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SCI Programming => SCI Development Tools => Topic started by: gumby on March 16, 2012, 02:10:31 PM
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I ran into a problem where a 'phantom' script was showing up in my game, in the form of ScriptXXXXX, where the X's were numbers. In my instance, Studio was convinced that this resource lived in the RESOURCE.045 file (which didn't exist).
I couldn't open it the script because it really wasn't there. I tried rebuilding resources, and sometimes the phantom would change script numbers, but would never be removed. If I opened the game in Companion, it does not report the phantom (go figure). Closing & reopening Studio didn't help. I even considered that my resources were truely corrupt, so I rebuilt it & the map using external utilities.
Having this phantom script resulted in a failure to compile - it would attempt to find the script at compile time & it couldn't. I'm running Studio on my 64 bit Win 7 laptop, in XP compatibility mode. Here is the workaround that I came up with:
1) Open Studio
2) Turn off the script preview window (if you don't do this, a right-click in the next step would generate an error)
3) Right click the 'phantom' resource (Game Explorer->Scripts) & choose 'Delete' - Studio will complain that it can't delete the file
4) Rebuild resources
Yeah. Seriously.
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Really shows just how much the source needs to be gone through by someone capable enough. I really think that if Brian had finished SCI Studio VGA that there would have been a lot more interest in SCI by would be fan game makers. That may have lead to more development of the tools. I seem to remember Brian saying on the old MT forum that he was disappointed that SCI Studio had not attracted more interest from the fan developers, implying that he lost interest in Studio because of it.
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Yeah, when really everyone was just waiting for VGA SCI Studio. When he didn't deliver, everyone gave up on it and turned to AGS. It ended up being the other way around. At least he finally released the source. It's just too bad nobody knowledgeable has picked it up and done something with it (since Troflip, of course).
Never ever had this problem. But I never use Studio. Ever.
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That was what I was waiting for, before I started any serious attempt at an SCI game. At the time I don't think that AGS was much more capable than SCI1 and quite probably not even as good.
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Never ever had this problem. But I never use Studio. Ever.
I would prefer to use Companion - it was really hard to turn away from it, but Companion has some limitations when it comes to syntax. Some complex statements just won't compile (inline if's, for example).
Of course, this is just for compilation. I can still use Companion for all my graphical needs.
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Is the phantom script listed as part of the .ini file... I don't think companion sees anything that isn't listed.
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Can you see any trace of it in the Sierra Resource Viewer? Can you create an empty script to replace the phantom one with and then delete it?
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Now I can't reproduce the problem. I'm pretty sure I searched the game.ini file and it wasn't there. Next time it happens I'll recheck & use the Sierra Resource Viewer to see if it's visible in there. Thanks for the troubleshooting ideas.
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Correction. I can reproduce the problem (I was looking at the wrong game). In fact, I can reproduce this apparently every time I re-create the game from my code gen tool. I've attached a screenshot for reference. It's sure there is a Script48020 in resource package 45.
I can't create another script with the same number (to replace/overwrite the phantom), as the number reported by Studio for this script is 48020, and Studio won't let me create a script with a number higher than 999.
I cannot find a reference to this resource in the game.ini. SCI Resource viewer doesn't see the resource either. I also tried grepping the entire game folder & subfolders for 48020, but the string wasn't found in any file.
Good news is that my documented 'fix' in this thread worked again.
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Sounds like it is more of a bug with your tool than Studio. Just something about the way Studio reads the resources triggers it. Perhaps if you rebuilt the map file outside of either Studio or Companion.
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I thought it was my tool as well, but I cannot see how or where. When looking at the individual files that it creates, they all seem fine. My gut hunch is that I'm doing something wrong when I'm appending the resources to the resource.001 file, or making an error when rebuilding the map.
I've tried to rebuild both the map & resource.001 files without Studio or Companion (admittedly using other tools that I've created which probably isn't a good test) and it's still an issue.
This time when I 'fixed' it and rebuilt the resources within Studio, a new phantom showed up with a different script number. I fixed it in the same way & I was able to continue.
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Well, I think I've determined that it's Studio. I've found a newer version of Studio here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/scistudio/?source=directory
Looks like it was built in September 2010. Viewing the Help->About indicates that it's version 3.0.+.36 DEVELOPMENT. Seems that the project admin is mageofmarr (Tony Hall), no other developers listed.
The phantoms don't show up in this version. But my games don't compile either because it appears that the 'Random' function wasn't implemented (or temporarily removed) & for all I know other things are missing/broken. I don't really want to use this version anyway as the project seems abandoned & it's unclear what state the build is in.
I've attached a screenshot for reference:
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Wouldn't Tony Hall be the real name of "Omni"? I think that Omni was the one that put it up on Source Forge. He may have done what a lot of people do when compiling others' source. Comment out the part where the build fails instead of fixing it.
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I don't know. I thought Omni was working on VGA SCI Studio, but maybe I misunderstood. The timing of his initial appearance here does coincide.
EDIT: I guess it must be him. I don't see any other SCI Studio project hosted on SourceForge.
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Here is his post on it.
http://sciprogramming.com/community/index.php/topic,297.msg1439.html#msg1439
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Thanks for finding that Collector. It's all right there in the post - sorry for the noise. Omni, you still around?
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Omni has not posted here in quite a wile. I'm afraid that SCI ended up being a passing fancy for him. I would love it if he resurfaced or at least someone capable picking up on either Studio or Companion. On the other hand, if anyone was going to put a lot of effort into Studio, I'd just as soon they picked up SCI Studio VGA. having 256 colors would make dealing with graphics so much easier. Having better media support would be great, too.
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Just dropped Omni a line. And it looks like he's still here, lurking. Awesome!
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I read the forums all the time, probably more then I should. Unfortunately I do not have the time to work with the code that I once did as I recover.
As for that link, that is a VGA Dev build. It is based on source code from Brian that was never released as a binary I believe. I think he had some syntax changes in it he never fully fleshed out.
As for your Script 45 Issue if I remember his comments correctly, Brian had something hackish in his code about a maximum number of scripts and garbage data, and that he never expected anyone would hit that.
I think someone named Omar had put SCI Companion it on GitHub. Maybe he has something more updated, or could look into the problem.
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Good to hear that you are still around, Omni - and thanks for the update. Hope you are recovering nicely.
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Oh, about the message. That thing on sourceforge is probably the most current source there is, and honestly it is close to the source he released. Nothing I did to SCI Studio should be shown, I mostly messed around with some of the SCI32 stuff and did not get terribly far.
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Well whatever you did, even if it was just compiling it, fixed the problem with the one game that I'm having trouble with. Maybe it just moved the problem around & it would crop up under another set of circumstances.
Either way, thanks for giving me another executable to test this problem with.
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Hi Omni, guys.
It's Omer, not Omar :-)
And you're right: I've got working code of SciCompanion over at GitHub: https://github.com/OmerMor/SciCompanion (https://github.com/OmerMor/SciCompanion)
It compiles fine with Visual Studio 2003, and contains all the dependencies.
I only fixed a minor alignment bug when running in a right-to-left OS.
I don't think I'll ever try to take on maintaining this beast, mainly because it was written in C++, and I'm a C# dev.
I uploaded to GitHub mainly for preservation.
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Omni,
I took the liberty of importing your sourceforge SVN repository into github as well.
I believe GitHub is more suited for collaborative work (easy forking, more transparency) so I hope it'll increase the chance for someone picking it up (from 0.01% to 0.02% :) )