On Thu, 7 Jun 2007 23:19:32 +0100
"James Urquhart" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Alban,
>
> > An IDE would indeed be nice but quiet hard to do. One idea i had was to
> > extand scvm to allow editing the game, but well up to now just vague ideas.
>
> Interesting idea, though i feel it might be moving towards the wrong
> direction (if you are thinking of moving a lot of the debugging
> front-end to it that is). I think what would be more useful would be
> allowing the hypothetical IDE to connect to the debugger (using a pipe
> or tcp port), poking and prodding values and loaded objects using a
> typical debugger GUI.
As said currently it is just some thought, this idea come from 2 facts:
both need to be able to load/show/edit all resources type available, and
both need to render the whole thing (although an IDE could do with a
simplified version).
Now regarding the typical design with a GUI - debugger connection i doubt
that it is really needed. This approch is indeed needed when you work on
code that run on real hardware, in particular if your target hw is limited.
However with scumm everything is software so simply bringing the code
together is much simpler.
> Thinking more about "editing the game", it sounds a bit like that
> runtime recompilation feature in Visual C++, where you can make minor
> modifications to your code and re-compile it into the running
> application.
Actualy i never thought about that, only editing object, actors, etc.
> I'd imagine you could replicate similar functionality by
> patching in re-compiled scripts (and/or resources) to scvm - that is
> of course if ScummC supports that sort of functionality.
That could probably be done using object files (.roobj) and a sort of
dynamic linker, provided the VM have the symbol tables for the running
game.
> I agree that creating an IDE would be quite hard to do, although not
> impossible. Of course, there doesn't necessarily need to be an IDE -
> we could just make more single-purpose GUI tools. Either way, it would
> really help if more people were interested in ScummC. :)
Starting small is probably a good idea, that's sure :) However more small
GUI tools, dunno, it could lead to some pretty mess.
> One can only dream, i guess...
One can do too ;) Anyway the first step we need still belong to the dream
world. We must first get a clear idea of what we want exactly, what features
we need, would be nice, etc, and a basic idea of how the whole thing should
look like. For a start imho we need at least something like:
* A tree to browse the ressources (rooms, objetcs, costumes, etc)
* A room editor where one can at least places and edit the objects.
* Allow loading external files / using external editors for all the
stuff not doable with the GUI (costumes, sounds, scripts, etc).
* A code generator that take the save format used by the GUI and
generate the sources and Makefile.
In the end evidently we want editors for everything: boxes, costume, images,
fonts, scripts, etc. But we should start with the most useful parts first.
Albeu
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