Messages

31

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: So You Thought You Were a Hero? Development Journal

« on: December 08, 2021, 12:36:50 AM »

Bonus points if you can have it import/export a QFG character profile file. 

I certainly could. That's something I was considering. Maybe late in development (like when this is ported to SCI32) this could be added, since I've already reverse-engineered the import/export scripts for QFG4.

Of course, I'll have to ensure compatibility with QFG5, so naturally the QFG4.5-exclusive spells will not be exported. There will be an in-game explanation for this, though (for example, with Leprechaun Gold, it was already mentioned that Silmaria suffers from "tremendous inflation" according to Tarna's moneychanger, so I could have Erasmus confiscate the spell for Silmaria's economic safety). Another idea is that the events are all just a dream by the Hero (which would explain the discrepancies between this and the official games).

On another note, the third and last enemy in the game, Cleo's murderer, has been added. There may be more enemies on the way, but for now, I'd like to focus on the actual rooms.

32

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: So You Thought You Were a Hero? Development Journal

« on: December 07, 2021, 07:26:18 PM »

And now I've managed to make random encounters and combat possible! The Goblin and Elite Guard are now possible combatants. Now I just need to set the Encounter region for every room that is meant to have a possible encounter, and maybe grab some code from the QFG3 decompilation...

33

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: So You Thought You Were a Hero? Development Journal

« on: December 01, 2021, 11:18:23 PM »

And the original QFG4.5 authors apparently never completed QFG4, since Bonehead (who was incorrectly identified as Bones) mentioned that you beat Baba Yaga a second time in Monrova (actually Mordavia), which never actually happens. I have since rewritten this dialog to be more accurate.

Good to hear that continuity will be better maintained.

Also better maintained will be the character classes. All three hero types had the sword and shield, which made the Magic User a bit too overpowered with his Leprechaun Gold and Healing spells (at least he would have been, had spellcasting in combat actually hurt the enemy). I plan to have only the Fighter have the sword and shield, just like in the official games.

Other nerfs will be the Leprechaun Gold spell (can no longer use it to pay off the lawyer, reduces honor, etc.), the ability to mug people (reduces honor, takes away puzzle points),

I want to add more alternative solutions for each hero type. Allow the Thief to just jump over the divide that normally requires the lasso (and the Magic User to levitate across with some help); allow the Fighter to just fight his way through certain enemies; allow the Magic User to just use Flame Dart on that mutant plant; these are just some examples I can think of.

All of this could have been excused back in 2001 Now that I've done decompilations of the official games, I can make this one more accurate to them.

34

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: So You Thought You Were a Hero? Development Journal

« on: November 29, 2021, 07:18:50 PM »

Never got that far in the QFG series, I think I only made it through QFG2.  Good luck with this!

You should at least give QfG4 a run through. Just be sure to play the CD version. Narration by John Rhys-Davies alone makes it worth it. It is a very fun game.

And the original QFG4.5 authors apparently never completed QFG4, since Bonehead (who was incorrectly identified as Bones) mentioned that you beat Baba Yaga a second time in Monrova (actually Mordavia), which never actually happens. I have since rewritten this dialog to be more accurate.

35

SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI32 Templates

« on: November 27, 2021, 05:07:08 PM »

Okay, so I've discovered that a pic's height cannot be changed to anything higher than 200. This made sense during the SCI16 era, where all pics were 320x200. Since the target resolution for the SCI21 template is 640x480, this needs to be addressed. (SCI2 can still support 320x200 resolution, so there's no problem there.)
This naturally results in imported images missing the bottom half. The View editor actually does allow for each view's resolution to be either 320x200, 640x400, or 640x480.

36

SCI Development Tools / SCI32 Templates

« on: November 27, 2021, 12:34:44 PM »

I have put together two template games for SCI32:
SCI2.0
SCI2.1

SCI2.0 Interpreter: Jul 01 1994 10:29:44 (KQ7 demo)
SCI2.1 Interpreter: Jul 11 1995 10:14:08 (Torin demo)

SCI2.0 still has support for 320x200 resolution, while SCI2.1 only supports 640x400.

The view editor does not properly edit SCI2 views, so any alterations can cause graphical glitches that don't appear in the view editor, but do appear in the game.

Still, these barebones templates are a good start.

37

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: So You Thought You Were a Hero? Development Journal

« on: November 24, 2021, 11:40:59 PM »

I like your solution to the questionable content. As much as I dislike some of that content, I dislike censorship more. Will you be putting this on your git?

It is on my git, it's just private.

38

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: So You Thought You Were a Hero? Development Journal

« on: November 24, 2021, 08:32:29 PM »

Hurrah! Using a newly-built AGSUtils, I was able to extract all of the sprites from QFG4.5! They are stored in TGA format, which is supported by GIMP. This should make things significantly easier...

