 Today, Google announced the projects accepted for this year's [Google Summer of Code](https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/), 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*](https://www.mobygames.com/game/spaceship-warlock) and [*The Journeyman Project*](https://www.mobygames.com/game/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](https://www.residualvm.org). 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*](https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/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](https://planet.scummvm.org/).
 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](https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs). 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](https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=Season_of_Docs/GSoD_Ideas) or if you want to bring up your own ideas - get in touch with us on our [Discord server](https://discord.gg/6TBm9hJ). 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](https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs)for additional information.
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](https://buildbot.scummvm.org/#/snapshots). As always, please submit the bug reports to our [issue tracker](https://bugs.scummvm.org/).
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](https://buildbot.scummvm.org/#/snapshots). As always, please submit the bug reports to our [issue tracker](https://bugs.scummvm.org/).
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](https://buildbot.scummvm.org/#/snapshots). As always, please submit the bug reports to our [issue tracker](https://bugs.scummvm.org/).
 The ScummVM team is excited to welcome CadiH and b-gent, our talented technical writers and participants of Google’s Season of Docs. CadiH will be working with us to launch a new documentation portal, which will include a revamped user manual and centralize our diaspora of information from the Wiki, Readme, and various other docs within our repository. b-gent brings his expertise and experience to help us modernize our Doxygen documentation. The Doxygen portal has long been neglected, this will benefit our developers and community as a whole. The work will officially begin on September 14 and will last 3 months. You can follow the progress of our two writers on the [ScummVM Blogs](https://planet.scummvm.org) and in the scummvm-gdoc channel on [our Discord server](https://discord.gg/4cDsMNtcpG). In the meantime join us in welcoming them to our community.
After many months of development Blazing Dragons is now ready for public testing. Join young dragon Flicker as he attempts to win the hand of Princess Flame and save Camelhot along the way. This is a rather odd Point and Click game as it was only released on Consoles. ScummVM's new Dragons engine allows you to run the Playstation version of this somewhat forgotten title. Throw away that PS1 controller and enjoy the game with a mouse/keyboard interface. We've also taken out all the annoying loading screens. Only the US and GB Playstation 1 versions are supported at the moment. You will need a [daily development build](https://buildbot.scummvm.org/#/snapshots). As always, please submit the bug reports to our [issue tracker](https://bugs.scummvm.org/).
In 2008 Google Summer of Code we had Kari Salminen aka Buddha^ working on adding <i>Operation Stealth</i> game support. While it was an overall success, still certain important game features were missing. Now, 12 years later, Kari got time for completing his work. Thus, we are proudly announcing support for the <i>Operation Stealth</i> game also known as <i>James Bond 007: The Stealth Affair</i> in the US release. Grab your copy of the game, fetch the [daily build](https://buildbot.scummvm.org/#/snapshots) of ScummVM and give it a go. If you encounter any oddities or bugs, please submit to our [bug tracker](https://bugs.scummvm.org/).
ScummVM Team is proud to announce support for a small freeware RPG game named <i>The Griffon Legend</i>. It was [originally](http://syn9.thehideoutgames.com/index_backup.php) written in the FreeBASIC programming language by Daniel "Syn9" Kennedy and later ported byDmitry Smagin to the GCW0 console, which we base this port on. The original story says: >500 years after the Griffon-Dragon war, the Dragons have returned to reclaim their empire. Cities are falling, everyone is dieing, and the lone Griffon Knight Fayne is caught up in the middle of it all. Since the game is freeware, you may grab a copy directly from our game [downloads page](https://www.scummvm.org/games/) or from the [original site](http://syn9.thehideoutgames.com/index_backup.php?table=griffonlegend). You will need the latest [development build](https://buildbot.scummvm.org/#/snapshots) to play it. Of course, if you encounter any bugs, please submit them to [our bug tracker](https://bugs.scummvm.org/).
Hello world, it is time for us to release the next version of ScummVM. Thus, we really need your help with testing the stable builds before the upcoming release, so we ensure better quality. Please, pay your special attention to the following new titles: * <i>Blazing Dragons</i> * <i>Eye of the Beholder - Sega CD version</i> * <i>Griffon Legend</i> * <i>Interactive Fiction games</i> * <i>Operation Stealth</i> * <i>Police Quest: SWAT</i> * <i>Prince and the Coward, English translation</i> * <i>Ultima IV - Quest of the Avatar</i> * <i>Ultima VI - The False Prophet</i> * <i>Ultima VIII - Pagan</i> We would also like you to play through another Sierra game: <i>Police Quest: SWAT</i>. Train to be a member of the SWAT team, and embark into dangerous missions to save civilian lives. This has been recently promoted for testing, so its call for testing has been included in the announcement for the upcoming release. These games need to be tested with [stable builds](https://buildbot.scummvm.org/#/snapshots), not development ones. And report any bugs or oddities on [our issue tracker](https://bugs.scummvm.org/). We also need your help to update the ScummVM translations for this release. You can see the status of the translations, and work on them on our [translations website](https://translations.scummvm.org/projects/scummvm/scummvm/). To log-in to the web site, you can either use your GitHub or Facebook account if you have one or create an account specific for this web site. Regular contributors can save changes to the translations but new contributors will only be able to make suggestions and vote on the suggestions. However we are looking for new regular contributors for some languages, so if you do not currently have full access and would like to get it, please [contact us](https://www.scummvm.org/contact/). Also, a few of our past contributors may have lost their full access a few months ago when we updated our permission settings. If you are one of them please contact us to see your full access restored. Good luck with your playtesting, and let’s release version 2.2.0 at the end of September!
