It's time for a very verbose change of pace

One of the things I like about my work on ScummVM is that it's a hobby rather than a profession, which gives me the freedom to switch what I'm working on when I desire. I've previously had encouragement to resurrect my Gargoyle engine work from about a decade ago. It was an early attempt to add support for Frotz into ScummVM, and at the time it was rejected due to multiple reasons. It was specific only for Infocom/zcode games, lacked clipboard, truetype fonts, and Unicode support. Most of these things have since been solved by the ScummVM framework itself, which now supports all of them. So I thought, why the heck not, and decided to work on it again.

However, my original Gargoyle engine being limited to just Zcode was a problem. Not only wasn't it extensible to other IF systems, but it would also take work to properly reimplement it to support Unicode. In the end, it was just simpler to scrap it all, and start from scratch. Luckily, there's the very convenient Glk specification, that was specifically created for easing porting the various Interactive Fiction interpreters to other systems. I knew that by supporting it, it would make it easier to create a framework that could support multiple different interpreters as sub-engines.

So I created a new Gargoyle engine, which I've since renamed it to ScummGlk to avoid ambiguity with the stand-alone Gargoyle project which also implements the Glk specification. After over a month of work, I've created an engine that implements the bulk of the API, and implements two sub-engines under it so far.. Scott for Scott Adams games, and Frotz for playing Z-Code/Infocom games. Scott was useful as a test case, due to it's simplicity. With it as the first sub-engine, I was able to focus on getting the ScummGlk core working. Then Frotz was a fairly obvious second choice, given it's popularity and large number of available fan games.

As of last weekend, the review period was completed for the engine, and it was merged into master. Daily builds now include support for both sub-engines. I've spend the last week fleshing out detection entries for all the ZCode games on the if-archive, so all the games will be automatically detected by the launcher. I'm going to wait on announcing an official testing period until I finish support in Frotz for V6 games. But if you can't wait, you're certainly welcome to jump the gun and try playing some games. Maybe one of the early Zork from GOG, or the immortal classic Freefall :)

Having the engine included into master will be a real nostalgia trip for me. Even prior to my original Gargoyle module, and before I even started working on implementing adventures in ScummVM, I spent several years as part of the Interactive Fiction community. Indeed, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was one of the first computer games I ever had. I spent way too many hours getting frustrated with the game's puzzles.