Messages

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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: LSL6 Interface help question mark bug

« on: February 11, 2025, 02:34:25 PM »

The error message doesn't lie. nClickHelp is an instance of a Set so it can't add selectors (methods or properties), only change them.

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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: LSL6 dark intro scenes with narration and no visible text

« on: February 10, 2025, 05:59:38 AM »

The Game class needs a game-specific implementation, right? And that's LSL6, script 0 export 0. That's where saved games get their filenames from and all that.

That game also needs to be referred to in order to control it, so there's a global variable, usually the second (#1, starting at 0), and that needs a name. Variable names aren't stored in the compiled script data so a decompiler has to make a best guess. Now, you could just look for when that particular variable is first used and see how it's used. For example, it could be used as a pointer to a class or instance, so you name it after that class. And it's a global variable so you put a g in front.

A given decompiler may be smart enough to know that all SCI games from a certain period have a similar set of global variables and preset the start of the list to be gEgo, gGame, gCurRoom etc. If so, it'll already know to use gGame way before it's first used. If it didn't, it'd make a best guess and end up with gLSL6 or whatever script 0 export 0 is called.

Same with for example gEgo: if the game has multiple playable characters like LSL5, the first use of global 0 could be best-guessed as gLarry, and suddenly any scripts involving Patti as a playable character make no sense. Hence the hard-coded list.

Plus, there may not be a hard-coded list for that one particular period, so it already knows it's gGame for one set of games, but has to guess for another.

And on top of all that, the whole "put a g in front if it's a global" is not law, so Eric is perfectly within his rights to use theGame. After all, it's what the original code as written by the Sierra devs used!

So yeah, (gLSL6 hideControls:), (theGame hideControls:), (gGame hideControls:), and (global1 hideControls:) are all doing the exact same thing, just with a different name. That's what you get when you mix and match different decompilations. Wack, isn't it?

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SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests

« on: January 17, 2025, 03:52:26 AM »

Supporting Japanese in SCI Companion is a hack and a half that won't cover SQ4, but it will work on for example PQ2, because all of them except SQ4 use Shift-JIS. So what you wanna do is claim the game uses Windows 1252 which bypasses the code page translation, then use AppLocale or some such to make SCI Companion itself run in Shift-JIS. Because it was never a Unicode application and for most of us can be assumed to run on Win-1252.

And that means the encoding used in PQ2-JP can match SCI Companion's... by making SCI Companion match PQ2's instead.

As for the font data: the Japanese games run on a system that has such beautiful features as "an entire Shift-JIS kanji character set in ROM" and "can display higher-res fonts on top of low-res graphics". The actual SCI font data only contains some katakana in the upper moby.

And then there's my SCI1.1+ which has UTF-8 support, entirely inspired by the fact that in the font data, it says "number of characters" instead of "highest character number". So "256 characters" instead of "up to #255". It's a 16-bit number and Unicode at the time hadn't developed into the astral planes yet. But I just said SCI Companion is not Unicode aware, so how do you use it with SCI1.1+? That's the best part: you don't! I wrote a command line tool to handle message resources in UTF-8. The only thing SCI Companion knows is that the max amount of characters isn't 256.

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SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests

« on: January 16, 2025, 06:29:53 AM »

CP-850 is the DOS Latin-1 codepage, used in Western Europe. I, being Dutch and old know it well, and it'd be a nice little challenge to try and extend things to support European games as well as American ones. (And Japanese if you know how, it's a trick.)

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: King's Quest 6 Hires's Aspect Ratio is completely wrong [RANT]

« on: December 19, 2024, 04:21:49 PM »

When you said the title bar takes about 19 pixels, I figured one way to solve it maybe could be to have the 10 pixel status line, which would be at least 20 pixels in hi-res mode, not count at all so as to make room for the title bar. But then there's the "large fonts" video drivers that'd make the title bar way thicker than that.

