Messages

1

Everything-Else / Re: agigames.com

« on: October 15, 2012, 04:30:48 AM »

Seems like it now redirects to Nick's site. Quick check at the registrar information, and turns out Nick grabbed it

2

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: SpongeBob AdventurePants

« on: October 08, 2012, 09:32:12 AM »

Cool screenshot How much of the game's still left to do?

3

AGI Syntax Help / Re: The illusion of scrolling in AGI

« on: September 14, 2011, 06:15:21 PM »

I've done so -- more or less -- once in a long-since cut intro for NF. It was basically scrolling down a castle. That was veeeery easy to do (although complicated drawing-wise cause I suck at animations). It was just a single view that scrolled down. The whole thing was limited to a tiny screen to do so.

Another possibility's something Cloudee's come up for in SCI and I have yet to implement in AGI. That's for scrolling in all 4 directions (giving the impression of a round world), so it should be possible to adapt to just horizontally or just vertically.

That possibility is hiding the ego view, centering a dummy ego on the screen (or placing it at an offset of the center, or wherever, but it's principally fixed in place). You got some objects on the screen, like some scenery, which moves in accordance to ego's position (moves to the front if ego moves up, moves to the back if ego walks down, moves to the right if ego walks left, and to the left if ego walks right). I guess the least resource-hungry would be to make a couple of background strips that scroll and loop (Hanna Barbera-style). You can even do parrallex scrolling that way. You can still move in the most important objects, like a wall to jump over or a pit to fall into, too. I wouldn't create a Bullet Hell shooter this way, though (max. of 16 objects in one room. 1 hidden player, 1 replacement ego, and 1 enemy leaves room for a whoopin' total of 13 more bullets. Not exactly Bullet Hell )

So yeah, depending on what you're trying to do, it's possible to do. If you need more technical details from the SCI version, you'll have to ask Cloudee. What I explained is just what I understood from it, but haven't gotten around to doing it myself yet, so who knows... maybe it'll blow your neighbour's kitchen up if you try it!

4

SCI Community News / Re: The Design Desktop - Play unreleased sneak peaks of upcoming SCI releases

« on: June 29, 2011, 06:07:44 AM »

Has Cloudee posted since the site was down? If it was moved to a new server, perhaps not everything got moved.

The site's been down...?

5

Everything-Else / Open office spaces

« on: June 20, 2011, 04:33:43 AM »

Open office spaces... I'm starting to fully understand that you can define them as follow:

"SHUT THE FUCK UP GUYS 10M FURTHER! I'M TRYING TO GET SOME WORK DONE AND CAN'T EVEN HEAR WHAT THE GUY NEXT TO ME IS SAYING, YOU LOUD, UNPRODUCTIVE BUMS! GET BACK TO WORK INSTEAD OF PARTYING ALL DAY!"

Yes, gotta love open office spaces Been like that literally everywhere Anybody here actually been in one that's NOT counter-productive?

6

AGI Development Tools / Re: PICEDIT 1.3 Milestone 1 released

« on: June 20, 2011, 03:51:25 AM »

A dither fill might be a bit tricky for AGI, but when I've added SCI0 support (which is something that is ongoing in the background), the SCI mode will have all the standard SCI0 fills. A dither fill in AGI would need to use diagonal lines of alternating colours, which is definitely possible but might generate a lot of data. A standard AGI fill, on the other hand, is about 3 bytes. But it does sound like a feature that people would like regardless of how much data it generates. I guess it might restrict games to being run on NAGI though.

We already do that kind of dithering, but in Photoshop, MS Paint, ... and then convert it with Vector If Picedit would offer the option to select two colours, then click the area to fill, it would actually be faster than how we do it now.

And yes, it results in NAGI-only games

7

AGI Development Tools / Re: Problem with Picedit (Java)

« on: June 08, 2011, 09:07:21 AM »

I'm not sure if AGI Studio is open sourced or not. Other people have worked on it since Peter Kelly abandoned it, but the most recent development is quite some time ago.

The original PICEDIT doesn't work very well on my PC, so I'm not sure how many people use AGIStudio for picture editing these days. Perhaps they use Dosbox to run PICEDIT, or more likely they are using WinAGI.

The command line option is now on my todo list.

Under Win98, Picedit worked fine. XP's got problems with it. Some years ago, The Joker taught me how to get around that, and I got the impression that Klownstein uses the same technique.

