Quoting: GeamanduraThis was always an amazing project to provide a 2D adventure game engine, but I genuinely don't understand what are they doing now with including separate engines for running a 3D game Penumbra. At this point what stops them from e.g. including OpenMW, including the Heroes 2 and Heroes 3 open source engines, etc.? What is the purpose of this project morphing into a bundle of their initial vision engine plus more and more unrelated random shit?

What I think happened is that the HPL1 engine was in pretty bad shape. Outdated third party dependencies, hard to compile on modern platforms etc. There doesn't seem to be much activity on the GitHub page for the initial source release, and no active forks I could find so clearly some heavy TLC needed.

Presumably ScummVM already have a lots of tools needed for any game, input/sound, handling savegames, built with portability in mind and so on, and with 3D support already there with the Residual merger I guess it was less work integrating it with ScummVM than doing a total rewrite?

FWIW: It was started as a GSoC back in 2022:
https://blogs.scummvm.org/grisenti/2022/09/11/gsoc-summary/ [External Link]