Is it too soon to ask this question?
You know Ron is going to release the engine to the public someday because he loves us. Even if he never does, the question is still relevant. What exactly is the game engine capable of? I gotta imagine that Ron has thought many times over the years, “If I were going to start this SCUMM thing over from scratch, knowing what I know now, what would I do?” Ron knows all of the limitations and bits that don’t scale well – and he’s probably got a notebook full of the things he wanted to do if he got a chance to sit down and do it.
Just over 2 years ago, Ron created an “Engine Roadmap” entry in the blog. This covered the requirements for Thimbleweed Park, but nothing beyond that. The engine, I suppose, is at version 1.0, but far from it’s eventual potential. Stuff like maximum resolution, number of layers, number of sprites, etc., are likely only limited by computer resources, but there are lots of other things that only someone who has gone down this road before would think about. I’d like to hear some details on how the engine avoids problems the SCUMM engine may have had and how he went about future-proofing the new engine.