Messages

31

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:More about Russian SCI...

« on: June 13, 2003, 05:28:45 PM »

I added Russian fonts to Hero's Quest(SCI0) and it all works fine, except this: the SCI engine never understands Russian letters as letters. So, when you type command on Russian, he understands it like a bunch of spaces.    Is there somebody who knows how to make new letters in SCI?

You can't. The SCI0 interpreter is not 8-bit clean, and large parts
would have to be re-engineered to make it work (That's what Sierra did with SCI01).
Some time ago, I put a little document together that never made it into the FreeSCI
docs - you can now find it here: http://freesci.linuxgames.com/i18n.txt

Lars

32

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:Portraits?

« on: June 09, 2003, 10:35:28 AM »

I meant the flag, but it's still nice to know about the whole synchronizing thing.

I don't know how interesting it is... it just makes the interpreter ignore calls
to Animate (well, skip most of the processing, at any rate). It means that you
have to take care of view drawing yourself (as Brian did in his earliest SCI demos). The purpose was no doubt to save a few clock cycles - since computers have become much faster since then, there's no real reason to use it. It's just more work.

Oh, and if you want the variable number that controls this, it's hardcoded
to global variable 84. So don't reorder/delete the variables in the template game, or you may end up tickling this feature unpredictably.
The variable, when used, is usually pointed at a list called fastCast (in script 994 in original games) which is created and destroyed dynamically.
The interpreter does not use the actual list, except as a flag (NULL/non-NULL).

Lars

33

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:Portraits?

« on: June 09, 2003, 08:18:41 AM »

* wiggles his ears *

Please, do elaborate, Lars...

OK. SCI1 has a new resource type called SYNC which allows you
to mark positions within a digital sound sample. A kernel call
allows you to retrieve this information while the sound is playing.
One possible use of this lip synch, I'll leave the others to your
imagination :-)

34

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:Portraits?

« on: June 09, 2003, 02:16:35 AM »

Not completely true. Most games that I have looked at set a
special flag to circumvent the usual Animate cycle (for
performance reasons) when displaying these portraits.
There's also special code in there to handle lip synching -
but Brian is right, the concept itself is quite simple to
implement.

35

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:Suggestions for SCI Studio and SCI itself

« on: March 29, 2003, 02:51:56 PM »

SCIVM does exist. It's called FreeSCI.
Its main aim is to support the present games, not develop new things. On the other hand, we won't try to stop people who want to do that.

Lars
(FreeSCI maintainer)

36

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:King's Quest VI intro movie

« on: March 01, 2003, 06:32:03 AM »

Okay, next question.

In Larry 1 (VGA), in Lefty's Bar, you can get severely drunk (in my case by buying two whiskeys, holding one, drinking the other). The music started warping! Just try and explain that one, master!

SCI1 allows you to inject MIDI commands into the playing channels. I can't test it right now, but this is quite likely what it does (sending a vibrato controller command, or something like that). LSL5 uses it more obviously, in the sequence where Patti plays the synth in a studio.

Lars

37

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Documentation for the new SCI Studio?

« on: February 27, 2003, 11:18:58 AM »

Brian,

I was wondering how much of the documentation for SS will be done when the program comes out? It seems reasonable to assume "relatively little" since you've spent a lot of time coding.

Lars

38

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:Yet another debug-mode thread...

« on: September 19, 2002, 05:41:01 PM »

This debug code is present in many SCI1 games. Often, it depends on a certain resource existing
in the game directory (as opposed to in the resource file), so it can be activated by
extracting all script and heap resources. You will probably find that the file in question
is present in the beta version. The exact resource you need varies from game to game,
but I've been able to get a debug mode in at least LB2 and SQ5. I'm thinking that there
must be one in KQ6 as well (which I would like to see because there is a dialog editor which
isn't there in the others), but I don't think there's a way to activate it.

39

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:Keypress events?

« on: September 11, 2002, 12:06:03 PM »

The shift keys (and various others) don't generate keyboard events. Rather, their state is implicit in any Event object.
In other words, look at the 'modifiers' properry of every incoming event, not just unclaimed keyboard events. You will want
to modify User:handleEvent to handle this as early as possible,
since the class hierarchy discards null events by default.

Lars

40

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:Freddy Pharkas

« on: September 07, 2002, 03:57:41 AM »

They used SCI and were great games also.

Don't judge them by the file names... yes, there are RESOURCE.00? files in there, but
they are in an entirely different format, and the executable is definitely not SCI.
I'm not even sure if they are script-based, like SCI.

41

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:MP3's and VGA?

« on: September 06, 2002, 07:23:55 PM »

The reason I have such an interest in music with SCI0 games is that I make electronic music.

Ah, so you have experience with MIDI... you may find it of interest that SCI1 allows you to inject
MIDI events into the sound driver. LSL5 uses this (synth-playing sequence).

42

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:Menu bar?

« on: September 05, 2002, 01:16:39 PM »

That would depend on the SCI version. If I recall correctly, the status bar and menu bar functionality
always appear together, so the interpreter from SQ4 most likely has both.
I'm not sure about the one Brian uses (and won't bother to check just now),
but it might be possible to use the interpreter from the floppy version of SQ4
(the CD version is SCI1.1, so it won't do). The interpreeter from LSL6 definitely
includes both, but it is SCI1.1 and won't be supported.

43

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:MP3's and VGA?

« on: September 05, 2002, 01:01:31 PM »

I'm just pushing a pet theorem to the limit here, so please bear with me:

Actually, you would not need Assembly code to write an MP3 decoder. SCI is a Turing-complete language,
which means that it is, in theory, possible to realize any computation with it, provided that its
result is known to exist and takes finite time to come up with. Now, getting the decoded data to the
sound card is another matter, and would require some hacking to do. You would probably also run into
a memory shortage. Oh well, so much for theory.

Lars
(who is a CS student, and proud of it)

44

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:MP3's and VGA?

« on: September 04, 2002, 05:00:38 PM »

juncmodule: Heh, that's a good one. Britney Spears isn't exactly the kind of music I had in mind...
Re sound effects: Yes, a converter would be nice - there are so many good sound tools available that we don't need yet another one just for SCI.
We would need a built-in tool for handling sync resources, however.

45

Mega Tokyo SCI Archive / Re:MP3's and VGA?

« on: September 04, 2002, 12:24:15 PM »

SCI can't read MP3s, so the point about 486s is moot. On the other hand,
SCI1 does support CD audio. An approach I suggested earlier is to make the mp3s available
on a web page and ask users to burn an audio CD with them.