Topics

31

AGI Development Tools / Visual AGI Picture Editor

« on: June 24, 2011, 01:06:50 PM »

sact at the scummvm forums posted a link to a version of Joakim Moller's Visual APE tool that I  have never seen before. It is a fully working AGI picture editor, and it has most of the features I intended to implement for the next Milestone of PICEDIT. Here is a direct link (grab it while you can):

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3712820/Visual%20AGI%20Picture%20Editor%201.0.1407.2498.zip

I tried tracking this tool down a few months ago but couldn't find it anywhere. The home web page has disappeared, none of the other AGI sites seem to have it. But what I was expecting to find was a tool that wasn't as complete and polished as the above. This tool is just really amazing. It has draggable vertices, draggable fill points, a simplified tool set, a scrollbar for navigating within the picture that redraws the picture in real time as you scroll, all of which are things I was going to add for 1.3. I had no idea Joakim had got this far with his tool.

How many people remember seeing this version?

32

AGI Development Tools / PICEDIT 1.3 Milestone 1 released

« on: June 14, 2011, 04:59:24 PM »

I have built and released the first milestone release of PICEDIT 1.3.  So far I have only put it in the downloads section of the Google Code project. It isn't yet on www.agifans.com, but I'll get to that soon.

http://code.google.com/p/picedit/downloads/list

The new features include:

* Four window sizes to choose from. The 2x option is the old screen size. The default is now 3x.

* Priority bands/grid lines. This was something missing from version 1.2 that is now fairly standard in AGI and SCI picture editors. It shows where each of the priority bands start.

* Dual visual/priority mode (where priority and visual screens mix, as first shown in the APE tool). This is a bit gimmicky but I quite liked it when Joakim Moller first demonstrated this with the APE tool. What it does is render the priority screen and then the visual screen is drawn on top with 50% transparency. Try picture 45 in SQ2 to compare with the APE screen shot on www.agidev.com.

* Load and Save dialogs now start in the current directory and remember the directory between uses, and the current picture file name is displayed on the title bar.

* Right clicking now stops the current tool but does not set tool to None. This allows the user to draw more lines in one go. They no longer have to keep choosing Line. They simply select Line at the start, then draw a line, right click, and then start drawing another line in another place on the screen. Right clicking twice will switch the tool to None.

Let me know what you all think. I am very keen to hear all of your feedback and suggestions.

33

AGI Development Tools / AGDS

« on: June 10, 2011, 03:45:27 PM »

Seeing the contents of this if-archive directory:

http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogrammingXagi.html

...reminded me of AGDS. It was a Russian effort to build a set of AGI editors. It predates PICEDIT and AGI Studio. I was just playing around with their picture editor in DOSBOX. Apart from everything being in Russian, the tool is quite similar to PICEDIT, except that it doesn't have a graphical panel down the bottom for selecting tools. Instead it seems to have keyboard shortcuts for everything.

34

AGI Development Tools / picedit Google code project

« on: May 25, 2011, 06:00:07 PM »

For those who are interested, I decided I needed a proper SVN repository to keep track of my source code for the Java version of PICEDIT. I have therefore created a project at code.google.com called picedit that I will be committing to fairly often during those times that I'm able to work on PICEDIT (which might end up being fairly infrequently). It does however already have a number of features in there that weren't in 1.2.1.

http://code.google.com/p/picedit/

35

Everything-Else / Platform games?

« on: March 15, 2011, 02:48:43 AM »

This is a question that relates to both SCI and AGI since the general concepts are the same. What I was wondering is if anyone has thought much about how a platform style game could be created within SCI or AGI? There is an old platform style adventure game for the BBC micro that I would love to implement in either AGI or SCI but it seems like it would be a bit tricky. Some sort of gravity rules would need to be put in place that overrides the normal ego movements. Things like jumping up onto another platform would be difficult, or free falling in a direction determined by whether you were moving or not at the time you "fell" or "jumped". It becomes a 2D game rather than 3D, where the up direction really is up rather than walking north.

Any thoughts?

36

AGI Development Tools / sarien.net is going, going.... gone

« on: January 26, 2011, 01:57:34 AM »

I assume that you are all aware of sarien.net and Martin Kool's Javascript AGI engine. The sad news today is that it is no longer. Activision have asked him to take all the games off his site for legal reasons. If you go to www.sarien.net you can see the full letter that he received. This is really sad news. It would have taken Martin a long, long time to build that engine. 

