High-Resolution Packs

[Kawa]

Has anyone else 'round here considered this concept as it might apply to SCI? Like, you'd take ScummVM and alter the graphics and sound code for its SCI engine to detect and substitute external data where available.

Something relatively simple might be like playing hrp/42.ogg instead of 42.snd, while something rather more involved might be drawing hrp/0_2_4.png instead of loop 2 cel 4 of 0.v56.

Just hypothetical I guess, but I doubt I'm the first here.

[troflip]

This woud be to avoid the 256 color palette limitation I guess?

[MusicallyInspired]

I assume it would be more to avoid the "ugly pixelation" .

I like the idea of HRP-ing SCI games like that, but I'm always wary about replacing MIDI with digital sounds as there are many commands that are just not translatable to digital. See iMuse and Monkey Island 2 SE. Loop points wouldn't be very hard with metadata loop tags, but cue points I'm not sure how you could implement into an OGG/FLAC...unless you just did the same thing with metadata. But what about pitch shifting? Modulation? Tempo manipulation? Manipulation of the aforementioned in individual MIDI channels?

Also, palette shifting is a similar issue in the graphics department.

[Kawa]

These kind of issues are exactly why I brought this up.

The Duke Nukem 3D HRP having separate files for each palette variant comes to mind... immediately followed by the bridge simulator in SQ5 -- the one right after the intro.

[troflip]

You can already replace MIDI with digital audio using sciAudio though (and of course using the digital audio support in SCI 1.1, though that's limited to 16-bit 22Khz, and probably has some size limitations). I know you obviously have a different opinion MI, but MIDI is just a super pain to work with (and I assume most would agree).

[MusicallyInspired]

True. Although, remaking the effects of 8-bit in HD 3D take a lot more work. I recall that those palette variants for the Polymer renderer took a long time to get right and still were tweaked over time, whereas it's a simple matter in 8-bit. It's looking pretty dang good now, though. It would be cool to see for sure. To get some of those original paintings by the Sierra artists and scan them in in hi-def would be sublime.

EDIT: @troflip I'm just saying, there are things you can do with MIDI that you can't with digital. If someone were to make an HRP pack for a Sierra game, they'd have these hurdles to overcome. Besides, there are many aspects of game design that are a pain for different people. Like graphics. Especially animation. That's why Sierra had its own music department.