Messages

1

AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Final Beta - Looking for a little more feedback

« on: October 13, 2026, 11:31:32 PM »

Ah, that's right. I remember seeing that before. Sorry, it's been too long since I've had a chance to do any AGI work. I miss it.

Honestly, I love WinAGI's help file. It's very informative and I was able to answer so many of my own questions using it. Had I remembered how good it was I probably could have avoided asking about the sound error.

Hopefully, I get a chance to really dig into WinAGI v3 here next year. I wouldn't worry too much about the installer or .NET, but I am curious if there should have been an uninstall option that I was missing.

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AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Final Beta - Looking for a little more feedback

« on: October 13, 2026, 02:52:39 PM »

And a question related to what I was trying to test: Almost all version of Manhunter NY that I have access to have 2 or more errors stating "Sound XXX has an invalid resourceheader at location XXXXXX in MHVOL.x". I believe these might be defects in the original sierra distribution. It's unlikely I'd need to edit the sound files, but is there anything to be done about them except to hide the error?

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AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Final Beta - Looking for a little more feedback

« on: October 12, 2026, 10:56:29 PM »

This is probably unlikely to happen to many people, but it was a bit frustrating trying to install the v3 beta96. It wouldn't install because a "newer version was already installed". That "newer" version was 3.0.1-alpha8.0.

In the past with WinAGI, I've needed to uninstall the old version before installing the new, which is fine. But the beta96 installer didn't seem to include an option to uninstall, so I had to eventually do it through windows' remove programs.

The beta96 version also required me to update my .NET version, which it would be nice if the installer could have dealt with that requirement; maybe by bundling the required version?

I'm probably just grumpy after work, but it's no fun struggling to install or update a program, so I'm mentioning it here. ty!

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Everything-Else / Re: I give up

« on: October 07, 2026, 11:19:03 PM »

I haven't been a part of this forum as long as a lot of people here, but I would like to say that the members, especially Kawa, were invaluable in helping piece together what I know about SCI and AGI. Honestly, the interactions weren't always pleasant or didn't always solve the problems I was struggled with, but they did point me in the right direction.

I'm not a programmer by profession, but working with these games has taught me things I didn't think it was possible for me to learn. I now feel fortunate that I was able to experience that journey in my own way, while having direct access to many of the amazing people who did the RE work to make that even possible.

I've used LLMs recently on some non-SCI projects in an effort to learn more about a technology that, as much as I dislike it, probably isn't going away. In addition to several other complaints, I really feel that its use took away a lot of what I love about programming as a hobby.

It's not right for me to gatekeep, and if LLMs make game design more accessible to people who don't want to invest thousands of hours learning a dead interpreter scripting language, that's probably a good thing.

However, I'm very empathetic to Kawa's point. There have always been alternatives; Adventure Game Studio is the first to spring to mind. Not that AGS is wrong or bad, but it's not SCI/AGI, and agentic LLMs feels the same. I didn't join this forum to create a point and click game, I joined it to learn how to create something myself in SCI/AGI.

If LLMs are driving people like Kawa away from the community I'll have to say that it's a net loss.

5

SCI Development Tools / Re: LSL4 Demo

« on: September 15, 2026, 02:57:19 PM »

The art and animation looks really good

6

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Script disposal question

« on: July 31, 2026, 12:02:01 AM »

(script dispose:) also has the side effect of resetting some properties, so that the script can be reused later.

This seems counter intuitive, as I'd expect you'd want every property reset if previously disposed

7

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Script disposal question

« on: July 30, 2026, 03:25:10 PM »

Great, thank you for the information!

8

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Script disposal question

« on: July 30, 2026, 02:03:12 PM »

So my question would still be does (self dispose: delete:) do anything different than (self dispose:) ?

9

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Script disposal question

« on: July 30, 2026, 01:16:01 PM »

But use-after-free is a common source of issues in many languages and you should never rely on it.

I wouldn't dare, but to confirm, it's just sitting around waiting to be overwritten after dispose is called, right? Would delete: do anything different here or at least clear the pointer to the disposed object so it's no longer accessible? Just curious

10

SCI Syntax Help / Script disposal question

« on: July 30, 2026, 12:54:02 PM »

It seems that if you dispose a script in SCI, you can still check its properties afterward and get the expected values from before disposal. It's not until room change that it appears to really flush the script entirely. This feels a bit confusing because if it's not freeing up the heap before room change, what's the point?

