Messages

1

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: New Sierra Documentary In the Works

« on: June 10, 2024, 04:13:51 PM »

Ken & Roberta's new company, Cygnus Entertainment, sends out occasional emails with updates on their Colossal Cave game, as well as other things they are involved in.  Their update for today included this:

A while back, we were approached by some filmmakers who were interested in producing a documentary about the adventure game genre, but more specifically, the story of myself, Roberta and Sierra On-Line.

We refused.

Sierra On-Line's story is an amazing one. It deserves to be told. However, we've been down this road before, on a variety of other documentary projects and nothing ever happened with them. One of the producers on the project, Cade Peterson, is a friend of a friend, and also in the game industry. Cade persisted after our refusal, ultimately convincing us his team would deliver.

The Sierra story is the thing great movies are made of. There are highs, lows, good guys and bad. We are excited to finally see it told in this documentary format.

A few weeks ago, we conducted our interview for the documentary. It was a long grueling day.

The documentary folk dug in deep, capturing some incredible footage. I had thought we might be done, but there's a lot more to cover. We?re delighted to see that some of our beloved Sierra creators like Al Lowe and Lori and Corey Cole are part of the project too? with many more to come, we?re told!

You can follow the project for updates at this link.

I hope it's ok -- but a few weeks ago I reached out to them to tell them about this forum and that they really need to consider talking to a few of you guys because you are keeping part of this world alive. They appeared receptive to that and I think some of you may be contacted. Sorry :p  BUT... you guys rock... and you are part of the bigger story <3

2

AGI Development Tools / Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)

« on: June 05, 2024, 09:34:54 AM »

The latest build of Let Them Eat Cake is here: https://let-them-eat-cake.com/ltec-1-7-1.zip
There are some bug fixes in there, and ... I added Cedric to a scene per request of Ricky on the Sierra Universe forum

How is traffic to the AGIle site? There are a lot of games there. I've tried a bunch but haven't gotten to far in many of them.

3

AGI Development Tools / Re: Original AGI Interpreter

« on: June 05, 2024, 09:26:11 AM »

Wow, you guys are bit-twiddle super sleuthing here. Impressive!

4

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

« on: May 14, 2024, 08:15:59 AM »

This is the YouTube video that covers the topic:

5

AGI Development Tools / Re: The web version of AGILE (https://agi.sierra.games)

« on: May 14, 2024, 08:13:25 AM »

I'm doing what I can to keep it on top for a bit. The birthday is only relevant for so long, but as long as new YouTube videos come out, etc., in my estimation, it's okay to continue to bring the subject back up without being "spammy."

6

AGI Development Tools / Re: The web version of AGILE (https://agi.sierra.games)

« on: May 10, 2024, 09:40:00 AM »

I think r/Sierra doesn't allow this kind of content. In my limited experience, it gets removed immediately.

7

AGI Development Tools / Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)

« on: May 05, 2024, 11:28:12 AM »

Thanks guys!

That last part about exporting, fixing outside, and reimporting is what I needed! 

I'll start with the ones I MUST do and then worry about the others (given that I just got done porting a ton of rooms into the game, and I'm crunch'n.) I never noticed the issue when I built these binaries from the JSON commands -- and I only worried about problems that presented themselves. Bringing the game into the "real" world definitely shows where the compiler and engine I worked on differed from the spec.

8

AGI Development Tools / Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)

« on: May 04, 2024, 05:19:13 PM »

Remember that DOSBox already gives you all or at least nearly all of the 640KB base memory, more than any real machine. Any memory issue loading resources would be more likely internal to AGI, but I would imagine that Andrew could say better than I.

I assumed the same. I tried loading that room right away without any other resources without much luck just to make sure it's not a slow leak. I'll go back and actually look at the asset in the vol file in a bit but for the moment I am have it on hold while I port the rest of the game.

9

AGI Development Tools / Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)

« on: May 04, 2024, 02:31:31 PM »

There is a ton of helpful information in the Help file that should show you how to do all the things you need to finish adding all your resources and getting things running. And you can also always contact me, either here in the forum, or by PM, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you have - either about how to use WinAGI to do what you want, or generic AGI related questions.

So far I am only really running into one issue:
pic.ControlRoom and pic.OuterBay PICTURES are so large that I run out of memory with AGI.EXE in DOS BOX.  These work fine in AGILE.  Is there any way to tell DOSBOX/AGI.EXE to give me more memory? These are not any bigger than SpaceQuest 2 PICTURE files so I am kind of surprised -- but I would like to be able to run in DOSBOX for all this effort.  Any ideas? 

10

AGI Development Tools / Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)

« on: May 04, 2024, 09:23:35 AM »

Russ, I took a quick look at your repo. It's a bit confusing, as there are two different WinAGI project folders, one in bins, and one in ltec-gds. It looks like the one in bins was your first try, as it's older - the other I see you were working on it last night.

I'm not sure exactly what trouble you're having. I checked, and WinAGI shouldn't throw disk/file related errors when deleting existing resources. What I suspect is that when you deleted them, logics that reference them will throw a compile error if you try compiling the game. All of the resources in the template game are used somewhere in the game, so if you delete one or more of them, you will also need to edit the logics where they are referenced.

