Messages

31

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Adding a fourth loop to talker portraits?

« on: December 12, 2024, 04:45:41 PM »

Even worse: the Windows portraits weren't views.

I had forgotten.

Anyway, I believe they may have been called Rave portraits, and regardless of the tech name they allowed talkers to be more visually expressive if I recall correctly. More information in the relevant ScummVM code.

No other SCI game used them to my knowledge.

You are remembering correctly, Rave. In fact, a while back deckarep posted a GO script to extract them and as you noted, KQ6 was the only SCI game to use them.

There we go!  I imaging at the time, they considered it an extension of the standard Size ability of windows.

I had never noticed that before. I had made the same assumption as Kawa about the "-" button, being a Windows interface rather than SCI. So being more of a Windows feature than one by Sierra, it was probably a transitional feature between old the old VGA standard of 320x200 and later VESA/SVGA 640x480. Another way to force it in-game was to switch to from speech to text, of course with no voices.

32

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Adding a fourth loop to talker portraits?

« on: December 12, 2024, 06:44:23 AM »

Don't know if it makes a difference, but remember that KQ6 has two different sets of views for the dialog portraits, one for DOS and one for Windows.

33

SCI Development Tools / Re: [KQ5CD] Issue when compiling script

« on: December 03, 2024, 03:37:03 PM »

I may be missing something, but is there some reason that you are not simply starting from Eric's decompile? It is already tested for successful recompile and play tested to completion. I believe that, also, most of the system scripts have been replace with leaked scripts from Sierra, taking decompilation issues for those scripts out of the equation.

34

SCI Syntax Help / Re: [KQ5 CD] StrSplit and kernel_123

« on: November 20, 2024, 11:23:08 AM »

SCI has a language flag for the RESOURCE.CFG. It uses the phone country code numbers, US is 1 and French is 33.

language = 1

for English and

language = 33

for French. Of course you cannot do this on the fly. I don't think that ScummVM uses the RESOURCE.CFG anymore, but I think it is settable from the GUI and/or ini. The only official SCI game that I know of that language can be set from within the game is "Mixed-up Mother Goose Deluxe".

35

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

« on: November 15, 2024, 06:24:18 AM »

The Sierra community is alive and well, though mostly on Facebook these days. I suggest that you advertise for voice actors in the various Sierra groups and have them submit audition samples.This could be done remotely. If unsure you could ask some of the fan and or indie developers that have released their games with voice packs for suggestions. Don't give up, your project should be far from done.

36

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

« on: November 07, 2024, 10:04:20 AM »

@cdb-boop, I take it that when you decompiled the game your copy had all of the patch files in the game's folder. In that case the decompiled scripts would have been from the included patch files. I'll assume that the steam version comes from one of the official collections (which included the SQ5PAT patch) and did not include the NRS patch.

Do you have a list of the scripts altered by you? Specifically did you alter scripts 104, 110 or 994?

37

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

« on: November 07, 2024, 09:35:44 AM »

The installer can read external driver.hlp files. I've attached one that can be just dropped into your SQ5 folder that will make the installer work properly.

Oh, I know how the installer works and had already edited the INSTALL.HLP. That is part of what I had called 'fiddling around'. But even so, without the RESOURCE.CFG stub file that is included with the original install media the generated cfg file the generated cfg will not include the extra flags from the stub. Without the minHunk set, the game will fail to launch. While it is easy enough to manually write a working RESOURCE.CFG, I usually try to approach these things from the point of view of helping more average users, which is to simply run the install.exe.

As I said, I was thinking about making an NSIS script to automate the entire process to have a ready to play game from the user's copy of the game, much like my SHP installers.

38

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

« on: November 06, 2024, 08:30:38 PM »

Were any of the patch files in the game's base directory modified? I guess I mostly want to know what SCI patch files you created/edited.

39

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

« on: November 06, 2024, 06:14:41 PM »

I see that you used VPatch to generate your patch files. I am working from the GOG release since this is the version that most will probably be using, though most editions of the various releases use 1.04. I had to fiddle around with generating a RESOURCE.CFG since the patch does not copy any of the Sierra installer files or driver files. Simply copying INSTALL.EXE,  INSTALL.HLP, INSTALL.SCR and INSTALL.TXT does not work  because the installer fails with the inclusion of the GUS driver. since the INSTALL.HLP is missing the gmgus.drv entry. I am not sure that the inclusion of the GUS driver really adds anything over the GM driver.

I am curious about the SCI patches. The installation media does not include a "PATCHES" subdirectory, so all of the original included are just in the base of the SQ5 of the installation media. Did you repack all of these files, even the ones that were not changed by your patch. Also, did you include the NRS patch? There is also the official SQ5PAT patch for 1.03. Was this included? Perhaps a list of the SCI patches you created for this project?

I would consider writing one of my DOSBox installers for this but I need some these SCI patch questions answered.

40

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

« on: November 05, 2024, 07:53:51 PM »

I see by his readme.md that he tried to register here, but do not see any account requests, nor do I see any users by the same user name as his repo account.

41

SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI Script Compiler - Open Sourced!

« on: October 28, 2024, 07:28:02 AM »

Are you sure Jane Jensen? She has never had much of a public presence on social media or other outlets outside of under here pen name and that only for promotion of her work. Perhaps one of the programmers instead? Robert Lindsey is aware of Companion and especially its decompiler.

42

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: KQ6 Box Colors - Did the different colors mean anything?

« on: October 05, 2024, 07:09:29 AM »

I have several of the variants and they are identical, both digitally and contents.

43

SCI Development Tools / Re: Larry Casino Sprites and Audio extracted.

« on: August 25, 2024, 07:23:32 AM »

Yes. INN was run in an old converted barn. That building was referred to by Sierra as "the barn., which is where the name came from for the recreated server. Inn Barn is still very much alive. http://sierrahelp.com/Misc/INNBarn.html

Omer, the client source you had, was that 2.4? We had the 2.4 source. It came from one of the original developers.

44

SCI Development Tools / Re: Larry Casino Sprites and Audio extracted.

« on: August 24, 2024, 11:46:20 AM »

There were two projects (Faux INN and INN Revival.) before INN Barn. After INN Revival was shut down there was a project to RE its closed source code, but it never got anywhere. I think that Omer was at least tangentially involved with that one.

I do believe that the server for The Realm was recreated as well, but that would have been more LSCI based than WON was.

James Leiterman use to work as a developer in Sierra's Barn before it was shut down and he had the advantage that we had Sierra's source for the client. Not sure that the WON was ever leaked, so anyone that wanted to do so would probably have to RE it from scratch.

You could try contacting James on Facebook to see if he has any information on WON, but I don't think he was involved with it. He might know someone to ask.

45

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

« on: August 21, 2024, 09:29:47 PM »

And now part 3.