Messages

1

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Heap Space Fun

« on: September 19, 2025, 01:36:24 PM »

Do you have a way to share your game in a state where it's low on memory? Could you share the compiled game plus a savegame that can be loaded? Is it playable in SCUMMVM? That would be the easiest way to write better heap visualization tools if they don't already exist.

2

SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: LSLS7 script compilation to csc patch

« on: September 06, 2025, 12:01:23 AM »

Are there projects that are trying to run on the SCI3 interpreter? We have the SC source code, it could be adapted to output scripts in the new format. Would that be useful?

3

SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI Script Compiler - Open Sourced!

« on: September 05, 2025, 07:35:12 PM »

Here is a forked version of this repro with a CMakeLists.txt that will build the compiler with latest MSVC giving you a 64bit executable that should be useful for anyone still messing with SCI script compilation. There are also a few minor crash fixes.

https://github.com/mnicolella/sci-compiler

4

SCI Syntax Help / Re: SCI0: Events claimed Flags etc

« on: July 31, 2024, 06:45:38 PM »

What does the code look like that you're trying to copy?

If gFlagArray is an int array, then each element of the array is a 16bit integer

So dividing the flag index by 16 looks correct for accessing the element of the flag array, and then mod'ing the flag index by 16 looks correct for accessing the index of the flag inside the 16-bit block

How is your gFlagArray initialized? What 'isnt working' about this?

5

AGI Development Tools / Re: Original AGI Interpreter

« on: June 25, 2024, 02:10:59 PM »

This would be pretty cool if you got it to work, although I would say it seems like an awful lot of effort in order to enable that syntax, I wonder if Sierra really would have put in that much effort in order to use that syntax. Certainly possible, just seems a lot easier to use something else especially considering there's only a handful of pcall uses in the code?

6

AGI Development Tools / Re: Original AGI Interpreter

« on: June 21, 2024, 01:56:33 PM »

(it also gives me a syntax error if I try to write &other_foo so I'm not entirely sure what that's about)

7

AGI Development Tools / Re: Original AGI Interpreter

« on: June 21, 2024, 01:54:06 PM »

I did this test in the latest masm:


.data
stuff db 54
extrn   other_foo:near

.code
foo proc
   push TYPE stuff
   push TYPE other_foo
   push TYPE rax
foo endp

end

Results in:


  0000000000000000: 6A 01              push        1
  0000000000000002: 68 08 FF 00 00     push        0FF08h
  0000000000000007: 6A 08              push        8

8

AGI Development Tools / Re: Original AGI Interpreter

« on: June 21, 2024, 12:59:04 PM »

In the MASM manual there is talk of a "TYPE" operator that can be applied to an expression to see what it is. It says it returns "a number" but I don't see what the possible numbers are. I would make a macro that takes a parameter and print out the TYPE of the parameter, and then I bet you could use that with some IF directives to select the code to emit based on the type of thing (register / word / pointer?) passed to the macro

9

AGI Development Tools / Re: Original AGI Interpreter

« on: June 13, 2024, 01:01:24 PM »

Very cool. Let me know if you want any help with that. You should also be able to mostly reconstruct the missing files by ripping the asm straight out of the executable. For a lot of the missing functions, you will probably find source code that calls into those procedures, and so you can cross reference the source code with the disassembled executable in order to know what the function's symbol is.

10

AGI Development Tools / Re: Original AGI Interpreter

« on: June 05, 2024, 07:41:18 PM »

Oh, here's the file from the DOS repo that contains the macro definitions for .if and .endif

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/2d04cacc5322951f187bb17e017c12920ac8ebe2/v4.0/src/INC/STRUC.INC#L320

Perhaps this file or something like it was distributed with earlier MASM versions? Or maybe Sierra had their own, or was given it from Microsoft?

11

AGI Development Tools / Re: Original AGI Interpreter

« on: June 05, 2024, 07:37:54 PM »

I think it's also possible that Sierra got preview builds of MASM from Microsoft, perhaps that included the .if and other directive features ahead of them shipping in an official release. I wonder if you hunt through the MASM 4.x or 5.x executables if you would find any reference to these things, maybe behind an undocumented flag?

Here's something else that's an interesting point... the DOS 4.0 source code is on github, and includes usages of these directives -- and DOS4 shipped around 86-88?
https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/2d04cacc5322951f187bb17e017c12920ac8ebe2/v4.0/src/SELECT/S_DISPLY.ASM#L64

12

AGI Development Tools / Re: Original AGI Interpreter

« on: June 05, 2024, 07:11:16 PM »

This page suggests that those directives were added in MASM 6.0, but it looks like that shipped around 1991?

https://bytepointer.com/masm/index.htm

Also some of the source files directly mention MASM, search this file:
https://github.com/lanceewing/agi/blob/main/src/SCROUT.ASM

13

AGI Development Tools / Re: The web version of AGILE (https://agi.sierra.games)

« on: May 23, 2024, 01:51:20 PM »

Very interesting writeup of how the code was leaked! Was the complete AGI code never leaked? Why are there by contrast so many complete leaked versions of the SCI interpreter?

14

SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI0 picture size limits when importing from bmp

« on: May 10, 2024, 05:02:44 PM »

mnicolella: You don't happen to have/be able to glean an answer to this question over at Jimmy Maher's site, do you?

But no amount of resource-file prying answers the central question: to what extent was The Realm an abandoned Quest for Glory title? The most I?ve been able to find is summed up on a page from the QFG wiki (linked at bottom.) If the title crosses your radar again, I?ll be curious if you turn up anything more.

https://www.filfre.net/2024/02/the-rise-of-pomg-part-3-competition-and-conflict/

My understanding is that at some point close to The Realm's alpha version shipping, the Coles were asked to come on board to design and implement quests, and there was some talk about turning it into "Quest for Glory Online". The quest infrastructure in The Realm was too primitive and the Coles declined to become involved.

There is an image supporting this in The Realm's old resource files (attached), but I don't believe at the game's inception that it was the goal.

15

SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI0 picture size limits when importing from bmp

« on: February 23, 2024, 12:28:48 PM »

Why is vector drawing not an option? Could you draw like you are now, and then make another pass where you use that as a guide to draw the vector art? Maybe you could find a tool where you could put your bitmap in the background so you could trace over it with vector drawing tools?