For what you want to do (create a new game based on your existing resources), the best path would be to create a new blank game. Then import all your resources (I'm sorry I don't have a bulk import function - maybe that's something I need to add in a later version).  If your logics are fully compatible with original Sierra, they should then compile with no errors. But I suspect there will be a bit of tweaking required to iron everything out. WinAGI will help you with that- if you try to compile a logic (or the whole game, which automatically recompiles all the logics), it will identify errors (displayed in red and indicate that the logic can't be compiled until you fix the condition) or warnings, which offer helpful advice on how to improve your code or avoid game runtime errors. You can ignore the warnings if you want - you don't have to deal with them to compile and run your game.

I did notice that in your first try (the files in the bins folder), you had your defines file listed as logic zero. That would indeed cause a problem. Logic zero MUST be the main logic - the one that runs every cycle and never gets unloaded. It looks like you got that straightened out when you tried using the template.

It also looks like you figured out how to use the global defines file. That makes it very easy to manage defines that are used across multiple logics. Here's a tip for you - you don't need to include defines for logic, view, picture, sound resources; their IDs are considered global defines by default. So if you've given your resources IDs that match what's in your globals.txt file, you can remove all those defines from the file.

There is a ton of helpful information in the Help file that should show you how to do all the things you need to finish adding all your resources and getting things running. And you can also always contact me, either here in the forum, or by PM, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you have - either about how to use WinAGI to do what you want, or generic AGI related questions.

Thanks for the response, I think I've got things rolling.  The project will definitely needs some folder cleanup but I'll do that after the madness.  For now I'm rolling. I've done as minimal a refactor as needed. I'll go back again and take advantage of some of the capabilities AGIJS and my compiler didn't support once I've got all the rooms in.  .... only ... 30 to go

11

AGI Development Tools / Re: The web version of AGILE (https://agi.sierra.games)

« on: May 04, 2024, 09:19:19 AM »

Continuing on from the previous post, yes, it is exactly 1 week until the 40 year anniversary of the release of King's Quest. As mentioned above, I have made a few changes over the past few days. One of those involved fixing a saved game bug where it was failing to overwrite previously saved game slots, which was a big problem actually. Luckily I had been trying to play through King's Quest 4 and was wondering why my game wasn't saving after I'd using up all the slots. Problem solved now though. It was appending to the existing file rather than overwriting it! 

If people get a chance, can I ask you to have another play to see if you can spot any major issues.

@doomlazer, I do plan to add some features to export the whole state, but I didn't want to put the 10th May launch into jeopardy, so I'm planning for that feature to be a quick follow later in the month.

Upload game seems to work   I'll be testing like a crazy person in the next few days

12

AGI Development Tools / Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)

« on: May 02, 2024, 11:20:26 PM »

The Power Pack Demo intentionally contains a lot of content that only works with the power pack. But I will take a look at it to see if I can strip out those parts. The exploration parts can probably be converted to true AGI without too much effort.

I moved all my assets into WinAGI GDS, running on a Windows box (in AWS), to try and help Lance's effort. 

But After I restarted the IDE, I am now getting Invalid resource data at ##### VOL.0 for all PICs and VIEWS, including the assets that came with the sample. Is this recoverable or do I have to remove and re-add all of the assets?

I will try and start a new project an copy everything back in. I already tried removing everything except for what I need for the Title Screen. When I build and run that it says please insert Disk 1.  I assume there's something fundamentally off with the VOL files. 

I committed my garage to this branch https://github.com/russdanner/agi-studio-let-them-eat-cake/tree/WinAGI-GDS/ltec-gds/src and I plan to start over again with an empty template and see if I can get things running again.

I rebuilt the game and I've found that so long as I do not remove any of the example assets I don't get into the situation. As a workaround I've move them all high ID numbers.

13

AGI Development Tools / Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)

« on: May 01, 2024, 09:36:12 AM »

The Power Pack Demo intentionally contains a lot of content that only works with the power pack. But I will take a look at it to see if I can strip out those parts. The exploration parts can probably be converted to true AGI without too much effort.

I moved all my assets into WinAGI GDS, running on a Windows box (in AWS), to try and help Lance's effort. 

But After I restarted the IDE, I am now getting Invalid resource data at ##### VOL.0 for all PICs and VIEWS, including the assets that came with the sample. Is this recoverable or do I have to remove and re-add all of the assets?

I will try and start a new project an copy everything back in. I already tried removing everything except for what I need for the Title Screen. When I build and run that it says please insert Disk 1.  I assume there's something fundamentally off with the VOL files. 

I committed my garage to this branch https://github.com/russdanner/agi-studio-let-them-eat-cake/tree/WinAGI-GDS/ltec-gds/src and I plan to start over again with an empty template and see if I can get things running again.

14

AGI Development Tools / Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)

« on: April 29, 2024, 10:05:42 PM »

http://agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/images/c/c6/WinAGI_2_3_6.zip[/url]. If you want to create a full featured AGI game in the old Sierra style, there's no better game development system out there.

I haven't been successful getting WinAGI to run on Linux/Mint, but I was able to push it further than it was (I think)

I was getting:
0024:err:module:import_dll Library MSVBVM60.DLL (which is needed by L"Z:\\home\\russdanner\\winagi\\WinAGI.exe") not found

Which seems to have been solved with:
winetricks vb6run

Unfortunately, the program now launches and exists without a peep. I'll update if I figure anything out.

15

AGI Development Tools / Re: The web version of AGILE (https://agi.sierra.games)

« on: April 04, 2024, 11:37:29 PM »

I'd like to check it out. Can I get the password?

OOOPS! I just saw the message (still learning the ropes on this forum)