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General and Everything Else => The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff => Topic started by: troflip on May 01, 2017, 10:36:58 PM

Title: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: troflip on May 01, 2017, 10:36:58 PM
Finally got around to starting my Cascade Quest-specific dev blog!

http://blog.cascadiaquest.com/

Title: Re: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: MusicallyInspired on May 02, 2017, 12:31:53 AM
Really impressive stuff you're doing!
Title: Re: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: Doan Sephim on May 04, 2017, 10:38:23 AM
Finally got around to starting my Cascade Quest-specific dev blog!

http://blog.cascadequestgame.com/
Looks super cool! I am really impressed with your innovations. Does all this stuff negatively effect your heap space?
Title: Re: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: Kawa on May 04, 2017, 11:41:28 AM
Do you really think heap space is an issue when you're not playing by established rules?
Title: Re: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: troflip on May 04, 2017, 11:49:16 AM
I long ago ran out of heap space in the actual Sierra interpreter.

My 'terp uses the same technique as ScummVM for dealing with heap... each script gets it's own 64K address space. As do object clones, dynamically allocated memory, and the stack. Actually, objects/clones only take up 2 bytes of space for their pointer (their properties aren't even mapped into SCI heap space), so I could theoretically have 32,000 of them.
Title: Re: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: MusicallyInspired on May 04, 2017, 11:55:07 AM
He's combining it with Unity which is why he has auto-complete parser text and scaling. :P I still find it fascinating.
Title: Re: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: Doan Sephim on May 04, 2017, 09:05:49 PM
I long ago ran out of heap space in the actual Sierra interpreter.

My 'terp uses the same technique as ScummVM for dealing with heap... each script gets it's own 64K address space. As do object clones, dynamically allocated memory, and the stack. Actually, objects/clones only take up 2 bytes of space for their pointer (their properties aren't even mapped into SCI heap space), so I could theoretically have 32,000 of them.

Cool. Honestly, that's one issue that's very limiting that I wish were easily remedied. Dealing with heap makes me sad because I don't get to implement things how I would like. Best of luck!
Title: Re: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: troflip on May 04, 2017, 10:37:23 PM
Cool. Honestly, that's one issue that's very limiting that I wish were easily remedied. Dealing with heap makes me sad because I don't get to implement things how I would like. Best of luck!

I agree! As long as it's your scripts that are getting too big, and not just a memory leak/memory fragmentation (which is the problem that most people have). My core scripts (Controls.sc, Game.sc, etc...) started eating up too much space to load some rooms...
Title: Re: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: lskovlun on May 05, 2017, 01:15:36 PM
I agree! As long as it's your scripts that are getting too big, and not just a memory leak/memory fragmentation (which is the problem that most people have). My core scripts (Controls.sc, Game.sc, etc...) started eating up too much space to load some rooms...
In which case, target SCI01. Problem solved.
Title: Re: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: MusicallyInspired on May 05, 2017, 04:18:45 PM
I wonder why Brian never targeted SCI01 to begin with? Seems like he was too obsessed with using Leisure Suit Larry games as a starting base...
Title: Re: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: troflip on May 06, 2017, 01:05:30 AM
I wonder why Brian never targeted SCI01 to begin with? Seems like he was too obsessed with using Leisure Suit Larry games as a starting base...

There are some disadvantages... the available interpreters didn't come with debug switches, right?

Anyway, it only gets you partway - it basically doubles your available heap space, sort of. Memory pressure is still going to be an issue if you're trying to do complex stuff.


New post on parser autosuggest: http://blog.cascadequestgame.com/2017/05/04/text-parser-autosuggest/
Title: Re: Cascade Quest dev blog
Post by: lskovlun on May 07, 2017, 01:39:44 PM
There are some disadvantages... the available interpreters didn't come with debug switches, right?
This is true of QfG2 (contrary to what I remembered), but KQ1/SCI and the christmas card have a debugger (the KQ1 interp does not have pathfinding, but since you're rolling your own that would seem not to matter).