Wintermute

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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:

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

External links