Soon after bumping into haXe and Doomed Online, they got me thinking. “Would it be possible to run SCUMM games in flash?”. The answer to that of course is yes, as was demonstrated by my SCUMM Interpreter written in haXe. Though as with anything, you really need to spend the time to implement everything, and justify it somewhat.
(Not to mention that Flash 10 is supposedly going to be able to compile C code, thus making my complete port more or less redundant)
Now i would have stopped there, if i hadn’t noticed that haXe targets multiple platforms, including every web developer’s best friend, JavaScript. Thus i thought, “Would it be possible to run SCUMM games in Javascript?”. For the answer… well, take a look!
Yes, that is an image of OpenQuest running in a web browser, specifically Firefox. It can run in other browsers too, though to date i have only tested Firefox and Safari, the latter of which mysteriously crashes.
And if you want, you can try it yourself by clicking here. A word of warning though, it is highly recommended that you use Firefox to run it. Otherwise you might get a nasty crash, or a big disappointment.
As previously, just about enough is implemented to get the first room of OpenQuest loaded. Actors, verbs, objects, and sounds are not implemented, though it would certainly be possible. However the engine runs much slower than in Flash, so i doubt anything that could be considered to be “playable” could be implemented with it.
Still, i feel I’ve now accomplished what i set out to do when writing this interpreter – that is to push haXe, Flash, and JavaScript to the limit and see what i can get out of them. And of course, learn a bit more about SCUMM too.
Again, i would like to congratulate the ScummVM team for their SCUMM interpreter and Alban Bedel for his scummc compiler. Without their efforts, i wouldn’t have had any code or references from which to base my haXe-based SCUMM interpreter.
Edit: Source code available from github.
Edit: No longer crashes in Safari provided you are using Safari 3.1.2 or later.
