GSoC: The GUI Week

So, this week I worked on the GUI mostly. That Cloud Options tab is almost fully functional — we want to modify Connection Wizard a little bit, so it helps users enter the code (which is quite long, about 40 characters). Apart from that everything in the tab works as it should, so you can easily switch between your connected storages, see how much place your saves occupied on your cloud drive and when the last successful saves sync was. The Connection Wizard works too, yet, as I mentioned, it won’t notify you of typos. We’re working on corresponding scummvm.org URLs, and these work quite fine.

I’ve also added Google Drive support this week. As Google Drive uses file ids instead of paths, that wasn’t a very pleasant adventure. I mean, imagine you want to download a file knowing a path to it. However, you can’t just ask to find that file because there are no paths in Google Drive. So, you have to divide the path by separators, start from the Google Drive root folder and implement path traversal by listing the directory, finding a corresponding subdirectory and repeating these steps. And, as there are no paths in Google Drive, there could be files with the same name! So, there could be two ScummVM folders or three Saves folders or five soltys.000 files. Well, I just use the first one’s id, so if you’d try to mess up with the Google Drive’s ScummVM folder — you’d succeed. Also, as we wanted to give more freedom to the users, we had to ask for the whole Google Drive access, because application data folders are completely hidden from users. ScummVM only creates its own folder in the Google Drive root directory, so fear not!

Finally, I worked on the progress dialog for the save/load manager. During the saves sync some slots could be unavailable because they are being downloaded. You’d see the following dialog in this case:

Most engines use the common pattern for their save files, so I called these engines «simple». If it’s «simple», you can press that «Run in background» button and you’d see all the slots. Some of them would be «locked» and would lack the thumbnail, but all the others would be easily available to save or load. Unfortunately, there are also «complex» engines. I was unable to implement that «locked» slots feature for these because of their complex nature, so «Run in background» would be unavailable. You would have to wait until all saves are downloaded, and only then save/load feature would be available. You can always hit the «Cancel» button, but that could leave the currently downloading file damaged, so use it on your own risk =)

I’ll have to pass my exams the next week, so I already started working less. The next week plan is to upgrade that Connection Wizard dialog and start working on the local webserver feature. (Yeah, I don’t want you to enter that code when ScummVM could do it for you instead.)