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SCI Programming => SCI Development Tools => Topic started by: Omni on August 27, 2010, 12:10:26 PM
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Hello,
A little bit about me, I am new to posting to these forums but I have lurked randomly for awhile and have always been interested in working on my own game and game engine, to be fair the engine side has always intrigued me the most. I have decided now that I have a little knowledge under my belt to attempt to fix one of the most promising SCI tools: SCI Studio VGA.
Now keep in mind that it may be beyond me or beyond help. At the least I hope to have it in SVN Repository so others can check it out and submit patches more easily then the current way. Which is tracking down the source and building a custom build environment in Borland where not everything in the project files is linked and proper. I was hoping this part had been documented or already done, I have searched many forums and the internet in both Google Cache and The Way Back Machine and have turned up nothing so that is the main reason I am doing this.
So that is that! If anyone has any suggestions or has worked on the source or is further along then me please let me know, it may save me a lot of time if I can play catch up that way.
Goals:
- Get it to compile in its original compile environment.
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- Fix some of the main crash issues.
- Familiarize myself with VCL and Borland Libraries.
- Upload this to an SVN Repo.
[/s] It is on Sourceforge.
- Update it to newer SynEdit libraries.
- Port it to Visual Studio where I am more confident.
[/s] Needs a rewrite.
- Possibly fix the Scripting Engine.
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Current Status:
- I have it compiled under Borland BCB.
- Fixed some minor linking and build errors.
Current Issues:
- I do not have a SCI Game to test with currently.
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- I need to learn more of the workings of the SCI engine.
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Pipe Dreams:
- Networking Support. Working INN would be the first step.
So does the strike-through command not work on these forums?[/list]
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Sounds awesome! Good luck - I'm sure you'll get the full support of everyone here - and welcome to the site!
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Wow! Finally, at least somebody is taking up the task of doing SOMETHING with SCI Studio VGA. I wish you luck. I'd also suggest considering porting it so it is compilable under MinGW/MSYS and/or Dev++ as well for those of us without commercial IDEs.
I've tried more than a few times to make sense of SCI Studio VGA's source but it's just way beyond me. As much programming experience and knowledge as I have, I just don't know enough. So I wish you luck. If you need an SCI game to test, there are plenty of fangames on this website. They're not VGA of course. You can buy some of the older Sierra adventure collections on both Steam and Good Old Games.
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I'd also suggest considering porting it so it is compilable under MinGW/MSYS and/or Dev++ as well for those of us without commercial IDEs.
If it compiles under Visual Studio it should compile under Express.
If you need an SCI game to test, there are plenty of fangames on this website. They're not VGA of course. You can buy some of the older Sierra adventure collections on both Steam and Good Old Games.
There are the free demos, too.
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True...I guess I just don't like IDEs. And MinGW/MSYS is so lightweight and easy to use.
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Thanks for the welcome guys.
It is not compiling under Visual Studio yet but I do not think I am to far off.
I have been out of programming awhile and when I did program(8+years ago) it was mostly C so I am playing catch up and playing around with the code to learn it the best I can.
The code I can tell even with out much experience with C++ is that the code is in a very rough state, and it relies on VCL very heavily which makes porting this a little time consuming but I think it is the most important part to be able to get this into more peoples hands by being able to use more modern compilers.
I tried one of the better looking fan games "Legends of the Lost Jewel". I am playing around with it in SCI Studio hoping for a crash, any tips?
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Best of luck to you, sounds great. So now you say you want sci studio to crash, try using the pic editor for a while. I seem to remember it crashing alot. as for compiling it, I seem to remember something about Borland 5. keep us up to date.
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Thanks cloud, I did quite a bit of pixel art today. Yes I did build it with Borland 5 after fixing the mess of his make/project files. Gonna go track down some of these warnings and errors now until I get a crash then.
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Oh yeah and windows 98 I think. scistudio hates 98
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Ahh, I think I have my VM of 98 still so that may help, I have a few ideas of which would cause bad behavior in 98, depending on which patches are installed.
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Well, I have it uploaded to svn with a couple of very very minor fixes.
