On Thursday Google announced the list of participants accepted for this year's Google Summer of Code and we are happy to report that 5 contributors have been accepted to work on various parts of the ScummVM project this summer.

• Ankush Dutt will work on an automated system for packaging freeware games with ScummVM for various platforms. The project includes two main objectives: help create standalone game packages bundled with ScummVM, and implement a new mechanism to let users download and install freeware games directly from the ScummVM launcher. You can follow the progress for this task on Ankush’s GSoC blog.

• Harishankar Kumar will work on improving Director 4 Compatibility. The goal is to reach full support for Total Distortion & The Journeyman Project. You can follow the progress for this task on Harishankar’s GSoC blog.

• Kartik Agarwala (aka hax0kartik) will work on porting the CRAB engine to ScummVM. The CRAB engine was developed by Pyrodactyl Games and was used in several of the games which the studio released, most notably Unrest, a story-driven adventure RPG set in ancient India. You can follow the progress for this task on Kartik’s GSoC blog.

• Abhinav Chennubhotla (aka PhoenixFlame101) will work on a system for verifying game file integrity, validating their checksums against those present in a central database. It will also let users contribute the checksums of game files not on the database. You can follow the progress for this task on Abhinav’s GSoC blog.

• Wyatt Radkiewicz (aka eklipsed) will work on a smaller project to optimize color blending code for the AGS engine thus making games more smooth and run better, especially on lower-end systems. You can follow the progress for this task on Wyatt’s GSoC blog.

Please give them a warm welcome, and visit our Discord server if you want to discuss those projects. After a four week Community Bounding period, the coding period will start on May 29 and you can expect regular updates on these projects on their respective blogs. The team is very excited about the upcoming weeks – and we hope you are as well.

Reah: Face the Unknown, the first supported game of the V-Cruise engine, is ready for public testing!

Created in 1998 by Detalion and published by LK Avalon, this 3D-rendered panoramic first-person adventure has you travel to a strange desert world to unravel its secrets.

ScummVM currently supports the CD, DVD, and digital English releases (with subtitles in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish). If you’re aware of any other versions, please contact us.

To play any of these supported releases, you will need a daily development build. If you encounter any issues, please submit them to the issue tracker!

After a few months of beta testing, valuable feedback from our community of play-testers, and relentless bug squashing, our ScummVM Android port is back on the Google Play Store with a fresh stable release! All the latest features of ScummVM 2.7.0 as well as Android-specific improvements are included in ScummVM 2.7.0.5!

A quick summary of the new features for this release:

• Implemented support for Google’s Secure Access Framework (SAF) for safe access of external storage space, such as SD Cards or USB drives.
• Improved input support for joysticks, modern controllers, physical mouse devices and even smart TV remote controls.
• Introduced the ability to switch touch controls between “touchpad emulation”, “direct mouse” and “gamepad emulation” modes, which can be set per context (ScummVM UI menu, 3D engine game, 2D engine game) as well as changed on-the-fly.
• Included a log view option, accessible from the “Global Options”, “Paths” tab, and the ability to specify the debug level of the log output, which can be set from the “Global Options”, “Misc” tab.
• Included all features of ScummVM 2.7.0 with regard to 3D engine support and shaders.
• Improved overall app stability.

Note that the added support for Google’s SAF API is significant, affecting devices running relatively modern Android OS versions. In these recent Android versions, SAF is relevant whenever games are stored on external storage such as an SD card. Since migration to SAF cannot be automated for the end user, you will need to perform a few manual steps to either use your old games or to add new games when using external storage such as an SD card. If your device supports SAF, the steps will appear in a pop-up when launching ScummVM for the first time. See our documentation page for a more detailed description of the process.

We are always interested in your feedback and suggestions. Any issues you encounter should be reported on our bug tracker. You may also reach out to the developer team on the forums or on Discord.

We’re grateful to have such an active and dedicated community and wish that you all enjoy this new ScummVM Android release!

HeR Interactive’s The Vampire Diaries and Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill are now ready for testing in ScummVM!

The Vampire Diaries follows Elena Gilbert, a high school student who discovers vampires are living in her hometown after one of them attacks her younger sister. The game is loosely based on the book series of the same name by author L. J. Smith, which later got adapted into a hit TV series.

Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill is the first installment of the long-running Nancy Drew game series, also based on a book series of the same name. In her first adventure, Nancy seeks to uncover the killer of a high school student who seems to have been disliked by all of his classmates.

You will need the data files from the games’ original install CDs, and a fresh daily build of ScummVM. Apart from the original release, Secrets Can Kill’s Russian translation is also supported. The ScummVM wiki pages for The Vampire Diaries and Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill contain information on which datafiles are needed. Please, report any problems you encounter in our issue tracker.

We are proud to announce that network-enabled Humongous Entertainment titles are now playable online! Anyone who has a copy of Backyard Football, Backyard Baseball 2001, and even Backyard Football 2002 (which was originally a LAN-only title) can download the latest daily build* of ScummVM and play online games against real people!

This all became possible because the three developers from the Backyard Sports Online fork had joined the team and brought their services with them to the ScummVM. These are LittleToonCat, Jim “jibbodahibbo” Westerkamp and Sam “QuestionMonkey” Kupfer.

Please note that Backyard Football and Backyard Baseball 2001 require online accounts for the complete online experience, so you need to register to Backyard Sports Online, which is our fantastic online-play service and a thriving community of fellow Backyard Sports players, they even have a couple of competitive online Baseball and Football leagues, if that's your style, you can find more information in their Discord server! People who already have a Backyard Sports Online account can log in using the latest daily build and play, but if you do not, you can register right here! This is not required to play Backyard Football 2002 online.

If you encounter any issues playing online, please let us know via the issue tracker.

This fantastic art is done by a fellow BSO community member Peppyrus.

* only the Windows, macOS, Debian, Raspberry Pi, and Android builds are compatible with network play at the moment. And only the 2.8.x branch of ScummVM has this functionality.