They also take regular snapshots from ScummVM to keep up-to-date. So, the work of RTL GUI which was merged in ScummVM was also present there. When I was running the application with the Hebrew language, some popups and drop-down buttons looked quite different from the normal GUI. Upon a little investigation, it looked like paddings were being set wrong for the RTL-widgets set in the theme. This was because back when I was on my RTL task, I temporarily set a padding of "2" as a placeholder to check, and then completely forgot about it as the difference was ever so subtle. I'm glad though, that I found this, and opened a PR to fix it. English, proper paddings Hebrew - Improper paddings Hebrew, mirrored and matching paddi...

Hello! The first few days this week, I spent trying to understand my task, and work on a small number of engines, and try to make games detect/work as a means to see if everything would work as expected. But first, some context. ScummVM has a MetaEngine and a Engine. MetaEngine A MetaEngine is responsible for, as the name would suggest, a meta-data related things before we actually start the engine. This is an abstract class, and each specific engine must inherit it and have their own implementation of it. Alternatively, we also have an AdvancedMetaEngine, inheriting from MetaEngine, which provides a default Game Detection algorithm - which saves individual engine developers the hassle of providing detection tools. The detection algorithm is an Md5 + filename check and makes game detection easier for engines. These engines can inherit from AdvancedMetaEngine and provide some other metadata/utility functions, like getting supported games, querying which features an engine has, etc. Adva...

Hello! This week, I got started with my new task - "Moving detection features to the executable". What is the task? ScummVM has over 50 engines that support many - many games. Currently, when compiled - these engines can either be compiled directly inside the scummvm executable (statically linked) or packed inside small packages of external libraries that can be loaded on demand (dynamic linking) So, why would we even opt for external libraries? Wouldn't packing everything into the executable give the best performance? Well, yes. But the thing is, ScummVM has a lot of platforms it supports ( ScummVM Platforms ) over 30! It's very portable, which is one of the really amazing features of ScummVM. With dynamic plugins, the executable sizes are lowered. Because of this, when we need to detect games - each engine is loaded by one and the relevant detection happens. This is slow. The main purpose of this task is to move the detection related features to the executa...

Hello! This week, I don't have a lot of updates. A while after I created my last post the previous week, I cleaned up the history a little and opened a PR. Then, the week was mostly spent on cleaning up more code and trying to keep the changes to a minimum basis - because I was modifying a large number of files (~280). Right now, I am trying to combine String and U32String into a template, because they have a lot of similar functionalities. Reviews for the PR should be soon, so I will mostly be addressing those and working on the templated classes. This week has been rather busy though because my final project from college had some documentation work pending and I self-reviewed my PR many times. It is exhausting to review so many files! I picked up many mistakes though as I reviewed them again and again, and the fixes were pretty simple. That's it from me for now. I hope to wrap my work this week and get a little more understanding of my next task, which is moving dete...