39

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / So You Thought You Were a Hero? Development Journal

« on: November 24, 2021, 12:12:09 PM »

So You Thought You Were a Hero? is an adaptation of the AGS fangame Quest for Glory 4 1/2 into SCI.
As the AGS game is horribly buggy and the Windows version (which is slightly more polished than the DOS version) does not work properly on modern Windows, I got the idea to remake the game in SCI11.
There was an attempt in 2013 to update the AGS game to newer AGS engines, but as of 2016 it seems to have been abandoned.
Since we've gained more knowledge of the SCI engine, and I've reverse-engineered the official QFG games, it only seems appropriate to put this knowledge to the test.
One criticism of the game is its offensive content. This will remain, but the game will have a setting to reduce this content (set to the lowest, Clean, by default). There will also be a content advisory at the start of the game noting this.
Another criticism is the fact that most of its graphics were mostly lifted from other Sierra games (notably, Conquests of the Longbow). Although I would like to replace these graphics with original ones, I am not an artist and have limited skill in graphics. For now, the Conquests graphics are being used as placeholders.

Ideally, I would like to upgrade this game to SCI32 and have SVGA graphics made. Then it would truly be the bridge between QFG4 and 5, and have all-original graphics.

40

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: What are we working on?

« on: November 05, 2021, 08:08:48 PM »

as well as a setting in the control panel to adjust the mature content.

If you would like to see how I did that exact thing in The Dating Pool I'll be happy to share the relevant code with you.

No thanks, I've already done that as a new slider, and it seems to work okay.

41

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: What are we working on?

« on: November 05, 2021, 07:40:23 PM »

I know I've got a full plate already with projects, but one more I've got my eye on is to adapt QFG4 1/2 into SCI.

I'll likely remove the QFG title from the game, leaving only the subtitle (which I did in the status line). There will also be a content advisory (like Disney+) at the beginning of the game, as well as a setting in the control panel to adjust the mature content. I get how polarizing the game is, and the ability to make it less offensive will help.

I actually already extracted the original's data files using QuickBMS and its AGS script. The MIDI files can be imported into SCI sound resources, and the compiled room files have all the strings as plain text in them, which I can bring over to message resources. The only issue will be the graphics, which are stored in acsprset.spr. If only ScummVM supported pre-2.5 games...

But I should probably focus on testing the QFG1VGA upgrade to completion first.

42

SCI Syntax Help / Re: evKEYBOARD question

« on: October 27, 2021, 11:33:18 PM »

A question about the number 16384, because I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. Would 43168 return true as well or does it only match in that order?

16384 translates to the hex value $4000. In keys.sh, this is the key code for F6, used to load the gun. F8 is used to draw or holster the gun, and F10 is used to fire the gun. This is all set up in the menu bar, but the decompiler wouldn't automatically know that. So yes, I need to go through that and make the code easier to understand.

43

SCI Development Tools / Re: Set channel properties for Sound resources in Companion?

« on: October 21, 2021, 12:44:52 AM »

It would be a good idea to add the ability to set the initial voices. I have managed to export the title and death music for SQ:TLC into MIDI for the purpose of bringing them into the SCI01 remake. I can then import the MIDI files into the game, but the music won't play.

Naturally, Soundbox only supports SCI0, and the sounds need to be in SCI1 format.

44

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: What are we working on?

« on: October 12, 2021, 11:04:00 PM »

In SCI01 I suppose you can use the multilingual Print and such, and give it "text like this%Dtekst zoals dit", but of course %D isn't a recognized language separator so you might as well just pretend it's English or German and use %G.

Somewhat relevant blog post: https://helmet.kafuka.org/logopending/2019/03/08/sci01-1-multilanguage-games-and-telephone-country-codes/ (yes the blog post uses # for its split point and the above example uses %, this is because one is SQ4 in French and the other is SQ3 in German.)

Unfortunately, The Seasoned Professional's interpreter (which is being used here) does not support this feature. A translation will probably require a separate version.

I'll try to make things easier by moving strings into Text resources later on.

I've actually managed to get the animated talkers working properly, thanks to a little thing called sub-scripts.

My main obstacle will be the graphics. The AGI rooms are too claustrophobic for Ego.

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: What are we working on?

« on: October 11, 2021, 07:28:14 PM »

For SQ:TLC and R44Q, I'll be doing animated talkers.

The dialog will be modeless, meaning the characters will move their mouths while the text is on-screen, so as not to interrupt the flow of events. QFG1EGA and Conquests of Camelot did just that. QFG2 fleshed it out further.

R44Q will just have a standard "talk to" command. This will not require separate script states for each line of text.

A better example for SQ:TLC is with Wilco Interactive, the hidden in-game hint service. You'll be able to ask him about anything, and the game will check an array for a matching said spec. If there's a match, he says the appropriate response. That's exactly how LB1 and QFG2 did things.