Difference between revisions of "Summer of Code/Application/2007"

The ScummVM project aims to allow users to run many old (and not so old) commercial graphical point-and-click adventure games (e.g. Monkey Island, Simon the Sorcerer, Space Quest, and many more), provided you already own their data files. To this end, the team works by either reverse engineering game executables (usually with the permission of creators of the game), or by using the original source code of the games (provided by the creators of the games, after negotiations with the team). The number of engines is constantly growing thanks to a very agile and diversified development team.

One of the corner stones of ScummVM's success is its extreme portability. Besides running on all mainstream desktop environments, be it Windows, Mac OS X or most Unix variants (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, ...), it works on game consoles (Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and more), smart phones and PDAs (WinCE, PalmOS or Symbian based), and even on many not-so-mainstream systems (like BeOS, AmigaOS or OS/2).

This high portability is made possible by the flexible and modular structure of the ScummVM internals, which more or less fall into the following three categories:  

# Backends, responsible for support of specific target devices, like PalmOS or WinCE, etc.

# Engines (sometimes dubbed front ends) containing the actual game specific code

# Infrastructure code, providing portable access to audio (including MIDI), graphics, user input, data access, a custom graphical user interface, and more

The structure of the team reflects this structure, in so far as developers can be roughly grouped into the following categories (with some people being in more than one, or being multiple times in a single category):

* Porters -- responsible for a specific port

* Engine authors -- responsible for a specific game engine (includes being responsible for handling users bug reports, i.e. support)

* Infrastructure development -- e.g. people working on MIDI code, on the built-in custom GUI, etc.

* Packagers -- not all ports require dedicated backends (e.g., we have one built around the SDL library, which itself is highly portable), but they still require somebody to test and compile them, which is where porters come in

* Project leads -- we currently have three, and they all are also represented in one of the above categories, but besides this organize and coordinate things, make decisions, solve disputes etc. (as one would expect)

This structure enables us to be highly productive in a team of about 30 currently active developers (out of an all time pool of well over 60), who work together on a codebase exceeding 600,000 LOC. In addition we have many non-developer contributors, and a huge and highly active community. We are among the most active projects hosted on sourceforge.net -- well over 100,000 monthly downloads and ~9 millions project web hits per month speak for themselves, we think.