Messages

1

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

« on: April 25, 2026, 08:20:08 PM »

Never mind. I realized you can just call an Audio resource with DoSound and loop with -1 infinitely.

2

SCI Development Tools / Looping Audio in SCI1.1?

« on: April 25, 2026, 06:25:00 PM »

I'm porting a SCI1 game to the SCI Companion's SCI1.1 template game and some of the SCI1 Sound assets have a digital track embedded. I used Sierra Resource Viewer to extract all the digital tracks as WAV files and add them as Audio resources (using unused numbers, as Sound and Audio assets share a namespace).

I have been auditing the code's 374 play: calls and making modifications to affected sounds. For example, using (DoSound sndGET_AUDIO_CAPABILITY) to dynamically swap between using Sound and Audio asset depending on audio driver. I also ended up creating a DigitalSound wrapper class to emulate cases of dynamically setting a Sound object's number property for play later.

So far I've found two cases (battle yelling and tavern chatter) where a Sound with a digital track is looped for ambiance. I looked at the SCI Companion Docs but I didn't see a way to loop DoAudio in SCI1.1. Is there a built-in way to loop Audio, like setting the Sound class's loop property to -1? I was wondering if it was possible to attach a script to a room's script to detect when it was time to loop the audio, or make a global list like gSounds or global object like gMusic and add check in the main game loop. Or should I just use gumby's sciAudio which supports looping but is not "authentic"?

Is there a best or intended way to loop Audio in SCI1.1?

3

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

« on: April 15, 2026, 10:22:43 PM »

Thanks! I see now! 64 globally and the rest for the room. I'll have to reconvert the Pics because they have the wrong global palette embedded. And I can use the palette remap feature to align actors with the global palette.

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

« on: April 15, 2026, 08:50:44 AM »

I'm using the SCI1.1 template game as the base, so I'm not sure what would be wrong with the offset table... If I only render the Pic in an empty room it renders with the embedded palette correctly. Just for some reason it seems to be overriding the colors with a View's palette added to gCast. Could be a low level class code issue. I'm slowly transitioning the low level classes to match the template game.

In better news, the iconbar and cursors appear to render properly in an empty room. I had to manually recreate the cursors as Views, offsetting the cursor number by 1000, and factor in the offset in the non-kernel setCursor.

5

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

« on: April 14, 2026, 05:26:24 AM »

I updated the Actor classes to match the template to fix the bug of rendering every View as View 0. Annoyingly that change caused Pic to use the palette of the last drawn View, as soon as the View adds itself to gCast.

6

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

« on: April 10, 2026, 09:25:13 AM »

I don't believe I've run into any palette related issues yet. I am running into a very familiar graphical glitch, which if recall correctly I think is because the class property definitions were incorrect and needed to be updated to match the template game. I'm trying to fix this now.

7

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

« on: April 08, 2026, 09:16:26 PM »

Thanks! That worked!

The only issue I had was that SCI1.1 palettes exported from SCICompanion didn't work for some reason. I had to use the SCI Viewer scripts to get a valid palette.

8

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

« on: April 08, 2026, 12:30:56 PM »

Hmm... I tried that but it kept telling me I needed a "palname.dat" file. Do you need to run it inside a project or something? I had copied a test file into the tool folder.

9

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

« on: April 08, 2026, 10:43:22 AM »

Before I attempt to program a Pic converter or recreate each Pic manually, I wanted to know if anyone had other suggestions for approaching this.

I'm trying to convert a SCI1 game to SCI1.1. I decompiled and bootstrapped the scripts (more changes may be required later to properly handle audio). It was crashing on run and I narrowed down the immediate cause to the DrawPic function call. I had assumed that the SCI1.1 interpreter could handle SCI1 Pics, but perhaps it's not backward compatible? Unfortunately the internal developer tools have Pics editor builds (PE.EXE) that stop at 1992. PICTEST.EXE appears to test for SCI1.1 Pics and rejects SCI1 Pics. I also tried running PIC2NEW.EXE, but it kept asking for a palname.dat. Within SCICompanion, I'm not aware of an existing way to convert Pics between formats, only extracting all files, importing individual files but maintaining the format or exporting just the visual screen.

10

SCI Development Tools / Re: Voice acting in Space Quest V - Part 2

« on: January 28, 2025, 06:33:32 AM »

Thanks, @L@Zar0. If you want to share changes, I'd be happy to try add the fixes and update the installation exe.

11

SCI Development Tools / Re: Voice acting in Space Quest V - Part 2

« on: November 21, 2024, 12:27:25 AM »

@cosmicr Hi again. I did put it back up.

I assume at the present time most people are disinterested in working on a project with this kind of AI, so I currently think any fan voice-mod would have to be all AI voices or all real voices. In the case of Space Quest I felt the narrator had to sound like Gary Owens, but I don't want to deal with that kind of constraint, so I'm looking at CotL and HoC.

12

SCI Development Tools / Re: Voice acting in Space Quest V - Part 2

« on: November 15, 2024, 07:25:38 AM »

They said organize fans to do the voice acting instead of TTS, no? Sorry, I made a comma a period and maybe it sounded wrong.

13

SCI Development Tools / Re: Voice acting in Space Quest V - Part 2

« on: November 15, 2024, 06:53:20 AM »

Thanks for the suggestion and kind words, Collector.

Maybe that'd be easier, as training voices, especially for smaller roles with the current tech it is really inconvenient and labor intensive without taking bad shortcuts.

14

SCI Development Tools / Re: Voice acting in Space Quest V - Part 2

« on: November 15, 2024, 12:41:09 AM »

Yeah, I guess I just got a bit paranoid after a bunch of attention shot up like a rocket after the Hacker News posting.

I guess I just needed a few days and some kind of external assurance that I wasn't going crazy. I mean, I know that cg videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti are still posted and voice and image models of celebrities are fine-tuned and uploaded online. Regarding me, the relevant legislation in my state and in the US is still early and in the works, so I'm safe.

I'll trust you and I've put things back up for now...

But like I said earlier, I would like to try and figure out how to make unique voices so I don't need to worry about this stuff anymore.

15

SCI Development Tools / Re: Voice acting in Space Quest V - Part 2

« on: November 13, 2024, 05:29:09 PM »

And... really I was spooked by the possibility of the passing of the No Fakes act, which, as I best understand it, would make computer-generated likeness protected property in the US. I want to continue abiding by all relevant laws and certainty want to avoid getting into trouble over something that, again, people have said sounds "alien" and "bad", and so I have preemptively taken it down and will not do something this risky in the future.