Messages

31

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: 40 years ago (KQ1/GAL/AGI)

« on: March 07, 2024, 09:35:17 PM »

This was probably one of the biggest pioneering moments in computer gaming history!

I agree completely.  Like, it's obvious to all of us, but it's really hard to overstate just how important/influential Sierra was to computer games in its infancy. But the most incredible thing to me is how far it's fallen out of the popular eye... like it feels like Sierra games and their franchises are little more than footnotes in most people's consciousnesses, that is if they've even heard of them at all.  King Graham is no Mario or Master Chief or heck even Pac-Man to the collective conscienceness, and is a precursor (or at least contemporary) to all of them.  So obscure that in the Wreck-It Ralph movie, there was nary an easter egg for anything Sierra. But they had a Qbert cameo. Arguably far more obscure.  Of course granted Wreck-It Ralph was a send-up of arcade games, not PC games... but they had a Sonic cameo and he's more console than arcade... so if it was more popular, it probably would have had some representation.  Sorry to hijack your thread for a sec for a rant, Lance. This history of AGI and Kings' Quest stuff is fascinating.

32

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

« on: February 26, 2024, 07:22:45 PM »

Hey, was this the project the original poster was talking about? I think that progress and potential is mind blowing!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/SierraGamingWorld/permalink/1354926355216962/?mibextid=W9rl1R

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

« on: January 26, 2024, 01:20:00 PM »

What's the state of AI when it comes to converting somebody's voice to somebody else's?  I'd love to see a real person perform lines, and then just change the voice to somebody else's, like Gary Owens.

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SCI Development Tools / Re: Can SCI script be modernized into the current age of programming languages?

« on: January 24, 2024, 04:45:56 PM »

Sounds like a fun project. Best of luck to you. 

35

SCI Development Tools / Re: Can SCI script be modernized into the current age of programming languages?

« on: January 24, 2024, 03:42:15 PM »

It sounds like a neat personal hobby project, but I'm a little unclear on your actual goals here...

This attempt is more at unlocking the source and engine for modern times vs preserving what once was.

What I'm thinking is more along the lines of what the existing engine and programming language looks like when modernized.

I can understand modernizing the source, but you've lost me at modernizing the engine.  Kinda like what kawa said, if you're making drastic "modern" changes to the engine maybe you're better off just using a different engine?  Like AGS, or even Unreal or something.

Making changes to the source-code to be more python-like or more java-like, or whatever is one thing, and that's cool... may open up the SCI engine to a wider user-set, but you wouldn't want to convert sci-script to actual python, would you? Like you already have a specific byte-code target that your code should compile to (i.e. the SCI engine, be it original DOC interpretors or ScummVM interpretor), and it'll never be python or java or c#.

But that doesn't mean you can't write a compiler that takes c#-like, or python-like code and compiles it to SCI byte-code.  That still has to be your ultimate target, right?

36

AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 2.3.4

« on: January 24, 2024, 03:01:55 PM »

When importing a game, if any resource issues are detected, WinAGI will show this dialog:


Maybe I could change that to make it clearer? If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

I do a lot of software development for work, and often have to deal with ID-10T errors... message box fatigue is real, and I suffer from it myself... too many programs tell you things that they think are important but really aren't, so the user will just click OK without reading it... or without reading all of it. 

The only thing I could suggest is remove references to "errors" and focus on the "non-conforming" phrase you used before.  they're not errors in that your program did something wrong, so removing the Error word makes things less scary and makes the user less likely to think they did something wrong.

Something like:
MsgBox("Some non-conformities were encountered in the game and/or resource data." & vbCrLf & vbCrLf & "This is normal for most commercial Sierra releases, and do not affect game play or recompilation.", vbOK, "Non-Conformities Detected During Import")

Forgive the bad VB6 script... it's been ages since I'd used it.  If you could go one step further too, present a (slightly) different message if it's really the game or it's the resource, or both.  Remove as many generalities or ambiguities as possible.

That's why I'd originally suggested keeping a table of known bad games (either by ID, or by binary crc of the volumes) and specifically mention that this game is known to have non-conformance issues and that's ok.

