Google Summer of Code is coming to an end. Thanks to my mentors, it has been a pleasant experience.

Here are the things I have worked on during this Summer:

Universal Packaging Script

Code: https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/5300

Tasks Done

1. Identify metadata requirement for DLC download support for various distribution stores. It has been compiled here.
2. Create schema for metadata and JSON files like dlc-games.json and export-platforms.json to maintain all required metadatas for games and how to process those metadatas for different distribution stores.
3. Write a python script that takes game location, platform type and the ScummVM binary location as parameter. It will determine the output based on the export-platforms.json and dlc-games.json. E.g. For Android Play Store, we will get a new AAB file bundled with games.
4. Add entry for Android Play Store in export-platforms.json and all required dependencies (bundletool.jar, python scripts, etc.).

Possible Improvements

1. It takes a lot of time to package games one by one. Create an option to mass package games from a folder.
2. There are some dependencies that are required to be installed on the host computer. E.g. specific version of Android SDK, Java, Python, etc. Utilize container based approach for quick setup.

In-app DLC Downloader

Code: https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/5134

Tasks Done

1. Create GUI dialogs and widgets to interact with the DLC Downloader and to show download progress, in-progress DLCs, etc.
2. Create DLC Manager to manage downloading DLCs.
3. Create an abstract class called Store. Different distribution store will need to implement this class using their store-specific API/SDK.
4. Create a new path called dlcspath for storing the downloaded DLCs.
5. Create a new compile time flag, USE_DLC for including DLC downloading support. This is disabled by default. To enable it, use --enable-dlc with ./configure. It will only be included on backends where it is supported (kFeatureDLC is true).

Possible Improvements

1. GUI dialog for DLC Downloader could see some visual overhaul like list with game icons.
2. Generalize DLC to allow other types of data like themes, icons, shaders, etc. Currently, only games is supported.

ScummVM Cloud Integration for DLC Downloader

Code: https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/5134

Tasks Done

1. Implement ScummVM Cloud to download games from a URL (ScummVM’s server) by utilizing existing networking methods.
2. Handle zip extraction and deletion of zip after extraction.
3. Improve existing method Archive::dumpArchive().

Android Play Store Integration for DLC Downloader

Code: https://github.com/ankushdutt/scummvm/commit/c313a43cf1415598144c816474eb38ddbe56a8b1

Tasks Done

1. Implement Play Store DLC support by using Play Core SDK for Java.
2. Create JNI methods in C++ to interact with Java code for Play Store or vice-versa. Java code utilizes the SDK to implement functions necessary for handling download.

Possible Improvements

1. Create script to generate the list of assets with required details like – id, name and detection keys for ScummVM configuration like engineid, gameid, extra, guioptions, language, platform and description directly by utilizing the dlc-games.json.

Documentation

Link: https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=Game_Packaging

• Student: eklipsed (Wyatt Radkiewicz)
• Organization: ScummVM
• Mentors: sev, criezy, lephilousophe, ccawley2011, and somean
• Project: Optimize ScummVM Rendering Code
• The 2 Pull Requests:
  • https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/5243
  • https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/5144

So originally, the goals for the project were to optimize the pixel blending code in the rendering code for the AGS game engine in ScummVM. The problem was: I completed that goal about half way through the coding period. So me and my mentors talked and what I did after was optimize the rendering code that most other engines in ScummVM use. I used SIMD cpu extensions to net a pretty huge performance gain.

Basically, in the AGS renderer, it got a 5x improvement all around and a 14x improvement in the best scenarios. In the global rendering code for all engines to use it got a 2x improvement all around. Here are the speed up results.

The most challenging part is knowing where to start. First, you must get to know your mentors really good, eg: calls, messaging, etc. If you don’t you’ll be left alone and not knowing what to do. And second, if a coding project seems big you should take three steps.
One: Figure out where you are and the actionable steps you can take to get there. What are the big milestones you have to hit along the way? Do you need to complete something else first to efficiently implement another feature? Should you write tests first? etc.
Two: Get the bare minimum code written. I know that sounds funny, but you should just get stuff working to start. This gives you plenty of time to look at your code and to step three.
Three: Make your code the best code anyones seen. Now that you have 90% of the code written, you can optimize it and make it cleaner and tie up any loose ends like updating the tests, making a PR, etc.

Once again, I’d like to thank Google Summer of Code 2023, ScummVM for the opportunity to work on a project like this and learn so much. And I’d like to thank my mentors for helping me when I was stuck, and teaching me how to work in a team.

So, I’ve updated the AGS blending code to use the new SIMD cpu features detector and added AVX2 support for AGS. All I have left is to get my PR merged, tie up some loose ends, and submit my final submission for GSOC 23. I’ve had a great time coding with my mentors, @criezy, @lephilousophe, @ccawley2011, @somean, and @sev. They have been a great help and very responsive, and it’s been such a blast this past summer coding with them! I’m at college now and got plenty of work ahead of me, so bye!

