SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests

[troflip]

That looks great! Definitely would like that in the template game!

[Kawa]

<Screwtape> Don't take this the wrong way, dude, but.. uh, I think you need to vaccum the carpet. And maybe clean the walls.

Y'know what? Looking at existing art, I think Screwy's right. Walls were funky.

[troflip]

Do you have a .v56 file for this, or are you still fine-tuning it? I think it looks great - the only slightly weird thing is the shadow on the left. Kind of like this is a movie set and someone just turned on the lights. On the other hand, it gives it some depth.

Also, I think the icons you generated for the template game look a little bit... "disabled" in their regular state. I can try to fix them, but if you have some updated ones on hand that would be great (although it looks like you're using much smaller icons in your current project).

[Kawa]

Do you have a .v56 file for this, or are you still fine-tuning it? I think it looks great - the only slightly weird thing is the shadow on the left. Kind of like this is a movie set and someone just turned on the lights. On the other hand, it gives it some depth.

Yeah, still got a bit of finetuning to do. Also the table and lamp, y'know? But the shadow is on its own layer and easily removed or altered, so either hand works.

Also, I think the icons you generated for the template game look a little bit... "disabled" in their regular state. I can try to fix them, but if you have some updated ones on hand that would be great (although it looks like you're using much smaller icons in your current project).

I think I get your meaning -- that the dark gray oughta be black, stuff like that. And you know what? I agree.

...Now that you mention my project's icon bar, I'm having some issues with the "ten pixels down" thing so maybe I'll do a combination; keep it about this size, but not permanently visible.

Edit: now with black icons.
Edit?: an inventory is added.

[Cloudee1]

Inventory Screen... There is quite a bit of padding that gets added to the end of the item "columns".

The first screen is out of the box, the second is with the code below altered. That should help to show it better than I can explain it.

In the drawInvWindow of the ScrollableInventory class in script 26.

Code: [Select]

     //   = temp10 Max((+ 4 theTheTheTheTheTheCurPos_2_2) (* numCols (+ 4 theTheTheTheCurPos)))
      = temp10 (+ Max((+ 1 theTheTheTheTheTheCurPos_2_2) (* numCols (+ 1 theTheTheTheCurPos))) 4)

I also changed these values in script 15, the sq5Inv instance of ScrollableInventory

Code: [Select]

            numCols(7) // 5
            scrollAmount(7) // 5
            dispAmount(14) // 10


[troflip]

You must have changed something else (what happened to your up/down arrow icons?). The template game's inventory dialog is thinner.

Also, what was the palette that we had semi-consensus using? Which game was it from?

[Kawa]

Template uses SQ5 right now, alternative was KQ5/LSL5/many others.

[Cloudee1]

The up and down arrows are there... they are just masked right now, I'm assuming cause I haven't reached row three yet. When I replace the mask with a transparent cel, the arrow is visible.

The palette I am using I think is from Hero's Quest, but if I remember, Brandon I think mentioned KQ's palette as a suggestion.

And it is thinner, because in script 15, the number of columns bit. Default is currently 5 and I changed it to show 7 items instead.

... the overall point though, is that the line in the scrollable inventory script, seems to be adding 4 pixels of padding for each item in a row... but the padding seems to be getting added to the end and not between the items like I would expect it to. Also, that would also probably be the cause of the highlight outline overlapping the items beside it. I didn't fix the padding between them, but my edit does remove all of the extra padding for each item and just adds 4 to it once to balance it out.

[troflip]

Can anyone find the thread where we discussed this? I can't seem to.

[edit:] found it: http://sciprogramming.com/community/index.php?topic=1442.0

[Kawa]

Can anyone find the thread where we discussed this? I can't seem to.

[edit:] found it: http://sciprogramming.com/community/index.php?topic=1442.0

Damned smartphone and sleep deprivation slowing me down

[troflip]

Let me see if I can whip up a little palette conversion tool for view resources to make this easier....

[troflip]

... the overall point though, is that the line in the scrollable inventory script, seems to be adding 4 pixels of padding for each item in a row... but the padding seems to be getting added to the end and not between the items like I would expect it to. Also, that would also probably be the cause of the highlight outline overlapping the items beside it. I didn't fix the padding between them, but my edit does remove all of the extra padding for each item and just adds 4 to it once to balance it out.

Before I make an official fix to the template game, I'd need to understand the real underlying issue. i.e. find out why the highlight is overlapping, instead of just adjusting the padding so it looks good in one situation.

[troflip]

Version 3.0.0.7 has been released.

Main points:
- cloudee's wav issue hopefully fixed
- named polygons supported. Create these by name from code, and do with them as you please. This should be the final piece of polygon editor functionality. Just bug fixes from here on out. See the template game thread for updates needed.
- fake ego can observe polygons

I think SCI Companion 3 is essentially feature complete at this point. I can't think of any big pieces of critical functionality that are missing. It should be mainly bug fixes and polish from here on, and also finalizing the template game.

My next order of business might be to make a little "explore SCI1.1 features" game, which could help flesh out the documentation for the various kernel and template game functionality.

[troflip]

There's some seriously gnarly shit going down with the pic resources here, when you look at them in SV. Oddly, they clearly render just fine at runtime, both the template scene and what's supposed to be one of those close-up portraits.

Incidentally, this appears to be a bug in SV.exe. The pic/view image data compression can encode series of raw bytes in chunks of up to 63, or up to 127 via a different encoding marker. SV.exe doesn't appear to handle the >63 case, and I actually can't find any Sierra games that use it.

So I'm not sure how anyone figured out that the interpreter actually supported that (I forget where I got the specs from... if they were documented, or I looked at scummvm or something).

Oh, ok... there must be some game that uses it somewhere. In the ScummVM code, it makes a reference to fixing bug #3135872. But I can't seem to find that in any bug database, so I don't know what games it involved.

Anyway, I can fix SCI Companion so it only uses the <= 63 marker.

[lskovlun]

It seems to be this: http://sourceforge.net/p/scummvm/bugs/5551/
I had to dig a little to find it, the Git log incorrectly says that this was in the Spanish version, but it's actually the Polish fan version. The bad view is attached to the bug for testing purposes.