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[We do not want to do anything in this regard without his permission. Then, it would be much easier if he would hand his source code and allow it to use under GPL.]

Hello.

There are people on ScummVM forums asking a lot about ScummVM supporting AGS. Just want to make people on the AGS community say their opinions about this, and if the developer of AGS say his opinion related to this long question by user from both communities (ScummVM and AGS).

I see ScummVM Team has nothing against a future merge of AGS into ScummVM if the author agrees. They just not want to try to "catch in" the official AGS implementation all time

First thing you need to do is talk to AGS author. We do not want to do anything in this regard without his permission. Then, it would be much easier if he would hand his source code and allow it to use under GPL.

Neither of which is likely to happen, according to the aforementioned AGS FAQ.

If you get permission from the author of AGS then that's great, but on the other hand he distributes AGS as closed source for his own reasons, and I'm not sure how his work could be tied into an open source project, unless he wants to open some parts of the AGS source code to the public (which he is reluctant to do).

I can look the FAQ up in the wayback machine and find it identical in 2002

That's understandable. But since he did not update it, we just assume that those statements are still valid.

I guess there must be some kind of grudge against AGS people or something here.

Not at all. We point to AGS on a regular basis as to a reliable and most up-to-date way to create adventure games without paying any kind of royalty. From the other hand we regularly, perhaps each other month receive a request about adding AGS to our engines collection. Whereas we ourselves do not see any problems with it from technical side, our policy is not to merge maintained projects without author's permission and if possible, collaboration. That is, we got FOTAQ, Reinherit, Gob, Sarien, TrollVM, CinE, CruisE, Igor engines only after they were either completely abandoned by their authors or their authors joined our team. And even in case of abandoned projects we always contact their authors beforehand.

So, take a look at AGS situation now. We have their FAQ. We see requests about merge with ScummVM both on our forms and on AGS forums as well. Still we saw no reply from the AGS author. This leads us to conclusion that he does not want it. Simple as that.

Again, we have nothing against if Chris will switch to our infrastructure and join our project. It will make great number of excellent games available to bigger masses and I am sure will make AGS even more popular. (Consider iPhone ). Of course, it will require some tweaks, as, for instance, current AGS implementation supports external modules via precompiled DLLs which is not portable, but all those questions could be resolved. So talk to Chris


Eugene

Still, to once more reiterate: You will have to fork ScummVM if you want to make a AGS engine, as we won't accept one, unless the AGS author explicitly gives written permission to do so. Even then, personally, I would be very reluctant to accept such an engine unless the AGS author goes even further and starts to collarborate himself. The problem being that AGS is actively developed, so if we tried to implement a second version of the engine from scratch, we'd always play "catch me" with him while trying to achieve compatibility.

Seconded. I.e. as I told above, we would not object if Chris himself will decide to switch development to the new platform. He will definitely benefit from that, and even I think he will get more engine developers from AGS community. But the on-going efforts of a second runner following AGS development is not an option.

Eugene

Here is the forum thread in ScummVM:
http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=4294&start=60#29373

Here are others forum posts like this:
http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=4458&highlight=ags


You can see conversation from devs (it seems everything was said before, but to proving they have nothing against AGS becoming part of ScummVM) : http://sand.enderboi.com/scummvm/log.php?log=scummvm.log.02Dec2007


Regards.