Messages

16

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Quest for Glory III: Wages of War - Unofficial Update 1.2A

« on: October 06, 2020, 05:05:58 PM »

Do you know if there is an equivalent patch for Quest for Glory IV?
I think so, but I forgot the author's pseudo...

NewRisingSun made patches to many Sierra games; QfG4 included.
You can find his patches on Collector's Sierra Help Pages:
http://sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updates/Patches-Updates-Games/QuestForGloryUpdates.html

I believe ScummVm fixed more QfG4 bugs than NRS, but you can only enjoy these fixes when playing through ScummVm.

BTW - Collector, if you're reading this - consider adding Ash Lancer's QfG3 patches to your site.

17

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Rare SCI Games

« on: October 05, 2020, 11:21:40 AM »

@OmerMor
If you are interested, I have some games from the list 'Space Quest 4 beta and Space Quest 5 v0.028'.

Thanks :-)
In the 14 years that passed since I made this list I managed to find these beta versions... 

18

SCI Development Tools / Re: Error in SCICompanion documentation - fopen

« on: October 05, 2020, 11:16:19 AM »

I've noticed a few mistakes throughout the SCI Companion Docs, mostly negligible though. Such as references to Python, and the obvious broken links to SCI Studio docs etc.

That's expected, expected in a non-maintained project.
Have you seens Kawa's suggestion?

The only better place would be GitHub, and even then specifically Phil's if you want the online version to be corrected.

You can send Phil a Pull Request in Github to fix the docs. The documentation "source code" can be found here:
https://github.com/icefallgames/SCICompanion/tree/master/SCICompanion/Docs

19

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Rare SCI Games

« on: October 04, 2020, 04:30:41 PM »

BTW,
a much more up-to-date and complete list of SCI games can be found in the detection tables of scummvm:
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/blob/master/engines/sci/detection_tables.h

20

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Rare SCI Games

« on: October 04, 2020, 04:25:34 PM »

I have French Police Quest 4. Let me know if you want a copy.

21

SCI Development Tools / Re: Error in SCICompanion documentation - fopen

« on: October 04, 2020, 07:27:53 AM »

These are not the same kernel calls. There's FOpen, FGets and friends, and then there's FileIO. The latter is used in SCI01 and later, SCI0 has the former ones. I haven't checked the return types of each, but they could be different.

You're right Lars.
However, even the Kernel documentation for SCI0 (from 1988-04-04) mentions it return -1 on error:

(FOpen filename [mode])
     Opens the file whose name is filename and returns a handle to it.  The
     optional parameter mode may be either fAppend, in which case the file
     pointer will be positioned at the end of the file for appending, or
     fTrunc, in which case the file will be truncated to zero length.  If
     mode is not specified, fAppend is assumed.  If there is an error in
     opening the file, a value of -1 is returned.

22

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: I just wanted to record some MIDI...

« on: September 30, 2020, 02:17:15 AM »

Who is Ravi Iyengar?

Ravi is one of the pioneering SCI researchers who participated in the FreeSCI project. His main focus was SCI sound.
Here's his website: http://rarefied.org/sci/

23

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

« on: September 24, 2020, 03:04:09 AM »

Just out of interest how would one get a hold of SQ4 EGA?

You can find all my EGA variants here.

24

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: SCI Tetris

« on: September 23, 2020, 05:41:36 AM »

Hmm weird
I thought that only applied to menu definitions.

Oh, sorry - I think what you're talking about is the single character notation:

Code: [Select]

Characters are single ASCII characters, and are denoted by preceding the
character with the reverse single quote ("tick") character:

     `A   represents uppercase A and
     `?   represents the question mark

Several character sequences represent special key combinations:

     `^a  represents ctrl-A
     `@b  represents alt-B
     `#4  represents the F4 key
See here.

25

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: SCI Tetris

« on: September 23, 2020, 04:49:21 AM »

What does the (`) Grave accent (backwards apostrophe?) do on the wasd control section? Convert the literal to a number? Is that documented somewhere?

` denotes the following character as the key for the menu.

See here.

26

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: SCI Tetris

« on: September 20, 2020, 02:20:57 PM »

Cool!

27

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: King's Quest IV VGA-ish

« on: September 10, 2020, 04:25:44 PM »

I love it! Well done Andrea!

I have looked into it, and I think it's related to the new Feature class introduced in SCI01. This class was moved out of script 998 (Actor), and into its own script, 950.
There, it was greatly expanded to include support for doVerb code. Script 996 (User) added the VerbMessager class which converted said specs into verbs. I know that KQ1SCI and QFG2 used this.
I think this was meant to help the programmers transition from the parser to an icon-based interface.

You can get a glimpse of the SCI change history and rationale in these documents:
SCI Changes & Updates.1993-08-23.txt
Run Time System Changes.1993-08-23.txt

28

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Where to get SCI0 documentation in 2020?

« on: September 01, 2020, 02:29:23 AM »

You're right. This part was removed from SCI Companion's documenatation.

You can view its latest snapshot here:
https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/icefallgames/SCICompanion/blob/2b0553c61a04def0f35d378579dc87b5e272f6ac/SCICompanion/Help/Legacy/index.html

However, this is just SCI Studio's documentation which can be also found here:
http://sci.sierrahelp.com/SCIStudio3Help/SCC/Index.html

29

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Where to get SCI0 documentation in 2020?

« on: August 31, 2020, 04:46:57 AM »

SCI Companion has very good documentation:
http://scicompanion.com/Documentation/index.html

30

SCI Development Tools / Re: Strings: {} vs "", and underscores

« on: July 20, 2020, 04:01:54 PM »

1.
In SCICompanion, is there any difference between {} and "" as strings delimiter?
Will they be compiled to the same thing?

2.
What do underscores mean?
For example, after dying, the possibilities are:

Code: [Select]

{Restore}, {Restart} and {____Quit____}


See here:
http://scicompanion.com/Documentation/Compiler/strings.html

Currently brace and double-quote strings can be used interchangeably.

All whitespace between words in a string will be converted into a single space character. If you need to have multiple spaces between words, you can use the underscore character.