Messages

1

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

« on: March 28, 2025, 10:53:37 AM »

https://www.loom.com/share/900e28bb7af849d593c835621f8f0de1

This is looking really cool. Looking forward to seeing how it progresses.

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Back in development: V - Resist or Perish

« on: March 24, 2025, 06:34:08 AM »

And thanks again for Picedit Lance! Still using the good old DOS version, works like a charm.

Thanks. I'm glad that people are still using the old DOS version  .

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

« on: March 24, 2025, 05:59:27 AM »

UPDATE:
If you are running in Tomcat 10+ you will either need a servlet filter or a web server/proxy to set the following headers:
   Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy same-origin;
   Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy require-corp;

Yes, that is correct. I've set up Cloudflare Pages to set those headers in the case of the agi.sierra.games website. The SharedArrayBuffer won't work without them.

Build / deployment instructions would help the README.  If I get it going, I'll send a PR.

When I wrote the README for agile-gdx, I was focusing more on the users of the agi.sierra.games website itself rather than on building and installing it on a different site. I do need to add a section that covers the latter.

I'm currently working on a similar project for emulating an old 8-bit home computer from the 80s called the Oric (I'm not sure if it is known much in the USA but it was a thing in the UK and parts of Europe). I used exactly the same approach for this emulator (called JOric) as I did for AGILE, in fact I copied some of the code from AGILE to get it working on the web, so it uses the same approach to using SharedArrayBuffers to share data between the browser UI thread and the background web worker. In this case, I did add a section to the README that covered setting up those HTTP header fields:

https://github.com/lanceewing/joric?tab=readme-ov-file#running-on-your-own-local-web-server

I'm planning to add a section like that to the agile-gdx README as well, in fact I've added a lot of additional features to this JOric emulator that I think would be useful for agile-gdx, such as loading a game from a url via a request parameter, and drag and drop, and generally lots of usability improvements, particularly with the game selection pages. I do plan to copy those improvements back to agile-gdx at some point.

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Back in development: V - Resist or Perish

« on: March 23, 2025, 05:23:14 AM »

Yeah, that's great to hear. I was always very impressed with the demos for V, so I'll be looking forward to the release.

Not sure if you're aware yet but I released an AGI interpreter for the web last year. You can see your old demo in action here:

https://agi.sierra.games/play/v-the-graphical-adventure/

Regarding your original co-authors, I haven't seen them on this site. Tbh, not many of the old AGI folk have been around here since the AGI forums were added here about 15 years ago. Not sure if it is that they're not aware of this site or not interested anymore. If you make contact with them, you should encourage them to join.

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: King's Quest 4 - Did you know they replaced background pictures??

« on: January 31, 2025, 09:32:38 AM »

Yeah, I've listened to that one a few times over the past couple of years. It's great, especially the early stuff about the King's Quest project.

The Apple IIe was supposedly released at the start of 1983, when the King's Quest IBM PCJR project was in its early days. Sierra had obviously created a lot of Apple II games before that, but it would have been the older models. The Apple II+ supported up to 64K, which would have ruled it out, but with the IIe supporting more memory, it opened the door to Jeff trying to squeeze it in. It is interesting what he mentions about the first 256 bytes of memory. I don't know much about the Apple IIe yet but I plan to one day disassemble the 6502 code for the Apple IIe AGI interpreter to see how it works, which would be a first step towards potentially writing something for another 6502 based machine. Some sort of similar memory bank switching mechanism would need to be used, as the standard 6502 can only address 64K.

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: King's Quest 4 - Did you know they replaced background pictures??

« on: January 30, 2025, 03:37:08 PM »

I get an error trying to run it in scummvm: "WARNING: AgiLoader_A2: disk 5 not found!"
Do you have a copy which scummvm can run?

I assume we have the same copy, as my one also doesn't work in scummvm. It does run in the Apple II emulator I'm using though (JACE).

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: King's Quest 4 - Did you know they replaced background pictures??

