Today is ScummVM’s birthday; 19 years ago they had their very first release. A few years later, in 2003, Residual followed suit, on the 15th of August. It has been a long and interesting ride for these two sister-projects, where one has served the 2D point-and-click community, and the other has aimed at the residual games, namely the 2.5D and 3D games. After a few more years, partially due to the need for a domain-name, Residual changed its name closer to its sister-project, and became the ResidualVM we know and love today.

We haven’t just shared suffixes, we’ve also shared a lot of code between the projects, to the point that apart from the specific game engines, it was mostly the graphics code that differentiated ResidualVM from ScummVM. Keeping these code bases in sync has taken a fair bit of effort, an effort that we’ll no longer have to keep up, because today we’re announcing perhaps the biggest change in ResidualVM’s history, namely its merger into ScummVM.

That’s right, from today, ResidualVM is no longer a separate project, but instead now fully a part of ScummVM. This means that you will eventually be able to run ScummVM with our theme, as well as run games like Grim Fandango straight from ScummVM. For the Wintermute-fans, this also means that there will not be any need for splitting your gaming across ResidualVM and ScummVM, as there will be a single, 3D-supporting engine in ScummVM.

From a technical perspective, the code base has already been merged, and in the days to come we’ll be merging our forums and look into consolidating things like bug trackers and Discord-servers etc.

It’s been a fun ride as a separate project, but we think it will be just as fun going forward.

“You know, sweetheart, if there's one thing I've learned, it's this: nobody knows what's gonna happen at the end of the line, so you might as well enjoy the trip.”

- Grim Fandango

The 20th anniversary of the release of The Longest Journey comes in a few days. As a present, the ResidualVM team offers the means to play the game on modern systems. Of course there is a catch, we need your help to find the last few bugs in the game engine before we can declare it stable.

To play The Longest Journey, get a fresh daily build of ResidualVM, assemble the required files from your game copy, and optionally install the HD mod. The HD mod was created by Faberman. It brings a welcome graphical update to the game through the use of a machine learning upscaler and a lot of polishing work. Please report the issues you encounter while playing the game on our bug tracker.

Our previous release is already a few months old, it's time for a bug-fix release! ResidualVM 0.3.1 is available on our downloads page. It fixes a couple of Myst III bugs:

• Fixed a rare crash when walking near the magnetic rings in Amateria.
• Fixed unresponsive controls for the holographic projectors in J'nanin.

That's not much, but Cyan and GOG.com are planning to use ResidualVM for the Myst III digital release and we want it to be as stable as possible.

In other news, progress on adding support for The Longest Journey to ResidualVM continues thanks to our GSoC student Liu "Douglas" Zhaosong. You can follow his work on his blog.

ResidualVM 0.3.0 is released. Go grab it. Let's get it over with, this new version does not have any new supported games to offer. But that does not mean there is nothing interesting in there. It's packed with almost three years worth of fixes and improvements. Most notably:

• Better compatibility with newer operating systems thanks to switching from SDL 1 to SDL 2.
• A multilingual user interface.
• A widescreen mode for Myst III.
• Both Grim Fandango and Myst III have received a lot of awesome user play testing, and as a result many bugs have been fixed.

Detailed release notes can be browsed in our NEWS file.

What's next? The development version of ResidualVM contains two additional work in progress games, Escape from Monkey Island and The Longest Journey. A lot of work remains before they can make their way into a release. But if you are interested in helping, contact us!

We at ResidualVM wish you a happy new year!

We are happy to announce that we are participating in this year's Google Summer of Code under the umbrella of our sister project ScummVM.

Have a look at the list of ideas or bring your own idea!

If you want to participate or have questions about GSoC, come talk to us on IRC Freenode channels #residualvm or #scummvm.