Messages

1

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

« on: May 08, 2025, 10:04:53 PM »

Ha, crazy stuff I wonder how he noticed it.

A side effect from this is that digital archaeologists will be able to tell whether screenshots are from original interpreters or scummvm/others in the future...

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AGI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: Better dialogue in AGI

« on: May 07, 2025, 12:05:00 AM »

Looks great! Can't wait to see our Lizard overlords.

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AGI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: Better dialogue in AGI

« on: April 30, 2025, 12:11:24 AM »

I remember the "Operation Recon" demo - they used speech bubbles. The author(s) wrote an external utility that would render and save new view files with a custom font that they then imported into their game.

You could try that, but you run the risk of your game growing very fast in size. I can't remember the maximum amount of views on the screen, but it if it's more than say, 100 (it isn't) or so you could build text up programmatically too with each character/letter being a view. Not really feasible.

1. I think that the Display command draws directly to the visible screen, so if you call show.pic after displaying the text it should redraw the double buffer (I'm not 100% sure).

2. The only way to change the styling of the builtin text box is to alter the game executable as far as I know

3. I think it is possible to display a view with a print.at command at the same time. You just call draw and erase on the view before and after displaying the text.

4

AGI Development Tools / Re: Any AGI engine upgrade projects? Looking for better graphics.

« on: April 27, 2025, 07:32:19 PM »

Part of the charm of an AGI or SCI0 game is the vector graphics... If you're gonna use bitmaps you might as well use AGS like Crimson Diamond did anyway... AGS has way bigger community, better tools, and easier to learn.

The only reason to adopt SCI with bitmap graphics is if you're going for authenticity.

FWIW, I like the Lisp/Smalltalk like language that SCI programs use. As a kid I didn't get it, but later I learned Lisp for work (CAD) and when I went back to it I found it fairly intuitive. The only parts I find difficult are the OO concepts and different terminology from today, like selectors/indices and superclasses hierarchy etc... I've attempted to write my own compiler for SCI (I wrote an AGI decompiler once), but it's not nearly as simple as the AGI logic scripts.

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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: Thoughts on the LSL4 babes

« on: April 17, 2025, 09:06:53 AM »

I can't recall sierra using a gradient background like that in EGA but it's a nice touch.

Quest for Glory 2 immediately came to mind.



You'll notice if you look into it that this is one of the few non-vector backgrounds in the game. Cos there's no way you're doing that gradient in vectors.

Wow I've played that game a thousand times and it never occurred to me that that image wasn't a vector image...

Takes away from some of the magic to be honest

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SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: Thoughts on the LSL4 babes

« on: April 16, 2025, 07:58:45 PM »

It's a lot of work, but you'd be better off tracing the pixelled version. You'd reduce the size by 95% I reckon. Very nice picture though. I can't recall sierra using a gradient background like that in EGA but it's a nice touch.

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Everything-Else / The modern definition of "AGI"

« on: April 07, 2025, 10:01:05 PM »

Anyone else's ears prick up these days when they hear "AGI" mentioned? Of course, now with the advent of the AI revolution and tools like ChatGPT etc, AGI stands for "Artificial General Intelligence". If you're a proponent of Machine Learning (as I am) you'll see the term AGI bandied about quite a lot.

But to me, AGI will always be Adventure Game Interpreter.

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Playing around with AI Image Conversion on Sierra titles

« on: April 03, 2025, 01:53:12 AM »

There area other models like "Depth Anything" by Meta that could be used to re-create the priority screens. If you were REALLY keen on upscaling/recreating a game using AI, it could be done, albeit not without any manual work.

Upscaling sprites and animations (views) is much more difficult though.

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: King's Quest 4 - Did you know they replaced background pictures??

« on: March 30, 2025, 06:41:47 PM »

I started writing a 65c02 port of the AGI engine for the modern retro computer the Commander X16. It uses 512k banked ram in addition to the main 64k. So far memory hasn't been much of an issue. It does need careful management though. The hardest parts are dealing with the animation subsystems (ie views, priority, and buffering). The CX16 has a decent graphics card - the VERA with 128k of VRAM which helps.

Program code is about 30kb (give or take). That includes look up tables etc.

Attached is a gif of it loading Kings Quest 2 - you can see the glitchy view for the intro which is what I'm working on now. Loading is slow, but everything else is acceptable. It's slightly slower than say a Tandy 1000.

There's another guy making one in C for the CX16 which is a lot further along, but I'm not sure if it's still progressing. My idea was that if I could get it working on the CX16, then other 6502 systems would be worth a look. Even the Commodore 64 might be feasible, and with a lot of blood sweat and tears the NES might even be possible (with a few custom mappers).

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Back in development: V - Resist or Perish

« on: March 30, 2025, 06:20:18 PM »

I remember this - was quite excited for it at the time. I should blow the dust of some of my old AGI game projects... Approaching nearly 30 years now wow.

I remember VonsterDMonster by name only...

It's weird a lot of people on this forum I don't recognise from the old days, but can't fight the feeling we're all still the same people just with different usernames (Mine's still the same - you can find some cringey posts of mine from when I was 16 on MegaTokyo forums back in the day)

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Playing around with AI Image Conversion on Sierra titles

« on: March 30, 2025, 03:45:54 AM »

Hehe, it certainly has come a long way since DALL-E and Stable Diffusion 1.5 (Which is what I used for those images in my original post)

As soon as the new OpenAI image generator came out the first thing I tried was some sierra screenshots...



 

 

 

The only thing I don't like about the OpenAI generator is that it's not open source, and it seems to put a brown hue over every 2nd image...

12

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

« on: November 19, 2024, 10:03:25 PM »

Hey I commented on your reddit post too - I loved the idea of this.

Its a shame you took it down. I have found AI generation to be very divisive actually, and have learned to be careful whom I mention it to these days.

FWIW I would have left it up and waited until told to remove it. 

There are some very good text-to-speech and even speech-to-speech toolsets out there -  I use them for work video presentations.  You could use a voice creator and then use speech-to-speech with fans acting.

13

SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI Unlocked - Sierra's game engine running on Python3 + Raylib

« on: March 18, 2024, 10:40:47 PM »

Sounds like fun little hobby project - good luck! 

I haven't watched the full video yet, but are you planning on open sourcing it?

Can you tell us more about the implementation? What does the transpiler convert to? I see at the end code to specific to LSL, does it re-write SCI bytecode to python?

Are you using the game specs found on the Wiki? Or other sources, such as SCUMMVM? Did you consider any libraries more python specific like PyGame(I'm aware it's an SDL wrapper)?

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

« on: March 18, 2024, 10:33:26 PM »

I had a play with a Gary Owens synth trained on SQ4 using ElevenLabs, with the exact thoughts of trying to implement it in SQ5.

Then I saw the earlier thread and have seen how difficult it might be and figured it's not worth it for the small niche of fans that might appreciate it.

15

AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 2.3.5 - Fixes Game Import Bug

« on: January 26, 2024, 04:31:20 AM »

Yep same here I can now load all games I've tried.

Thanks.