37

SCI Syntax Help / Original SCI syntax

« on: January 02, 2011, 01:07:34 PM »

I thought I should start a new topic for the discussion we were having regarding the original SCI syntax. It is not good news I'm afraid. Both of the leads I had on getting that SCI code from the Sierra book have come to nothing. Kimme has kindly scanned the code that she thought was SCI code and it is as I suspected, which is that it isn't SCI code but is instead AGI code. It appears that Kimme has exactly the same version of TOBOKQ that I have. As I mentioned earlier, Kimme has also checked Kings Quest Companion 1st and 2nd editions and neither of these had SCI code.

I've also heard back from Dark Fiber and he is now saying that the book with the SCI code in it is the one that he doesn't have but he still says that it exists. I also know that something with SCI code in it did exist at some point. We'll just have to keep searching.

38

SCI Development Tools / SCI Decompiler?

« on: December 22, 2010, 05:14:59 AM »

I've seen references to someone other than Brian writing a SCI decompiler. Does anyone know much about this? Who it was? Where it is?

39

AGI Development Tools / PICEDIT 1.2.1 beta 2 released (fixes 5 defects)

« on: December 19, 2010, 07:12:55 PM »

I have just released beta 2 of PICEDIT 1.2.1. This release fixes five defects, four of which were quite big bugs. These five defects were as follows:

1. Setting visual colour to white was adding the wrong colour byte code into the AGI picture (16 instead of 15).
2. Setting priority colour to red was adding the wrong colour byte code into the AGI picture (16 instead of 4).
3. Setting priority colour was adding the wrong action byte code into the AGI picture (0xF0 instead of 0xF2).
4. Turning off priority colour was adding the wrong action byte code into the AGI picture (0xF1 instead of 0xF3).
5. Picture navigation when showing the priority screen kept switching back to the visual screen.

Although I have been adding new features over the past couple of weeks, this release does not include any of those. Instead it is exactly the same as beta 1 except for the five defects fixed above. I will continue to fix bugs in version 1.2.1 until either no more are found or I release the next major release.

Grab the new beta 2 release from my web site: www.agifans.com

40

SCI Development Tools / Picture Editor written in Java

« on: December 13, 2010, 12:55:06 AM »

Hi all,

You may or may not be aware that I recently released a Java version of my PICEDIT AGI picture editing tool. I posted about it in the AGI tools forum:

http://sciprogramming.com/community/index.php/topic,365.0.html

The reason I have raised the topic again here is that as I was writing the tool, I thought to myself that it wouldn't take much to make it support SCI0 pictures as well. Would that be something that people in the SCI community would be interested in?

I guess support for SCI0 could range anywhere from an import/export from/to SCI0 pictures...   all the way up to supporting full editing of SCI0 pictures.

41

AGI Development Tools / New Java version of PICEDIT (AGI Picture Editor)

« on: December 13, 2010, 12:30:57 AM »

Hi all,

I've been away from the AGI community for about a decade but recently my interest was renewed again. For some reason I felt like revisiting my AGI picture editor tool PICEDIT. I've been a Java developer for the past 13 years and have no desire to write C code anymore, so I decided as a starting point to extending PICEDIT I would rewrite the tool in Java. I have now completed this conversion to Java and the first beta release is available on my new web site below:

www.agifans.com

I'd be very keen for as many AGI/SCI fanmade game fans as possible to download PICEDIT 1.2.1 and let me know what you think. You'll need to download and install Java 6 first but after that all you'll need to do is double click on the downloaded PICEDIT 1.2.1 JAR file. The good thing about it being written in Java is that it is instantly available for all platforms... so you'll be able to run it on Windows (XP/Vista/7), Linux, Mac, etc.

It is very likely that there are still bugs in it so I apologise in advance for this. What I'm really looking for is testers though. I'll fix bugs as soon as they are reported.

From this point I'm hoping to add a lot more features. At the moment it is almost the same as the original PICEDIT 1.2 that I released back in 1997. Over the next month or so I'll be adding many more features. It would be good to get some suggestions from the AGI and SCI community about the features that should be added.

I look forward to hearing all of your feedback.


Lance