This technique (as far as I can remember) goes as following:

1. Draw a very basic, rough outline in Picedit (boot it up in Dosbox or whatever, suffer the weird shit it pulls for a short amount of time, then quit as soon as you can). Pic should be saved as BMP. This step is mainly to get the alignment of your lines right, not to do any actual drawing.

2. Open the BMP in MS Paint or whatever you want to use and flesh everything out.

3. To get the details (and especially dithering) in, use the selector tool to select the part you want to alter, copy it, open the Views editor in AGI Studio, paste it and treat it as a view. Then copy-paste it back into your BMP once you're done.

4. Save the file and convert it to an AGI picture using Vector


So... nope. People do use AGI Studio for picture editing, but not the way you think The Java version of Picedit helps alot in getting rid of the pain of step 1, though. Maybe it can be used to add a 5th step to the process: tweaking the picture to become less resource-intensive (turning it into as little vector commands as possible)

8

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Play community-created games in a browser

« on: June 07, 2011, 03:42:13 AM »

Anyone have some old DOS binaries of Sarien?

Dunno if it's this one, but modified: 2004-07-21... Comes pretty close, no? Especially since all the Win versions I find that clearly state they're win versions, are from 2007.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sarien/files/

9

AGI Development Tools / Re: picedit Google code project

« on: June 06, 2011, 08:39:37 AM »

I agree with Collector on using the scrollwheel to zoom. I'm not sure how zooming'd be useful for AGI pics, though. Maybe it'll make the lines alot thicker, too, allowing more accuracy? Dunno...

Being able to quickly access colours and / or tools without having to move the mouse would be useful, but that's what keyboard shortcuts're for

10

AGI Development Tools / Re: Problem with Picedit (Java)

« on: June 06, 2011, 08:35:44 AM »

1. Windows 7 does that with almost every file. If anybody knows how to turn that off, they'd make me a very happy guy.

2. How do you load a game in Picedit?

11

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Play community-created games in a browser

« on: June 06, 2011, 08:28:29 AM »

Another thing I've found:
http://web.ist.utl.pt/antonio.afonso/agi/
I can't check it out, cause I'm at work right now (LSL might have a boss key, but still...), but'll check it out further this evening.

12

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Quest for Rita

« on: June 06, 2011, 08:24:03 AM »

Has anybody heard or played Quest for Rita? I just stumbled across it on a site that doesn't want to load (http://geekyblob.com). The Google Cache version of the site is pretty interesting and makes me want to try that end game sequence out

13

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Play community-created games in a browser

« on: June 06, 2011, 08:19:47 AM »

Did a quick google for AGI interpreters, and found these:

DAGII -- written in Portable C++ (hehehe, "Interpreter Interpreter" )
AGI -- written in Java (VERY confusing name, that!)
MeAGI -- written mainly for phones'n such, and doesn't seem finished

That's all I can find (besides the typical ones: NAGI, Sarien and ScummVM). No YAGI or such.

14

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Play community-created games in a browser

« on: May 31, 2011, 03:52:50 AM »

Didn't I already explain this earlier in this thread?

The original AGI interpreters have a very limited amount of memory. Some fanmade games (Enclosure, Hobbits, etc) have some resources that're too big for that memory, or load in too many resources. The original AGI interpreter can't handle that, as it's made for computers from a different age. NAGI allows bigger memory usage (I don't know whether it's by design or not). That means that some games that have at least one room which requires more memory than the original interpreter can handle, can only run on NAGI.

For the record, most of the time, those resources're background pictures with lots of dithering. There're some techniques to do that without any problem, outside of Picedit. But once it's in the AGI picture format, it's a whooooooole lot of commands to draw single-pixel lines. That eats up an ENORMOUS amount of memory (enormous to AGI terms)

15

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Play community-created games in a browser

« on: May 30, 2011, 09:01:07 AM »

Okay, I'm finished.  All the games (except the NAGI ones) are playable either on-line or off-line (both from within a browser).  The archive consists of:

- An index page of all the games in a sortable html table, nothing fancy.
- A generic, parameterized page to launch jDosBox
- jDosBox itself, current stable version
- All games in 10 meg images, zipped up

The NAGI games are listed in the index, but are not playable.

The file is 30 meg, couldn't upload it.  Cloudee & Raf, PM me so I can get this to you guys - assuming you'd like to host it.  I guess I don't see a problem releasing the package for the community to download as well.

On to testing the sarien.net solution.

PM sent. Now, for me, the biggest issue's the NAGI games. Those tend to be the best showcase games (Enclosure, Klownstein's Hobbits, ...), so it'd be nice to get those working as well. Things should calm down here soon, so I'll be able to look into it as well.