It's finally time to announce the official testing period for the Glk engine in ScummVM, for playing interactive fiction (aka text adventures). This is a conglomeration of sub-engines for playing the games that use the various authoring systems released over the years. At this time the following sub-engines are going into official testing mode:

• ADRIFT (except for version 5)
• AdvSys
• AGT
• Alan 2 & 3
• Archetype (newly reimplemented for Glk from the original Pascal sources)
• Hugo
• JACL
• Level 9
• Magnetic Scrolls
• Quest
• Scott Adams
• ZCode (all ZCode games except the Infocom graphical version 6 games)

Other sub-engines, such as Comprehend, TADS and Quill, are likely to be included in the future. So those of you that are fans of the literary classics, dust off your favourite classics, and prepare to play them again. You will need a daily development build. As always, please submit the bug reports to our issue tracker.

It seems that work on cleanup and improvements to the Ultima VIII integration was further along than I had anticipated. It's now been confirmed that Ultima VIII is completeable under ScummVM as well, so it joins Ultima IV and Ultima VI for official testing.

So break out your copies of Ultima VIII as well and give it a try! You will need a daily development build. As always, please submit the bug reports to our issue tracker.

Many years ago, a company called Origin Systems developed the much beloved Ultima series of role-playing games. Thanks to the previous hard work of others who created stand-alone reimplementations of these games, ScummVM is pleased to announce that two of the games in the series are ready for testing.

The first of these games is Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, based on the prior work done by the xu4 project. You can detect your English copy of Ultima IV as either original or enhanced. Enhanced mode uses the VGA graphics developed by the xu4 project. With the inclusion into ScummVM, the game also receives several improvements, such as multiple savegame slots and configurable keybindings. It even adds in a small secret area that only the most dedicated explorers may find.

The second game is Ultima VI, based on the Nuvie project. Due to some miscommunication, Nuvie may still advance as a separate project, but given the work done integrating Nuvie into ScummVM, we're hoping to have it officially supported in ScummVM as well. As with Ultima IV, Ultima VI supports the original game mode, as well as an enhanced mode that allows for Nuvie's full screen map, container gumps as in Ultima VII, and other features. Note that enhanced mode defaults to double resolution, so for now, the intro only displays in half of the screen.

So break out your copies of the games and give them a try! You will need a daily development build. As always, please submit the bug reports to our issue tracker.

Get your season (of docs) pass ready! We are excited to announce that ScummVM has been accepted as a participant of Google Season of Docs 2020. One of the most important parts of every open source project is its documentation. Good documentation is vital for making the project accessible to both end users and new developers wanting to have a deeper look into the project's internals so they can start contributing on their own.

Season of Docs, a recent initiative by Google to connect technical writers with open source projects. The program offers a great way to gain practical project experience, as well as explore the world of free software and the great communities that evolve around them.

For ScummVM this is a wonderful opportunity to improve our documentation. You can check out our ideas page or if you want to bring up your own ideas - get in touch with us on our Discord server.

We've had a lot of successful student projects as part of Google's Summer of Code in previous years - we’re looking forward to carrying that success into Google's Season of Docs and inspire you to work with us and add your very own success.

The deadline for proposals is July 9. Please make sure to read the program timeline, guidelines and FAQ on the Season of Docs website for additional information.

Today, Google announced the projects accepted for this year's Google Summer of Code, a yearly event with the goal to encourage students to participate in open source projects. For many students, it's the first time working in a collaborative environment. We are especially delighted to announce that the ScummVM Team will support and mentor four fellow adventurers during their journey.

Dylan Servilla and Nathanael Gentry will both work on our Director engine. While Dylan's goal is to help with Lingo-related stuff like factories, Nathanael will start working on rendering routines. Both will eventually lead us to support at least Spaceship Warlock and The Journeyman Project.

We want ScummVM to be easily accessible to as many people as possible. This obviously includes localisation to help removing language barriers. This year, Aryan Rawlani will help improving support for languages written from right to left ('RTL') as well as adding proper Unicode support to the ScummVM GUI. Imagine ScummVM being available in every possible language one day and you might understand how important Aryan's work is. Besides that, Aryan will also work on the mechanics we use to detect your games in order to improve reliability and performance, which includes deep rework on how our plugin system works.

During GSoC, ScummVM also acts as an umbrella organisation for its sister project ResidualVM. Gunnar Birke will work on implementing support for the Wintermute 3D engine to ResidualVM. Wintermute 3D is the - you guessed it - 3D counterpart to the Wintermute engine supported by ScummVM which is only able to play 2D games due to the project's scope. Adding support for Wintermute 3D to ResidualVM will eventually allow you to run games like Alpha Polaris.

Brace yourselves - Summer 2020 is coming. Prepare for supporting our students on their glorious adventure. When your watch begins, follow their process on the ScummVM Planet.