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Messages - lance.ewing

Pages: 1 ... 62 63 [64]
946
SCI Development Tools / Re: Picture Editor written in Java
« on: December 16, 2010, 07:49:06 PM »
I have just checked the scummvm source code and their formula for SCI0 is as follows:

1 + ((Y - 42) * 2000) / (((190 - 42) * 2000)/14)

There is a comment in the source code saying not to modify the calculation because should not involve any kind of rounding of doubles.

It looks roughly the same as the calculation I came up with. It's too late in the evening to figure out if they generate the same values or not.

947
SCI Development Tools / Re: Picture Editor written in Java
« on: December 16, 2010, 07:32:47 PM »
Tonight I started adding some SCI0 awareness to PICEDIT. I'm still a few weeks away from having something ready but thought I'd mention something. I've got a feeling that the priority bands are misplaced in SCI Companion. Could this be possible?

I think this might be the priority band calculation:

priorityBand = RoundDown( (Y - 42) / ((190 - 42) / 14) ) + 1

I guess I could dig into the scummvm source code to confirm this but my first point of verification was SCI Companion, and as I say, it doesn't seem to match this calculation, which makes me think I might have it wrong.

948
SCI Syntax Help / Re: Vocab.900 - The 'Black Box'
« on: December 16, 2010, 02:01:25 PM »
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought that 10+ years back someone in the SCI community (maybe Brian) had some real snippets of SCI code. I think it came from a book or perhaps a magazine article. Not sure exactly. If memory serves me right, it was for one of the Police Quest games (I might be wrong about that but fairly sure it was a Police Quest game). I had assumed that Brian based his syntax on the short snippets of real code that Sierra had released with books or articles or interviews or whatever. I'm impressed that Brian came up with something that actually works so well given that there was such little info available.

949
SCI Syntax Help / Re: Vocab.900 - The 'Black Box'
« on: December 15, 2010, 05:09:21 PM »
To be honest I never spent much time looking into decoding SCI back when I was writing all those tools and specs for AGI. But having worked as a Java developer for the past 13 years, it occurs to me now that the way SCI works seems to be quite similar to Java. Doesn't SCI have a VM that the scripts compile to? And it's object oriented as well. Sounds very much like Java.

I guess the only difference is the Lisp syntax. Nowadays we have languages like Clojure that are lisp-like and compile to the Java VM, so that's even closer.

Yes, Sierra were definitely way ahead of their time. They were building the SCI system back in 1987 but Sun didn't build Java until around 1991 (Oak language as it was called then).

950
Yeah the background image feature was there in the original. It was a bit harder to use though because you had to run PICEDIT with a command line parameter and it had to be a PCX file (an obscure image format that most of us would have forgotten existed nowadays). I think it also had to be exactly the right size. None of these limitations exist in the Java version.

In theory it should be smoother than the original. I used a much faster fill and line routine and I've still got the biggest speed improvement up my sleeve.

951
Hey thanks! Yeah, I had a lot more time on my hands back then. I was at uni at that point and living at home, so a lot of spare time to work on things like this. Now I'm married with two kids so unfortunately I can't get as involved as I once could. I guess that's why I thought I'd pick one thing (PICEDIT) and make that my focus. - Seems like the interest in AGI has dropped while SCI has picked up though? Is that the case?

Did you give the Java version of PICEDIT a try? Let me know what you thought. Any suggestions for features?

952
SCI Development Tools / Re: Picture Editor written in Java
« on: December 13, 2010, 01:43:45 AM »
I might give it a go then. I'll add it to the list of features for version 1.3. I already have a fairly long list of features I've put together myself.

I should point out that an import/export capability isn't going to be perfect for what should be obvious reasons. What I'm imaging is that you'd export the picture to SCI0 and then (assuming PICEDIT didn't have SCI0 editing capabilities at the time) you would load it into a SCI0 editor and fix it up.

Of course if PICEDIT supported full editing of the SCI0 picture then it wouldn't need to be exported.

953
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.

954
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

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