Possible new version of SCI Companion

[troflip]

Ok, I changed my code that outputs resource.map to insert the version stamp there. And now it gets into the game! Eventually it throws up a 100.msg not found because rm100 event handler falls back to doVerb (I didn't notice at first, but ScummVM says missing message resource too, but it doesn't crash). This is different behavior than on the SQ5 interpreter, so *something* is different. Maybe GetEvent returned different data, I don't know yet. Adding a 100.msg worked around the issue, and I was able to get into my template game's first screen and walk a character around, look at my inventory, etc...

[OmerMor]

Excellent news!!!

[troflip]

So the difference is that the first event received is evMOUSERELEASE, instead of evMOUSEBUTTON.

It looks like this is just a difference in the interpreters. Playing the unadulterated LSL6, you'll notice (in DOSBox), focus isn't set on the game right away (the windows cursor is still shown), and the first mouse down just gives focus to the game. But in unadulterated SQ5, the windows cursor is not there - the game already has focus. So it receives the first button down.

[Collector]

The Windows cursor will only show if you have autolock set to true and DOSBox has not yet captured the cursor. If it is set to false or DOSBox has already captured the mouse there simply is no cursor until you click in the  game or hit enter. In either case the cursor flashes briefly at the very start of the game and then disappears. It looks like they were simply trying to hide the cursor for the credits and the first click bypasses the intro.

[troflip]

I may have an "alpha"  release of SCI Companion available later tonight, with a SCI 1.1 template game functional enough to play around with (I even managed to make my own palette cycling title screen!)

Unfortunately I'm having problem with audio resources, most likely due to mixing SQ5 with the LSL6 interpreter. Sound effects just sound like big buzzing sounds!

[MusicallyInspired]

Can't wait to play with it!

[troflip]

Here's a link

I won't keep it up there for too long (there are still some Sierra view resources in there, so I don't want to keep it up there).

You should be able to Create New Game, and choose SCI 1.1 template, and it should run (and compile).
Of course, you'll need DosBox, and right now the cmd file that runs it has a hard-coded path to c:\Program Files (x86)\DOSBox-0.74

You'll notice the terrible audio problem when you enter the first room (Feel free to remove brookSound and recompile :-) ).

A few more notes:
- snd resources are not supported for SCI 1.1, in fact trying to open them might crash. However, snd resources are supported for SCI0! You can import midi and set cues and stuff. Aud resources are fine. You can drag wav files into the audio resource view and it will add them, and you should be able to preview them (of course, they aren't working properly in Sierra's interpreter (ScummVM is fine)).
- I have barely tested anything with this release, so I'm sure there are lots of bugs. I haven't been focusing on SCI1 at all, so it's possible I've made some assumptions to make things work well with SCI1.1, and broken other VGA-ish resources in SCI1.
- You should be able to edit SCI1.1 views, palettes, pics, messages, and of course scripts.
- right now there is still sort of a need to occasionally "rebuild resources". For SCI 1+ there are no longer any duplicate resources in the resource.map, but they are still in the package files (just haven't bothered to code that up yet). There is no ill effect, except your package file will get larger and larger the more times you save a resources (and SV.exe will show the old resources, which will in turn crash it when it tries to cross-reference mismatched heaps and scripts)

If you want to play around with the Decompiler, it's in the script menu under "manage decompilation". Generally you would start with "Set Filenames" to give things good filenames, and then you can shift-click to select all scripts and click Decompile. As it decompiles them, it will find better names for global variables, so you might want to them Decompile them all a second time to fix up the scripts with the proper global variables.

Finally, the main thing I hope people do is play around with the SCI 1.1 template game, and see what the various classes do. For instance, why does the main character spin around when he changes direction in the first room (110), but not the second room (105)? (which is accessible by walking south from the first room - you have to click right on the bottom edge of the screen). What about setting up poly paths, and trying path navigation? What's the best way to set up interactive objects or areas of the screen?

The left-hand pane has quick links to switch between message and script resources (which will be a common thing, as message resources are pretty core to SCI1.1). In the first room I added one object that responds to the look verb. Try to add messages that make it respond to other things. Maybe play around with trying to get different talkers working?

If anyone wants to take a stab at making some resources for the template game (like a main character resource that can be used legally), that would be wonderful.

[troflip]

Oh, and this is how I went about making the color cycling title screen (it took a while to figure out a workflow, during which I implemented a gradient creation feature in the palette editor).

