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SCI Programming => SCI Development Tools => Topic started by: richruss691 on June 09, 2018, 05:31:07 PM
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how different is sci0 from sci1.1? I've been considering vga updates of a couple ega sci games. are the formats close enough i'd be able to throw in some new graphics and a point and click interface? maybe sci companion can convert? or would it likely be a complete ground up remake?
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throw in some new graphics and a point and click interface? maybe sci companion can convert? or would it likely be a complete ground up remake?
They are different enough. It would probably have to be a ground up remake.
One thing you might not be considering is that you can't just throw a point-and-click interface onto puzzles that were designed for the text parser - so you will probably need to redesign many of the puzzles.
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Brian originally alluded that it would be a "relatively simple process" to upgrade from SCI0 to SCI1. But I think those are much closer together in terms of similarities. For one thing, room numbers in SCI0 start basically at 1 (I think SCI1 is the same) and room numbers in SCI1.1 start at like 100 and higher, the lower scripts being taken up by functions and whatnot. Probably because SCI0 and SCI1's scripts could only go up to 999 while SCI1.1 can go much higher (SCRIPT.XXX in SCI0/SCI1 as opposed to XXXXX.SCR in SCI1.1). So that's one way it's more complicated.
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Thank you both for your prompt responses, you make good points. seems like it might be an uphill battle! lol
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To expand a bit more: I guess there are two categories of difficulty: changes to the actual gameplay (since you're changing from a parser to a p&c interface) and then the mechanics of actually converting the resources to the new format.
I don't think the latter is all that difficult - just tedious. If I were doing this, I'd start with a blank SCI 1.1 game, and then port things over piecemeal. Start with just one simple room to see how difficult it is to get things up and running.
- For pic backgrounds, you can just CTRL-C copy from a SCI0 pic and "import bitmap to pic" to an SCI 1.1, to get the background. The control and priority screens are more difficult, but you can copy pic commands from one running SCI Companion instance to another. But then you'll need to manually go through the pic commands to remove any "set visual" stuff (or just redraw them by hand). I feel like I wrote some functionality to do this automatically at some point, but I might be dreaming.
- For views, you can export a loop as an animated gif in SCI0, then "import image sequence" in SCI 1.1.
- For scripts, the room setup is a little diffierent, so you can't really just copy/paste an entire room script over. But you can probably mostly copy individual instances and procedures over manually. The scripting isn't that different in SCI0 vs SCI1.1
And of course then you need to figure out how to map all the Said parser clauses into doVerb switch statements, and put all your text into message resources.
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thank you troflip, that should be helpful. :)