ScummVM Retrospective - Lessons learnt, from games preserved.
Presented by
Ender
Monday
11:05 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
Target audience:
Developer
Abstract
This talk with provide a retrospective look at the ScummVM project - that (increasingly inaccurately named) project that reimplements a wide variety of adventure game engines across a even wider variety of hardware and OS platforms.
We will briefly cover the projects history, origins and future direction. We'll touch on the projects outreach efforts and negotations, and some noteworthy failures. Lastly, we'll talk about project governence and some of the unique challenges and conflicts that arose.
Presented by
Ender
Ender has been involved in a number of open-source projects since the mid-90's covering a variety of fields - from blogging software (LJ) and Windows replacement DEs (Litestep/PureLS) and a number of gaming projects.
He founded and managed the first site established around ID Software's GPL release of IDTECH1 (Quake) - which provided many developers with their 1st chance to learn and modify a commercial-grade 3D game engine. While the site closed many moons ago, much of the tutorial and documentation content remains mirrored around the web.
In 2002, Ender became Project Lead of the ScummVM. He retired from the team in 2008, but still closely follows the project and promotes it where possible. During his time as lead/co-lead, Ender expanded the project to include multiple co-leads, led negotations with a number of studios to obtain source code and/or freeware relase of a number of game engines and assets. All these efforts wee much more productive than the multi-year mediation with LucasArts (a long enough period that their legal council rotated several times). It's rumored this experience led him to develop an uncanny ability to find GPLv2 conflicts in almost any IP licensing agreement.... without even reading it!