Is it just marked disposed and still accessible until overwritten by new objects? It would be helpful to understand how that's working under the hood. TY

11

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Rare AGI Games on standard PC DOS

« on: June 26, 2026, 10:30:31 PM »

BTW, the AGI Wiki is no longer being updated.

I think this is why Threepwang is feeling a bit confused. The AGI wiki lists 1.0U 2.272 as from 1984, which seems to be a mistake. KQ1 1.0U 2.272 as Lance mentioned is from Nov 1986 and logically a DOS game, right? 

It's listed as 84 on the Sierra wiki as well

12

SCI Development Tools / Re: Looping Audio in SCI1.1?

« on: April 28, 2026, 06:57:22 PM »

(using unused numbers, as Sound and Audio assets share a namespace).

I believe that despite seeming to share the same resource numbers you can differentiate between sound and audio by prepending a 1 before the number to use digital audio.

For example, in LB2 most songs are MIDI, but "The Archaeologist Song" has both a MIDI version and an audio version with lyrics. So you can call the MIDI version with 312 or the digital version with 1312.

13

SCI Development Tools / Re: Converting Pics from SCI1 to SCI1.1 format

« on: April 15, 2026, 10:33:40 AM »

Isn't that the expected behavior? There should only be one palette available per room. Loading a pic and view with conflicting palettes is going to overwrite the previous colors.

That's why you can't transition between rooms with conflicting palettes without distortion or fading to black. This was often the case with EcoQuest where they would use checkerboard transitions between rooms with incompatible palettes and it looked terrible.

I believe it's also the reason most actors keep to the first 16 (or 32) colors so they can move between all rooms without issue. The rest of the colors are then used for pics or per room objects.

As an aside, with scummvm you can do some palette tricks, like overriding the static SCI0 palette. You're still limited to 16 colors, but you can assign them to any RGB value, allowing for a monochromatic effect with a dozen shades of a single color.

14

SCI Syntax Help / Re: QfGIVCD view corruption when editing 936.v56

« on: April 13, 2026, 12:34:56 PM »

I fixed a bug related to that many years ago (pull request #1467 if you're interested).

In which repo? Not seeing the PR in the IceFall or Kawa githubs.

15

SCI Syntax Help / Re: QfGIVCD view corruption when editing 936.v56

« on: April 09, 2026, 05:04:53 PM »

Seems to be. I've been working with ashlancer's qfg4-enhanced patches recently and everything appears to compile and work in game correctly. I've not encountered any issues and, so far, the translators using the patches haven't reported any problems. Probably why I didn't realize it was sci2.1 - it's working too well except for the views, which still seem to break randomly in different ways.

Edit: There are some issues I forgot about. KString (0x83) and KArray (0x82) will not compile in SCICompanion. KString should use the same hex value as String, so we can skirt that easily. KArray is only used twice in QfG4CD (array.sc and polyedit.sc), but that might require manual hex editing, because Array is a class in QfG4. None of the exported patches in Ash's repo contain KString or KArray, so I haven't actually dealt with them yet. Also pretty sure I've had issues compiling Phant and LSL7 scripts before, but too long ago to remember. QfG4CD seem mostly good, but since I'm only compiling/testing what Ash patched there certainly could be issues I haven't encountered.

I'm looking at Enrico Rolfi's Tradusci, but 2.4 was hosted in google drive, which blocked the downloads because of 'infection'; which is complete nonsense because a google 'scan' of .scr files always finds an infection, until you rename the extension and the virus magically disappears. /rant

Enrico removed the .exe from the source code for 2.4 this morning, so I'll try building it after work, but I understand it's not so much a view editor as a tool to replace cels of the same size with externally edited bitmaps. It will be interesting to see what its limitations are.

As for the original 936.v56 file I was working with in SCICompanion, changing a pixel adds 10k of bytes in four repeating blocks (view has 4 loops) to the end of the file. I'd like figure out what that extra data is supposed to be and if any loop or cel entries actually point to it. Also need to compare other views known to corrupt when saved, but time is in short supply at the moment.