« on: January 30, 2025, 08:32:46 AM »

I looked at a few other Apple II AGI games, and was not able to spot any graphical differences.
Perhaps the pictures in KQ4 were more elaborate and had too many commands for the Apple II to handle?

Did the Gold Rush pictures look the same? That is another one that strikes me as having more elaborate pictures.

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: King's Quest 4 - Did you know they replaced background pictures??

« on: January 30, 2025, 08:28:53 AM »

Yeah, I had the same thought when I saw that. It would be an interesting part of the history, in fact it is interesting that he put the name of his company within the interpreter version pop-up. Multiple apple II games show this, e.g. PQ1 attached. I haven't checked them all though. The earlier games probably wouldn't have this.

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: King's Quest 4 - Did you know they replaced background pictures??

« on: January 29, 2025, 11:08:35 AM »

I've been fascinated with the Apple II AGI interpreter for quite some time now. It's amazing that all but one of the AGI games were released for the Apple II, including KQ4 and Gold Rush. It is what gives me hope that one day I might be able to write an AGI interpreter for other 6502 based machines. I am thinking that the Oric might be a possibility. Someone is already working on one for the BBC Micro.

When I was looking at it a year or two back, it was obvious how much this particular AGI platform (i.e. Apple II) was Jeff Stephenson's baby. When you bring up the dialog for the interpreter version, it only mentions Jeff's name. Example attached for KQ4.

Jeff was the one that ported the AGI interpreter to the Apple II in the first place (in 1984), and it would seem that he "owned" the further development on that for the duration of its lifetime.

10

AGI Development Tools / Re: Any AGI engine upgrade projects? Looking for better graphics.

« on: November 29, 2024, 09:35:53 AM »

There does already exist a hack that gives the AGI interpreter 256 colours for both the pictures and the views, where the pictures are no longer vector based but bitmap. The resolution is still 160 wide though, so I assume that that is still too low resolution?

When you say upgrade the AGI engine (fork the code), are you referring to the original AGI interpreter code? If so, unfortunately we don't have a full copy of all of the original AGI interpreter source code. We are lucky to have about 80% of it. The people that implemented the various hacks for the original AGI interpreter would have hacked in small machine language hacks into the executable. It might be possible to do something like that to provide what you want, but I think it might get a bit tricky, as it isn't as "easy" as what the 256 colour hacks did. The problem with a higher width resolution is that it changes many things across the interpreter. The LOGIC file format will have to change, for example, since setting the position of views on screen will need to represent a number bigger than 256, so will require more than one byte. That's just one example. I personally wouldn't be able to update the original AGI interpreter to do that. AGKorson understands the internals of the original AGI interpreter better than anyone, so could probably give a more authorative answer, but I'm guessing it would be a lot of work, even for him.

If you are not necessarily referring to the original AGI interpreter, but could instead live with one of the fan-made AGI interpreters (of which there are quite a few now), then the problem would become easier. The updates to the fan-made AGI interpreter wouldn't be too difficult to make, but you'd then require an AGI editor suite that supports the new formats. As I say, the LOGIC files would be different, the PICTURE and VIEW files would be different. An editor like WinAGI wouldn't understand the format, unless a special fork of that was also created.

I think that the "easiest" way to achieve what you want would be a custom build of WinAGI and AGILE. It would then be its own thing, but closer to AGI than AGS.

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: KQ6AGI - Complete after 18 years of development!

« on: August 22, 2024, 11:17:38 AM »

This is truly amazing! It's great to see so many AGI labours of love being released over the past year or so. I was aware of the project from way back, but didn't realise that it was close to release. I've just watched through the whole video and it looks great. I'll give the game a go in AGILE this evening to see how it works there. It will be interesting to see. AGILE (both the C# and web versions) wouldn't have the resource limitations that the original interpreter had, so hopefully the customisations to the interpreter won't be an issue.