37

AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 2.3.4

« on: January 23, 2024, 09:39:29 PM »

The warnings when you import PQ1 are just that - the original resources in Sierra's released version of PQ1 had a couple of 'glitches' in their resources that don't affect the game at all, but are non-standard. WinAGI is just letting you know in case you want to rebuild/modify things that those warnings should be addressed.  You can ignore them completely if you want.

I haven't used WinAGI much, but out of curiosity, are there many known bad resource files of the official sierra AGI games? Like, are they few enough that you could detect them and put an additional message warning that the file decompiled etc properly, that these are just bugs present in the official game releases?  Or is that just an insane amount of work for minimal payoff?

EDIT:

I'm also seeing problems running v2.3.4 vs 2.3.2.  In 2.3.4 if I try and import a new game (KQ3 specifically), it hangs after decompiling but before opening the window where you select the ID name, the interp, the folders... all that stuff.

v2.3.2 works fine.  I did a full uninstall and re-install of each version before testing that.

38

SCI Development Tools / Re: RESOURCE.000 compression/decompression algorithms

« on: January 12, 2024, 03:08:47 PM »

Thank you very much!  I'll check that out tonight.

39

SCI Development Tools / RESOURCE.000 compression/decompression algorithms

« on: January 12, 2024, 02:26:29 PM »

I'm writing my own resource viewer for funsies and I'm hung up on the compression methods and algorithms used on some of the patch files.  The info on the scummvm documentation https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=SCI/Specifications/Resource_files/Decompression_algorithms and sierrahelp documentation http://sci.sierrahelp.com/Documentation/SCISpecifications/10-DecompressionAlgorithms.html seems to be identical and outdated (or incomplete?).

Obviously these are solved problems, because ScummVM can play the games, and SCICompanion can edit them, etc, but would somebody be able to point me to the code in either of those two github repositories where I could follow along?

40

SCI Syntax Help / Re: How does EcoQuest 1 allow to enter any code and not just the copy protected one?

« on: October 02, 2023, 10:38:26 PM »

It I recall correctly, it was pretty common practice at Sierra to remove (most) copy protection schemes from CD versions of their games. Al Lowe even remarked on it in an old interview somewhere that they did it because (at the time) the CD versions were just so big they wouldn?t be casually copied/distributed like the floppy versions were.

And hacked versions were also pretty common for a bunch of games which have unfortunately become kinda the defacto versions still found on abandonware sites today. Gold Rush and Colonel?s Bequest are two notable ones that come to mind.

41

SCI Syntax Help / Re: How does EcoQuest 1 allow to enter any code and not just the copy protected one?

« on: October 02, 2023, 02:10:43 PM »

The problem is I can't submit this since officially (unless someone finds Floppy v1.1) the game was shipped without a working copy protection.

Have you confirmed the bug with an actual floppy version of EcoQuest v1.000, not just one downloaded from the internet?

42

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:Right-Click "Look"

« on: March 30, 2003, 01:40:38 AM »

That coulda been it.  It`s really been a long time since I did it.   But that sounds like something I`d go messing around in.

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Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:Right-Click "Look"

« on: March 26, 2003, 08:06:27 PM »

I stumbled across it once while messing around with the QFG2 debug system.

44

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:Right-Click "Look"

« on: March 26, 2003, 08:53:56 AM »

I don`t think it actually worked on many useful objects.  About the only thing I know for a fact it recognizes a ctrl-click on in QFG2 is the street lamp outside of EOF.  And all it says there is you can`t get that.

Really, I don`t think there are alot of objects in QFG2 that you can get, that are plainly visible on the screen.

The only ones I can think of trying off-hand are the magic lamp after you defeat the fire elemental, the Djinn ring, your equipment after it gets taken.

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Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Right-Click "Look"

« on: March 19, 2003, 08:35:20 PM »

Just one quick question -- I haven`t actually looked too hard for this, but it is just a passing question of mine, so I thought I`d tap the resource of all the knowledgable people on this forum:

With SCI Studio, can you (and how easy is it) to do right-click looking at objects.  Similar to was used in QFG1/2.  (Also, ctrl-click for get object... QFG2 did that to a very limited extent.)