Topics

1

SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Must Print pause the game in SCI.?

« on: January 20, 2021, 02:46:54 AM »

Hey everyone,
I've taken it for granted that the game must pause when dialogue is being displayed, but I wonder if this is necessarily the case?
I'm sure there's moments in Leisure Suit Larry 3 and Space Quest 3 when dialogue is displayed while either character animation and/or ego movement is going on.

Does anyone have any idea if there's a way to toggle this? It would be awesome to get some animation while a character is talking!

2

Everything-Else / Dialogue Interface

« on: January 19, 2021, 02:25:34 AM »

Hi all,
I always wanted dialogue to be a big part of the SCI.0 game I'm working on. Initially I thought it would be cool to use the text parser for any dialogue sequence (Instead of INPUT the parser either reads "Action:" or "Say:" depending on whether you've initiated a conversation.) I got the idea from Space Ship Warlock (anyone remember that game?) where you would input fairly naturalistic dialogue into the parser ("Who is the captain?") ("What do you think about space pirates?")etc.

This was all before I found out about Heap memory restrictions so it's not like I can create a dialogue option for every imaginable topic relevant to the game. I'm considering implementing more of a dialogue tree like the one in Space Quest V, Gabriel Knight or Lucas Arts games. This would simplify things, maybe even streamline the gameplay a bit, where you're not constantly guessing what I thought was a good question to ask a character. Trouble is, it seems a tad inauthentic, and weird to keep switching to mouse in a mostly keyboard orientated game.

Also, dialogue choices can ruin the joke, if you already know the phrasing of the question before you ask it.

What are people's thoughts on this?
I'm so involved in the development of this project, when making a design decision I must ask myself, "is this fun?"

3

SCI Syntax Help / Telephones

« on: December 11, 2020, 04:31:44 PM »

Hi all,
I was wondering if anyone has had a creative solution to including telephones in your game. I've been analysing the Police Quest 2 phone script for ideas.

Originally I was going to use a pop-up keypad, but thought it would be simpler to just have the user input the number into the text parser. This is pretty clunky so far, considering it's a fairly simple concept!

ideally I want the user experience to go:
INPUT: pick up phone
(ego sits in the chair and picks up the phone, only accepting either numbers or "hang up" to return to normal roomscript)
DIAL: (anynumber or specific number)
results--phone call script or random wrong number script.
if the user inputs a word instead of a number at this point you get a unique error message for this situation

I get that the number must actually be a string as the interpreter doesn't like eight digit numbers!

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

4

SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Global animations using changeState

« on: October 12, 2020, 01:15:53 AM »

Hi all,
I've run into a problem with something I expected to be very straightforward, but perhaps I've got completely the wrong idea.

I want to set up some global animations for things the player can do in any room, eg drink a potion or open a map etc.
This is usually easy to implement in a room script using the Roomscript:changeState/switch method. I figured that I could do the same thing in my main script and activate the state I want with my global said statements. This works fine except it will only run the case which I call from the said statement without going to the next case after =cycles x or =seconds x.

Is there something fundamental I'm misunderstanding about the main script which makes this method not work here? Is there a better way to rig up global animations?

Thanks in advance for your help!

--Edit: I'm still interested to know the answer, but after thinking about this a lot I don't see the benefit of having animation in the main script, as opposed to copy/pasting it into every room script- surely the effect would be the same on the heap, plus i can think of a few situations where you don't want those global animations, eg underwater or in the dark.

5

SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Dosbox Run - backup

« on: September 30, 2020, 07:57:25 PM »

Hi all!
I realised the other day that my game folder was HUGE and when I looked around I realised that it was backing up my game files every time I run the game! I was worried for a moment my game would require more floppies than King's Quest XXXXVIII!

How do I get run.exe to stop backing up my game files?

6

SCI Syntax Help / Sci.0 wish-list: diagonal movement, title-bar colour, and parser questions

« on: September 19, 2020, 06:27:45 PM »

Hi all,
this is my first post here, many times I've been about to ask for help I've had another last look and been able to figure it out for myself. Sci programming is wonderfully intuitive like that!

There's a few things on my Sci-wish-list I haven't been able to tackle, and I was hoping I could get a few nudges in the right direction!

1 - In certain rooms up and down arrow will result in diagonal movement. Codename: Iceman has this in one or two of the beach rooms at the beginning. it's subtle, but saves a lot of up-left-up-left movement to get through a narrow 45 degree angle path.

2 - Change colour of the title bar from grey to red. I've seen a lot of complicated stuff in fan games for customizing windows, I actually like the look of the windows as they are (Reminds me of Space Quest III) but the grey clashes with the look of the game I'm creating.

3 - This is probably a hard one, which I've basically given up on. Is there a way to ask questions to the parser? It would be cool if it switches to 'conversation mode' when you 'talk to' a character, and now you can say 'where is the lighthouse' instead of 'ask about lighthouse', which is more clunky and I think less intuitive for the player.

Thanks for any help I can get!