Wintermute

Wintermute
Engine developer	somaen
Companies that used it	Dead:Code Software
Games that use it	Dozens of games
Date added to ScummVM
First release containing it	N/A

The Wintermute Engine (Copyright (c) 2011 Jan Nedoma) is a set of software tools and a runtime interpreter (game engine) primarily designed for creating and running graphical adventure games. The full engine is open-source (on demand), as well as some of the tools. The lead developer rewrote the runtime interpreter to make it a bit portable in 2011, for the 2D part of the engine only.

This engine is being added by the GSoC student somaen to ScummVM as part of the GSoC 2012. Adding this engine would add support to more than fifty 2D games, would give the users a nice way to create games supported by ScummVM, and would bring to Dead:Code the portability they are dreaming of.

Features

This port of the Wintermute Engine (WME) is based on WME Lite, which lacks the following functionality originally found in WME: (from http://res.dead-code.org/doku.php/wmelite:start)

The following features of WME 1.x are NOT supported by WME Lite:

• 3D characters. WME Lite only supports 2D games.
• Sprite frame mirroring.
• Sprite rotations.
• Sprite blending modes.
• Video playback.
• Plugins.
• Calling external functions from DLL libraries from scripts.
• Game Explorer support.
• 'Directory' script object.

This port does reimplement a few of these features, currently:

• Sprite frame mirroring - WORKS.
• Video playback - Theora PARTIALLY WORKING. (Slow, and doesn't support seeking)

In addition, this port removes a few additional features that were never/rarely used:

• 'File' script object - ScummVM doesn't have any easy way to write/read arbitrary files.
• Debugger/Compiler - weren't properly accessible in WME Lite anyhow.
• CD-numbering support in .dcp-files - was never used.
• 'SaveDirectory'-property of 'Game' will not return anything usefull to the game-scripts (saving is handled through SaveFileMan)

Additional limitations

• Only .OGG and RAW-.WAV sounds are supported at this point
• TTF-fonts might behave a bit differently, owing to both the change to FreeType in WME Lite and the change in dpi in this port of WME.
• The window-caption-setting in-game will be ignored, for the sake of concistency with ScummVM.
• Most VKey-combinations might still be missing (as they already were in WME Lite)
• Since we don't use FreeImage, some games might use odd files that weren't expected when the image-decoders in ScummVM were written. One example here is interlaced-PNGs.
• UTF8-support is not ported, which means only games with western charsets will work for now.
• Games that select language by moving .dcp-files around still need a bit more handling on detection/load adding support for those languages on a language-by-language basis.
• Most games assume the availability of the Windows-fonts (particularly arial.ttf) at this point no fallback has been put in place for using FreeFonts as replacements, simply for lack of having them easily accessible to the engines at this point. So, at least arial.ttf should be put in either the game-folder or made available through the extras-folder for now, otherwise kGUIBigFont will be used as a replacement.

Advanced engine-features

At this point the engine implements the following "advanced engine features":

• RTL ("Return to Launcher") support
• Global options dialog support
• Listing savestates via command line or Launcher
• Loading savestates via command line or Launcher
• Deleting savestates via the Launcher and GMM
• Savestate metadata support
• Loading/Saving during run time

and NOT the following:

• Enhanced debug/error messages

Detection

Since Wintermute has authoring tools available, there will at any point in time be atleast a few games that are works-in-progress, and as the authors of these games might want to test their games in ScummVM, the engine has to be able to detect arbitrary Wintermute-games, to this end the detector code in this engine will check any folder containing "data.dcp", and try to read "startup.settings" and "default.game" (or optionally any other .game-file defined in startup.settings), the Name/Caption fields in the .game-file will be used as gameid/title (prefixing the gameid with "wmefan-" to avoid confusion with any other WME game that might happen to have taken that id.

All COMPLETED games should have their md5s and gameids properly added, IFF they don't require 3D.

3D games may also be added, for the purpose of giving the user feedback as to why their game won't run, but at this point, any such MD5 should be added as a comment only, to avoid confusion, as no mechanism for giving the user feedback about 3D-games not being supported is currently added.

Games targeted by the engine

This engine potentially targets a very large amount of games:

• Dead:Code list of games
• Dead:Code forum announcement thread
• MobyGames short list

Since the feature-set of WME Lite differs from that of the full Wintermute Engine, games will need to be targeted on a case-by-case, feature-by-feature basis, this is a list of the games that are currently known to work (although perhaps with minor issues) through to completion:

• Chivalry is NOT Dead (chivalry)
• Dirty Split (dirtysplit)
• J.U.L.I.A. (Demo) (julia)
• Pigeons in the Park (pigeons)
• Rosemary (rosemary)
• The Box (thebox)
• The White Chamber (twc)

Untested, but start:

• Actual Destination (actualdest)
• East Side Story (Demo) (eastside)
• Five Magical Amulets
• Ghost in the Sheet (ghostsheet)
• Reversion - The Escape

Totally untested:

• Beyond the Threshold
• Fairy Tales about Toshechka and Boshechka
• Five Lethal Demons
• Hamlet
• James Peris: No Licence Nor Control
• Looky - The Adventure
• Mirage
• SHABAN
• Space Madness
• The Colour of Murder: A Carol Reed Mystery
• The Shine of a Star
• The Trader of Stories
• Wilma Tetris

Games with known issues:

Certain games will work mostly fine with this engine, but can still be impossible to complete for various reasons, this is a list of games that technically qualify (as in they do not require the 3D-parts of the engine) but have issues that make them problematic or not completable:

Might work after the change to libPNG:

• Five Lethal Demons (5ld) - Requires support for interlaced PNGs
• Five Magical Amulets (5ma) - Requires support for interlaced PNGs
• Kulivočko - Requires support for interlaced PNGs
• Reversion (reversion) - Requires support for Non-V1.1 JPEGs and interlaced PNGs
• Mirage (mirage) - Tries to seek in a vorbis-stream inside a ZipStream
• Hamlet or the last game without MMORPS features, shaders and product placement (hamlet) - Requires support for interlaced PNGs

Gameplay broken:

• J.U.L.I.A. (Full game) (julia) - Requires sprite-rotation for a puzzle.

Non-critical:

• Ghost in the sheet (ghostsheet) - uses Non-V1.1-JPEGs
• East Side Story (eastside) - wants "framd.ttf"

General known issues:

Mostly a TODO-section, to not forget fixing outstanding general issues:

• Save/Load-screens are not shown during save/load this is probably a result of reducing the amount of redrawing done during save/load, and I'm not sure it should be put back, if that means making saves slower again.
• Font-sizes are wrong enough to allow Dirty Split to draw text that is hidden in the original game (most visible on the coin-interface)
• Alpha-masks for Theora-videos are broken on big-endian platforms

External links

• Wikipedia article on the Wintermute Engine