The SCUMM Diary: Stories behind one of the greatest game engines ever made

The "stack" most people using the term today consider is barely the tip of the iceberg.

Computer programming has been trivialized by web development and most newcomers are still busy reinventing lisp.

Give it sometime for them to discover where their code is running...

> I can relate to the very satisfying feeling that is making a tool that enable several projects beyond what you could do by yourself.

That is indeed a mark of good engineering.

Looking at ScummVM, I can only think that SCUMM must have been the product of truly great engineering. A single codebase, supporting dozens of games? The basic design of SCUMM has to be solid for that to be possible.

Compact, check. Extensible, check.

The other adventure powerhouse of the time, Sierra, apparently had at least two different engines. (I know there was AGI, and the last I tried, AGI-interpreters could not play all the Sierra games. Another kind of interpreter was needed for some titles.)

Now, if only Infocom had used bytecode for their games, instead of hard-wiring the game logic inside their executables. I still remember fondly their best titles: Spellcasting 101, Gateway, Eric the Unready, Super-hero league of Hoboken, ...

-deep sigh-

It talked about this in the article: "Probably the most distinctive part of SCUMM was that it was multi-tasking. This meant that multiple scripts could effectively run simultaneously. You might create a clock on the wall in Zak McKracken’s office and have it animate. [...] The script would simply command the actor to walk, and then issue a “wait-for actor” command which put the script to sleep until the actor had arrived or was facing the right direction. This allowed you to write your scripts in a very linear fashion reflecting the series of steps that you wanted the actor to follow."