Oh well :3

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AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 3.0.0-alpha8.0

« on: December 18, 2024, 04:00:22 AM »

Not quite that simple in C#... But I did finally figure it out.

graphics.DrawString("Hello world!", someFont, Brushes.Black, rectangle) may have more arguments, sure, but...

I tried to check out your code sample to see some better examples but the link is broken (do you work for Microsoft?  )

My bad, it's a private repo.
It's mostly just stuff like

Code: [Select]

private void roomPreviewPictureBox_Paint(object sender, PaintEventArgs e)
{
var g = e.Graphics;
g.DrawImage(anotherImage, 0, 0, targetWidth, targetHeight);
g.DrawRectangle(Pens.White, (obim.Left * zoom) - 2, (obim.Top * zoom) - 2, (obim.Width * zoom) + 1, (obim.Height * zoom) + 1);etc.

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AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 3.0.0-alpha8.0

« on: December 17, 2024, 06:14:39 AM »

I expect the graphics based editors to be especially difficult.

Having done graphics editors in both VB Classic and C#, I can tell you this much: it's not that hard to use System.Drawing.

Your picture box control's OnPaint event gives you a PaintEventArgs, and that in turn gets you a Graphics object. And that? Oh, you can draw anything from there. Here's the code from my attempt at a SCUMM room editor, specifically the paint event. I can't imagine doing arbitrary polygons (the walk so-called-boxes) in VB Classic as easily as I had it there.

Note that I've developed an interesting aversion to how the WinForms designer produces, well, designer files, and create all the controls for that room editor myself, by hand. That's entirely my own code, my own choice, and none of that really matters but it might throw you off a bit so I thought I'd mention it. The important thing is how to use Graphics to draw stuff to Bitmaps.

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SCI Syntax Help / Re: Adding a fourth loop to talker portraits?

« on: December 16, 2024, 12:56:24 PM »

I've been running into crashing issues whenever a conversation starts to begin

If I were a betting cat, my first guess would be that none of the talkers actually provide a fourth argument and a lack of proper argc checks and/or null reference checks messes up the part where they're actually drawn and cycled.

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SCI Syntax Help / Re: Adding a fourth loop to talker portraits?

« on: December 13, 2024, 04:05:34 AM »

Now consider: they also bought Coktel Vision, for their animation system. If you look at the leaked SCI32 code you can see that the video player code retains its original French comments, including a whole card at the top with ASCII checkboxes and text fields.

Now consider this was once about Talker portraits only having three parts.

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SCI Syntax Help / Re: Adding a fourth loop to talker portraits?

« on: December 12, 2024, 04:28:08 PM »

Now it makes sense. If you pick "small", the high-res assets, including the Rave portraits, wouldn't fit.

Anyway, we've gone way off track!

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SCI Syntax Help / Re: Adding a fourth loop to talker portraits?

« on: December 12, 2024, 09:38:46 AM »

It was clear what element you were talking about. I'm just saying it doesn't make sense to put such a toggle there.

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SCI Syntax Help / Re: Adding a fourth loop to talker portraits?

« on: December 12, 2024, 09:12:15 AM »

(by right-clicking on the title bar or application icon, maybe?)

I'm sorry but that does not make any sense.

Anyway, I believe they may have been called Rave portraits, and regardless of the tech name they allowed talkers to be more visually expressive if I recall correctly. More information in the relevant ScummVM code.

No other SCI game used them to my knowledge.

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SCI Syntax Help / Re: Adding a fourth loop to talker portraits?

« on: December 12, 2024, 07:51:52 AM »

Even worse: the Windows portraits weren't views.

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SCI Syntax Help / Re: Adding a fourth loop to talker portraits?

« on: December 11, 2024, 02:57:27 PM »

It's too bad my game doesn't use talker portraits or I'd have a very good reason to implement it myself.

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SCI Syntax Help / Re: Adding a fourth loop to talker portraits?

« on: December 11, 2024, 02:37:52 PM »

Basically, yeah. Good luck!