Messages

841

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Nodes - What are they?

« on: August 29, 2011, 03:02:03 PM »

@Lance: That's one of the things it could be, yes. On the other hand we could also be talking about parse tree nodes, which would be a somewhat longer story to tell. And I guess Brandon's background is not in computer science...

842

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Nodes - What are they?

« on: August 29, 2011, 02:48:20 PM »

There are a couple of things that this could refer to. Can you quote a bit for context, please?

843

SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: Using timers

« on: August 29, 2011, 02:42:16 PM »

Does anyone know for sure that timers go away inappropriately? As I wrote below many years ago, that should only happen if their clients become NULL - which they do after signaling the client. If so, that is a matter to be investigated. Otherwise, in summary, the things to watch for are:

• Make sure the Script you gave to the timer remains valid until timer expiration. That is, place it in a region or globally.
• Make sure that you use the right kind of timer for the job (as described in the original article)

/Lars

844

SCI Syntax Help / Re: A global countdown initiated at a user specified time

« on: August 29, 2011, 02:15:28 PM »

Is http://sciprogramming.com/community/index.php/topic,83.0.html useful, by chance?
I have a few additions to that original how-to, which I am going to post there.

845

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Original SCI syntax

« on: July 30, 2011, 06:20:23 PM »

Hi Lars. I was trying to track you down a few days ago. I tried emailing but not sure if I got the right email address. Is it still the one on your profile page on this site?

Hmm... *checks* no, it's not... *fixes* done.
Should be good now.

846

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Original SCI syntax

« on: July 30, 2011, 09:03:12 AM »

I haven't posted it on-line because it is really only for investigative purposes, and it does not belong in the main tree (or as a formal patch).
I imagined we would take care of things on IRC, though I must admit I'm not entirely clear on what the next step is after trying this code.
What it does is it clears the underBits of all cast members during DrawPic... SSCI does not do that, so if this patch helps, that would indicate
a tricky bug somewhere in our graphics system.

847

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Original SCI syntax

« on: July 30, 2011, 04:37:10 AM »

This is part of script 325 in PQ SWAT (I have been searching in vain for this as well...) - 40 lines out of roughly 4kloc according to the embedded line number info in the script.
So a short piece of code indeed. It seems quite plausible that it is from some kind of paper publication, and scanned in by whoever posted it in the first place - there are typos in the code that look like the errors OCR software would make (setloop instead of setLoop, setcel instead of setCel, etc.)
There are also arguments against that, however: I can see that the code is unfinished in places (compared to the version of the game that I have), indicating that the
game may have been a work in progress at the time this was leaked. This would make it less likely to be an official publication, right?

Thanks Omer, for finding this!
(btw, I came up with a small piece of code to test that sq5 issue of yours - but you haven't been back to the ScummVM forum for a long time)

848

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Arrays as Object Properties

« on: February 04, 2011, 09:34:11 AM »

There is no way to do what you ask. That's part of the reason why they had to introduce the Memory call in SCI01 (but that's an ugly solution to the problem.
There is a hack that you can use, however. Declare a single locsl variable followed by the arrays you need. Then you can (at least from the point of view of the PMachine, not sure about Brian's compiler) index into the large arrays by addressing the lone local variable and using a bit of arithmetic.

So I'm saying something like

Code: [Select]

(local
  baseVar
  array1[10]
  array2[10]
)

(instance Blah of Obj
  (properties
    arrayPos 1
 )
)

(instance Blarg of Obj
  (properties
    arrayPos 11
  )
)
to use the array you then ask for baseVar[arrayPos+i] where i is the index you want.

Actually, you can probably skip the lone local variable and avoid the potential problem with the compiler altogether. Just use the first of your arrays as an index base. Of course, you then subtract one from the arrayPos values above.

849

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Vocab.900 - The 'Black Box'

« on: December 22, 2010, 07:31:10 PM »

What kills me is that all things I hated (and swore would not apply in my future) during my higher education are coming back to haunt me.  Push-down automatons, context-insensitive grammars - I never thought I would ever see them in my professional career.  Of course, I have not.  But in my hobbies?  You bet...   

Since I wrote the "black box" document, I thought I'd reply to this. I wrote the document at a time when I had no formal CS education. But this file contains essentially a context-free grammar for the language understood by the parser. It's complicated a bit by some things that are hard-coded in the parser, so you probably couldn't change the black box file easily (not without being mindful of the limitations of the parser code... which we don't have).

850

SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI Decompiler?

« on: December 22, 2010, 06:04:48 PM »

there is a generic decompiler architecture in the scummvm codebase now (it was written in a Google Summer of Code project). It should be quite possible to write an SCI decompiler based on that. Doesn't help with compilation, of course.

851

SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: A generic Keypad class

« on: December 21, 2010, 06:26:02 AM »

Hmmm.... I just noticed a couple of bugs:

• There is a memory leak in this code - I don't dispose the internal list used by the keypad. Look into the dispose and/or release methods.
• It is not documented how to remove buttons, which you may want to do if you reuse the keypad object. The methods from the superclass EventHandler can be used for this (delete to remove a number of indicated buttons, release to remove all of them)

This is seriously old code, but I'll see what I can do about this.

852

SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / Re: A generic Keypad class

« on: December 21, 2010, 06:15:42 AM »

Does anyone have this file?

Here you go...

853

SCI Development Tools / Re: Source Release of SCI Companion?

« on: November 25, 2010, 06:34:26 PM »

The only reason I even use Studio anymore is to compile my scripts because for some reason whenever Companion compiles ScummVM gets a stack overflow whenever you launch the game in question.

I fixed this a few weeks ago.

854

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Pass variable by reference/pointer

« on: November 13, 2010, 02:03:09 PM »

In my case, I want to be able to manipulate the original object within the procedure; using a clone would not preserve the changes to the original object.

It is not the case that object values are "magically" restored once you return from a subroutine call. An object is always passed to subroutines by reference. I'm afraid I can't see the problem.

855

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Changing menubar colors

« on: November 13, 2010, 01:13:47 PM »

I don't think you can do it in 0.000.572 (the version used by the template game), unfortunately. However, the reason this got added to FreeSCI was of course that the original was able to do it as well.
I forget which version of the interpreter added it, but the last SCI0 interpreter (0.000.685) certainly should support it. I forget whether they are binary compatible with each other, but you can try grabbing an interpreter from games that use this version and using it for your game. You do it with two extra parameters (foreground/background) to the DrawStatus function.

EDIT: The Eco Quest 2 screenshot on the main page certainly seems to be doing it...
EDIT 2: No, 0.000.685 can'r do it either, unfortunately. SCI01 and later only...