Watching the video has made me realise that I played the original KQ6 so long ago now that this is like a new story to me. I have images of the original graphics in my mind from back then, but the story line feels almost new. I really should play this through, and also KQ5 at some point. It's been a while. I've been so focused on AGI over the years that my memories of SCI games are getting vague

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

« on: August 07, 2024, 11:03:03 AM »

Was also quite interesting to hear from Bob Heitman; there was one comment he made in particular that struck me:

"A goal of mine for years - and I don't think I'm going to realise it, because it takes a lot of effort still - is to return game development, at least adventure game development, to a one or two person format. Something, a set of of tools - I can't really phrase how they'd be written - that would put the power of creating games back into the hands of one or two people who just have an idea and they want to get it out there, but they can't affort 20-50 million dollars put their game out there to entertain people. That's something that I still want to see somebody do."

Yeah, I remember him saying that.

It does make me wonder though, what might a modern adventure game engine and development environment, one designed for today's technological capabilities, look like? I'm "between jobs" right now and hunting around for something to do to fill my time and feel kind of tempted to have a go at this, but I'm curious to hear what others think of this. A few ideas - 3d world, procedural generation of graphics and/or some game elements, a nice & simple scripting language, interactive programming (game world updates as soon as you change it, no compilation), publishing to web/native, online play and online collaborative editing. Just a few random ideas, but I'd love to hear yours.

Something that I've been thinking about for a while now is an integrated online editor and interpreter for AGI games, and with AGILE now running in the browser, I guess my approach would be to extend that. Obviously that is quite niche though, and only a handful of people are ever going to use it

You seem to be thinking of something new that will capture a modern audience, but perhaps in the same spirit as AGI and SCI. I think that the online collaborative editor and interpreter would be a key part though, something similar to what kids use in schools these days, e.g. Scratch and Construct3D, where they have an account and can build away, save, execute directly in the browser and share. I'd say yes to the simple scripting language as well, it could even be visual in nature, such as with Google Blockly, whose demos show switching between source and visual, which I think would be needed for people who like to code quickly directly in the source.

The cool thing about a web based interpreter is that it can easily be packaged up to run on mobile devices as well, the game execution bit I mean. Editors on mobile devices are pretty neat at first, but its more of a gimmick I think. It's difficult to actually be productive when "building" within such a small screen size, so the novelty seems to wear off pretty quick... at least in my own experience

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

« on: August 06, 2024, 11:34:46 AM »

For those who haven't been keeping an eye on it, the crowd funding campaign is in its last 8 hours. It is currently over 400% funded, which means that it has exceeded a few of the stretch goals along the way. The latest one is the mini-doc series, which means that in addition to the main documentary, they'll do a further series of mini-docs with even more in-depth coverage. I think its going to be great. If you were intending to back it, then you have 8 hours left.

The other thing that was really cool recently was the Adventure Game Fan Fair. I didn't attend, but I watched some of the streams online. It was great to see the former Sierra employees speaking in the various panels, including Bob Heitman in a couple of them. Always great to hear what he has to say. I think that his memory of those days is second to none. I have my fingers crossed that since the team behind the documentary were at the Fan Fair that they will have spoken to Bob about being involved in the documentary as well. They already have a rather impressive cast of ex-Sierra employees lined up.

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

« on: July 26, 2024, 02:21:10 PM »

Another amazing video about the 40th anniversary:

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

« on: July 10, 2024, 09:36:17 AM »

The Backerkit campaign for this launched yesterday and it has already exceeded their lowest goal amount, so I guess that means it is definitely going ahead now. The first 48 hours apparently has cheaper amounts for the pledges. I was very tempted to back it yesterday, in fact almost entered my card details. The bonus for backing in the first 48 hours is not only the cheaper price, but also a free PDF of Ken's book. I already bought that book about 20 months ago, so if I don't back it now, its only the cheaper price I'd be missing. I am wondering if anyone else has backed it yet? And, if so, do people have a feel for how safe this website is? It looks like they don't charge the card until the end of the campaign, which implies that they hold on to the card details, right?

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/legends-of-adventure/legends-of-adventure