Wintermute

Wintermute
Engine developer	somaen, t0by, Fury, lb_ii
Companies that used it	Dead:Code Software
Games that use it	Hundreds of games
Date added to ScummVM	2012-09-04
First release containing it	1.7.0

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 was added by the GSoC student somaen to ScummVM as part of the Google Summer of Code in 2012. Its functionality was extended by the GSOC student t0by as part of the GSoC 2013.

The 3D part of the engine was implemented by the GSOC student Fury as part of the GSoC 2020.

Subengines for Wintermute forks were added by lb_ii to run games developed by Gingertips Game Studio and HeroCraft.

Once complete, this engine would add support for hundreds of 2D and 2.5D 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 some functionality originally found in WME: (from http://res.dead-code.org/doku.php/wmelite:start)

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

Comparison of different WME forks

Feature	WME 1.x	WME Lite	ScummVM
3D Characters	Yes	No	Yes
Sprite frame mirroring	Yes	No	Yes
Sprite rotations	Yes	No	Yes
Sprite blending modes	Yes	No	???
Video playback	Yes	No	Partially (Theora is slow and doesn't support seeking)
Sound effects like SoundFXEcho()	Yes	No	No
Plugins	Yes	No	For most games, reimplemented - see Wintermute/Plugins
External functions from DLLs	Yes	No	For most games, reimplemented - see Wintermute/Externals
'Directory' script object	Real files listing	Real files listing	For most games, static lists - see script_ext_directory.cpp
'File' script object	Real files access	Real files access	Implemented with SavefileManager
Game Explorer support.	Yes	No	No
Debugger	Yes	No	No
Compiler	Yes	No	No
CD-numbering support in .dcp-files	Yes	Yes	No, was never used
VKey values	MSDN Keycodes	SDL Keycodes	MSDN / SDL Keycodes (specific per game)
Non-Unicode string encoding	OS-specific	OS-specific	Target language-specific

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.
• 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.
• 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 at least 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 known games should have their md5s and gameids properly 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

See Wintermute Games for a list of known games and their current state of support in the engine.

Known issues:

See Wintermute TODO list.

See Also

• Wintermute/Controls
• Wintermute/Versions

External links

• Wikipedia article on the Wintermute Engine