The Good: It allows people to check out the code easily and resubmit patches/fixes.
The Bad: It currently only compiles with Borland v5 and I believe freecommandlinetools5.5, but this way may need a couple extra files not included.
Working on the update to visual studio still, that is still in my local repo.
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Nice. Keep us apprised!
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I have been working on this in my spare time, I know I have many bugs/projects ahead but wanted to get this out there.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/scistudio/files/scistudio.exe/download
Some minor bug fixes and general cleanup is it currently.
If you use this remember keep a back up of whatever you are working on, and let me know if when it breaks and what you did to break it.
Currently it is still under Borland.
The Files in the SVN are not of this version, I am waiting to knock out a few more things before I commit as I do a lot of my work on my laptop in downtime and SVN access is from my PC only due to the laptop not having a internet connection nearly always.
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Well, this may just be a fixed non VGA Version. The Project as I got it is a mess with random source files from 4+ sources and this program -was- violating many GPL rules.
Depending on what happens next week determines the amount of time I spend on this, if things go as planned it may be a rewrite which is really what is needed. If things do not go as planned/as I want it means fixing the issues for now and anything new I write can be transferred should I rewrite this.
The main thing I need now is some demo games in the various engine types, heck 1-2 rooms in the SCI0 through SCI32 would be killer. So I am going to spend time looking for some of those, I believe I have some of the old games on Disk/CD at my parents so I hope they are still in working order.
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Well, there are many games here (with source code) that you can download...
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Here's a bunch of demos.
http://scummvm.org/demos/#sierra (http://scummvm.org/demos/#sierra)
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Awesome thanks. This is letting me see how much really needs to be done, like reimplementing the saving functions to resources. Also some more scripting additions.
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Official Sierra Demos (http://sierrahelp.com/Misc/Demos.html)
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Awesome site Collector, I am not sure how I ever missed this in my searching for old SCI games or INN and the like.
I have just spent probably 2 hours reading and following links based on your page, to bad the VAGSoft site is no longer around, or that the version of it I found did not have the decompression algorithms I was looking for.
I have Faux INN and the Faux INN Source, I wish INN Revival had source or even exe's readily available.
Also I have the old desktop theme to "The Realm Online" on my external if that would be of any use to your theme listing.
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Awesome site Collector, I am not sure how I ever missed this in my searching for old SCI games or INN and the like.
I have just spent probably 2 hours reading and following links based on your page, to bad the VAGSoft site is no longer around, or that the version of it I found did not have the decompression algorithms I was looking for.
I have Faux INN and the Faux INN Source, I wish INN Revival had source or even exe's readily available.
Also I have the old desktop theme to "The Realm Online" on my external if that would be of any use to your theme listing.
I wish that all of the people that have developed SCI tools had left the source available. VAG's VMD Player was promising, but as with many of the SCI tools, not finished. With the inclusion of SCI into ScummVM, one of the developers was looking for the source to the Sierra Resource Viewer. The INN Revival server is often down, so it would be nice if its source was available before it goes the way of Faux INN. I am glad that you are picking up where Brian left off with SCI Studio VGA.
Oh, and I would appreciate anything you have that is Sierra related that I don't have on SHP.
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Here ya go Collector. http://youpointwebash.com/realm%20theme.zip I uploaded it to my nearly unused site so if it fails or you get a hot-linking error let me know so I can fix it =p
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I have just spent probably 2 hours reading and following links based on your page, to bad the VAGSoft site is no longer around, or that the version of it I found did not have the decompression algorithms I was looking for.
http://freesci.linuxgames.com/scihtml/x390.html (http://freesci.linuxgames.com/scihtml/x390.html)
Might help with the decompression algorithms, (if you haven't found this already).
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Thanks, I've been using http://freesci.linuxgames.com/scihtml/x987.html which seems nearly identical luckily with a tidbit about SCI32. I am still tossing around some ideas in my head of how I want to handle resource.map and uh the other one which I am forgetting. Reading the Freesci IRC logs a part of me wishes they had ported in Brians code =p.
Anyways just got done with my CCNP class time to go sleep!