Hi all, my name is Kartik Agarwala(hax0kartik) and in the past three months, I worked as a GSoC student under the mentorship of Eugene Sandulenko(sev) and Strangerke with ScummVM. The main focus of my project was to integrate the CRAB engine, developed by Pyrodactyl Games, into ScummVM. This blog serves as a final report of what I accomplished in this three-month period.

What’s been done?

The original milestones as per the project proposal were:

1. The skeleton engine with some of the main classes is compilable within ScummVM.
2. Skeleton engine is extended to fully include the first component. This includes loading and parsing XML files.
3. Work on the graphics component.
4. Get Unrest into a somewhat working state by integrating the essential components.
5. All the components are integrated aside from audio.
6. Integrate audio and ensure that the game is playable.

All of these milestones have been met.

CRAB has been fully integrated into ScummVM and Unrest is playable from start to end.

My changes were merged in the main ScummVM branch with PR #5229. You can also see the “feat-CRAB” branch in my fork to view the most recent changes I made.

Accepted changes

I created a number of PRs in the last three months, all of which were accepted. The following are some of the more important PRs that I created with a brief description.

• PR #4753: Made text selectable in the input boxes.
• PR #4766: Implement MKV decoding.
• PR #4801: Added ProjectorArchive for the Director Engine.
• PR #5229: Integrate CRAB engine into ScummVM. This was the main PR for this project.

What work is left?

The following list of things need to be improved or are missing:

1. Filenames are inconsistent.
2. Unimplemented “fade-in” effect of music.
3. Saving/Loading is only available through GMM load/save menus.
4. “Options” menu selectable from the main menu is broken.
5. Keymapper needs improvement to make the game fully playable using only a keyboard.
6. Unimplemented “ironman” saves.

Conclusion

My time as a GSoC student has been fantastic. In the last three months,  I have learned a lot from my mentors and the community. I want to note that the ScummVM community particularly has been very welcoming and helpful to me.

I would like to extend a special thanks to my mentors, Eugene Sandulenko(sev) and Strangerke who answered a lot of my questions and provided continuous feedback on the changes I was making. Their expertise helped me complete the project successfully.

Oh, and, I was given the offer to join the ScummVM team, which I have accepted 🙂 I hope to continue working on the CRAB engine and help maintain other engines in the time to come.

Thanks for reading!

Greetings, as you might have already guessed, this is the last blog post for this beautiful journey of GSoC’23, These last 3 months were amazing, and I would like to wrap it up by writing this final report!

My Introduction

I am Harishankar Kumar, a final-year student (at the time of writing), and working past three months on adding more support to the Director Engine, ScummVM implements a kind of Virtual Machines to support numerous engines, In these many engines the one which I was also working to add more support is called Macromedia Director

My work was to implement support for game titles like “Total Distortion”, “Journeyman Project”, “Meet Mediaband”, Now the thing was that ScummVM was already capable of running these titles however there were bugs and glitches which needed to be fixed before labeling these title as compatible!

What’s been done

According to the proposal, “total-distortion” right now is playable, a lot of work has been put into it and many bugs have been fixed. “meet-mediaband” has also progressed quite further due to adding UnDo Me, This in total added fixed lot of bugs, reimplemented core of Director engine and progressed it closer to what the original engine was like!

What’s left

In general, no amount of progress is ever sufficient as new bugs keep popping up, regressions that needs to be fixed, etc! But in my tenure what’s left to do:

• Total Distortion is yet to be fully playable, many small bugs are yet to be fixed and the end needs to be tested thoroughly
• Much work is left for meet-mediaband as well
• Journey Man Project is almost untouched

My work

In short, all my work can be summarized by these blog posts and the PR’s attached with them:

29th May – 31st May

Implementing Mac Styled PopupMenu’s, First PR After GSoC Accepted!

PR Merged – #5005 #5056 #5059

1st June – 30th June

I am a Developer, and I add bugs in Code

PR Merged – #5074

Because spaces should have height too!

PR Merged – #5089 #5100

The Butterfly Effect of Fixing Bugs!

PR Merged – #5107 #5118

1st July – 31st July

The Art of Scaling Fonts

PR Merged – #5125 #5126

Regressions: I make code, then I break code

PR Merged – #5158 #5136 #5152 #5153 #5156

It’s not you, It’s me!

PR Merged – #5163 #5164

Creating sandwiches in Total Distortion!

PR Merged – #5191 #5190 #5176 #5178 #5196

1st August – 21st August

A background window

PR Merged – #5221 #5216 #5233

Reading Books in Total Distortion

PR Merged – #5182 #5245

The End

It was a beautiful and fun journey, these last three months were filled with endless learning and I couldn’t express how much grateful I am for being given this opportunity! The community is very impressive with lots of helpful members, for anybody looking to contribute, I would totally 200% recommend them!