- I made an image in photoshop with a red-blue gradient that defined the cycling range (and I left the background black) (see attached image)
- Then I created a new pic in SCI Companion, and clicked on the "edit palette" button (just above the palette in the left-hand pane). Then I selected a range of colors (from 64 to 254) by shifting clicking in the palette editor dialog. That enables the Gradient button.
- I choose pure red and pure blue for Color A and B, gradient type "A-B", then hit ok
- So now the pic has a red-blue gradient in its palette. From here, I can right click on the pic, and choose "import bitmap to pic". (For VGA pics, this will actually insert the image into the pic directly, instead of converting it to vector). By choosing "Map to current pic palette", then Accept, I now have a pic with an image whose color values vary smoothly across the image. So the red/blue gradient was just a temporary thing so that I could map the color indices to what I needed
- Then I went back and edited the palette again. I selected the same range of colors, but this time chose a "B-A-B" gradient, and put in whatever two colors I wanted. So now, the left and right side of the image might appear the same green, but they are actually two different color indices. This is what lets me cycle the palette continuously and smoothly.
- Finally, I call Palette(palANIMATE startColor endColor -1) in the room's doit method.

[lskovlun]

Finally, the main thing I hope people do is play around with the SCI 1.1 template game, and see what the various classes do. For instance, why does the main character spin around when he changes direction in the first room (110), but not the second room (105)?

Actually, it doesn't work either if you exit to the second room and then go back to the first one. And the reason is simple: the ego setup code is inconsistent and incomplete.
The instance responsible for ego's turning is stopGroop, and it happens to be set in the game's init (why?!?) but not in the subsequent room inits. The result of this is that it is reset to 0 as soon as you exit the first room. I tried reworking the room inits to use SetUpEgo consistently, and put this line in SetUpEgo:

Code: [Select]

(send gEgo:setLoop(stopGroop))Then it worked (on the other hand, I had to take out the setCycle call because it referred to a nonexistent view; I'm sure the more artistically minded among us could fix that more properly by actually making a view...).

[troflip]

Ok, the audio issue is fixed by switching audio drivers in resource.cfg. I changed it from audblast.drv to audisny.drv, and now I hear the sounds just fine. Are there any recommended drivers? Can I assume that one that works with DOSBox on my machine will work with DOSBox on any machine?

[lskovlun]

This is very good work!
For the polygons/paths, I would suggest some sort of way to show them overlaid on the pic they belong to. Maybe by highlighting a list of numbers in the source and clicking an icon, maybe locating polygons automatically via the decompilation and showing them in a list. I'm sure others could come up with other ways of implementing it. It's probably best if there is some degree of commonality with the placement of objects (you seem to have such a feature planned?)...

[MusicallyInspired]

Yey!!

Here's a question, how would one set hotspots for the VIEW-based cursors in 1.1?

EDIT: One other, I was going to attempt to make a VGA ego view but there doesn't seem to be a way to export palettes, unfortunately. Would make editing some sprites easier by being able to use a third-party image editor like PSP.

[MusicallyInspired]

I also have a suggestion. You have the functionality to import animation frames over multiple files. Is it possible that you can import animation frames from an animated GIF as well? I ask because SCI Viewer can export SCI loop animations as a GIFs. I'm working with an image editor similar to Deluxe Paint that can edit 8-bit images more easily and edit each animation frame in a GIF. I'm using Sierra views as a reference so that export feature from SCI Viewer is welcome. It would speed up production all the more if SCI Companion was able to import in the same way, seeing as that's how I'm editing them.

[Collector]

W-D40 ego view!

I found your audio problem. It is a mismatched SB driver. You used the one from LSL6, but if you use the one from SQ5 it works. Not sure if this limits the quality of the sound resource.

[Cloudee1]

I am not sure if we want to start a new thread for some of this stuff or not, but I have started in the main script and just going down through it.

I see the cursors are now set up to views. gCursor points to 999 which is the arrow, and gInvisibleCursor points to 997 which is the hand... 996 is actually a transparent view.

Should the invisible cursor point to 996 instead or is the variable name actually supposed to be something like gLoadingCursor?

Edit: Nevermind, it looks lik in the public class of the Game, the invisible cursor is reset to align with view 996... Theoretically, couldn't the line in the public class be removed if we reset the default to just point to 996 initially? Paranoid about breaking things already... This is going to be a lot to digest. But in a good way