Moreover, although GSoC is coming to an end however, I am planning to become a member of the Director Engine team and continue my contributions in the future, so expect occasional blogs and my presence in #engine-director channel!

With that being said, here’s the hall of fame, and my heartful gratitude to these people for being part of this project:

Hall of Fame (My gratitude list)

1. Sev (Eugene Sandulenko) – First and foremost, Eugene, as my mentor, is probably one of the best people who have guided me. honestly, I didn’t expect any learning outside anything related to this organization (ie I expected to learn more about C++ ONLY) but to my surprise, the amount of growth I have seen in myself is surprising to me, in these three months I have learned from basic skills like communication, to how to use git, how to develop efficiently, to even reading gdb stack traces!!I am really thankful for the patience, and for not giving up on me despite so many mistakes, etc! The only reason I got my proposal selected, to complete this project (If I will be passed) will be amazing super-mentor Sev!
2. My friends and Family – These last three months, I was especially very busy, didn’t pick up anybody’s call, super-duper unavailable! So shoutout to all my friends for understanding this and being there in support whenever needed, I am so grateful for them that here are some mentions to each of them
   1. Sahil Kadiyan – My best roomie who inspired me to work, a source of endless motivation and energy that pushed me through to do something with my career (and that’s how I found GSoC)
   2. Radhika Agrawal – For understanding my unavailability in all these hard times, and for being there for me in thick and thins!
   3. Abhinandan Singla – For managing all the other projects, and academic work, so I wouldn’t feel academic pressure while working for GSoC, He was a lifesaver.

With that being said, I look forward to submission and the final evaluation results! It was a great tenure and I will continue my support to this wonderful of an organization through more long-term contributions!

The implementation of Play Store is mostly done. The downloading works along with the download progress and cancel functions. These functions need to be implemented on the java side since we use the Play Asset SDK for Java. I also needed to call these functions from C++ and vice versa. So, for this, JNI comes into play. The current code for Android also uses JNI extensively for some of its functions. So, the base work was already done. I had to check the current implementation of one of the JNI functions and follow the steps used. The other thing I needed to do was create simple functions that handle Playstore SDK on the Java side.

In Playstore SDK, there is an interface called AssetPackManager that contains the functions used in managing the downloads for the DLCs from Playstore. For starting a download, we can use the fetch() method. It only needs a packname, which is a unique string to identify a game package. I also had to create a listener that keeps track of the download progress, completion, and cancel events to call required functions.

To support the download of the DLCs, Play Store requires us to bundle the base APK (ScummVM) together with all the on-demand assets in an AAB format. I had previously created a Python script to bundle the AAB (containing only base APK) with games. The workflow for creating the final ready-to-upload AAB should be: extract games somewhere, fill some file (JSON or something else), and run gradle to generate the full AAB. The current workflow is more involved. I will also simplify this process next week.

Now only one week is remaining. I will focus on completing the Play Store support and simplifying the process of the AAB build. And, of course, writing proper documentation.

Hi all, welcome back to my progress blog for CRAB. As we get closer to the end of the GSoC period, I am happy to inform you, that the PR for integrating CRAB into ScummVM has been merged! 🙂 In this blog post, I would like to detail what changes and improvements I made last week.

While most of my commits were around code formatting fixes and code cleanup, I did make a few exciting changes. My mentor, Sev, pointed out that Unrest had a demo version available on Steam, and I was able to add support for the demo version as well. This means that all of you can at least play one stage of Unrest for “quick feels” of how CRAB works on ScummVM!

Initially, the demo crashed due to bugs in MusicManager but I was able to fix it and now you can play the whole demo. As an engine developer, the consequences of having a demo version are really exciting because now a larger audience would be able to test out the engine. 🙂

Next, I have made the debuglines that are drawn on the screen togglable using ScummVM’s debug console. You need to press CTRL+ALT+D and then type in the draw `XXX` command where XXX is the feature(TMX, Pathfinding, etc.) for which you want to draw debug lines.

I made some other small fixes here and there but that is all I did this week. The major progress of this week was that I was finally able to get CRAB merged, phew. Oh, and in other news, I have joined the ScummVM team. 🙂 I plan to keep working on the CRAB engine and I’m also thinking of helping out with the SLUDGE engine. We’ll see.

Thanks for reading as always!

—

P.S., here are some links for announcements of CRAB getting merged into ScummVM:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ScummVM/status/1689658519749013504

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ScummVM/posts/pfbid0d9pQ1LCKKsgH9JZ6EF5tdbKuJVpNXgYLryHmmLg5VG6vh7zzAPVAikuwym61YKKZl