No-Shirt Developer(s)

[troflip]

My inspiration is this; Notice: Monochrome Color + Noise, Scanlines, Timecode, Location Identifier, and Date Identifier. It's still going to be Sierra-Styled, but I want to maintain as much as this "realism" as I can. Can .SEQs be overlaid above other .SEQs, or over a background? Because I feel as if the background stuff needs to be one thing, and then the things above another. What is the best way to approach this?

A modern shader-based graphics system

- Draw your scene as usual, with people moving around, etc...
- But switch the palette to a grey scale palette
- Draw a 320x190 view with alternating lines on top of the image
- Draw labels on top of that.

Of course, a 200px high resolution means that your scanlines will be... rough. But if you're going for an old-school feel, then you know...

[Kawa]

That basically boils down to what I said, but with a view for the scanlines.

[CTxCB]

I'll see what I can do with that.

[troflip]

You could also emulate noise. If you use, say, 16 grey-scale colors for the picture, and you have 192 palette indices, then each pixel of a particular color could be one of 12 different palette indices (chosen randomly).

Then in script you could modify the intensity of each palette color randomly in each game cycle. An area of one solid color would have 12 different pertubations possible per pixel, so it would probably look like random noise.

The hard part is generating the palette indices in the first place. You'd need to be able to produce 12 variations (in your image editor), where a random 1/12 of the pixels are on and the rest are transparent. Then import them one by one into a pic in SCI Companion, into different palette ranges. It would be trivial to write code in SCI Companion that assigns a color to a random palette index, but it seems like functionality very specific to this scenario... would it have other uses? hmm...

[MusicallyInspired]

Can you not overlay one pic on top of another in SCI1.1? Wouldn't that be easier on heap/performance than a screen-sized view? I tried making a screen-sized view in SCI0 once. It doesn't like that very much lol.

[troflip]

Can you not overlay one pic on top of another in SCI1.1? Wouldn't that be easier on heap/performance than a screen-sized view? I tried making a screen-sized view in SCI0 once. It doesn't like that very much lol.

I don't think that's really an option if you want to actually have actors moving "underneath" the grid lines.

Yeah, in SCI0 screen-sized views are definitely a problem. In SCI1.1, I don't think it's as big a deal. I had to remove code that detected views as corrupt because they were too large... because some of the games did have ones that large.

[Kawa]

Black scanlines in the visual screen, white scanlines in the priority screen y'all.

[troflip]

Black scanlines in the visual screen, white scanlines in the priority screen y'all.

lol, you're right. That would do it. And then MI's overlay makes total sense.

[Kawa]

Unless you want to CCTV arbitrary screens, why bother with overlays?

[CTxCB]

Looking at the opening to King's Quest VI (I've never actually watched the Introduction to that game), I see that the .SEQ files have voice acting? Can .SEQ Files hold audio files or timing for when an audio file should be played? Or is it just some elaborate code that knows when these events should happen in the .SEQ File and plays them to match? I'd love to know!

[CTxCB]

Also, I've installed Paint.NET to do images for my SCI1.1 Game. How do I limit the game to a VGA Palette? My idea is to take a real image (creative commons) and then try to convert it to VGA, and see what that's like, then work on drawing something from that, or if it's good enough then I might use it instead.

[troflip]

Looking at the opening to King's Quest VI (I've never actually watched the Introduction to that game), I see that the .SEQ files have voice acting? Can .SEQ Files hold audio files or timing for when an audio file should be played? Or is it just some elaborate code that knows when these events should happen in the .SEQ File and plays them to match? I'd love to know!

kawa made a utility that generates seq files, and one that plays them back:
http://sciprogramming.com/community/index.php?topic=1487.15

I don't think audio was involved though... but maybe he knows more...

[troflip]

How do I limit the game to a VGA Palette?

Not sure I understand that sentence. The game is VGA. It can use any palette.

My idea is to take a real image (creative commons) and then try to convert it to VGA, and see what that's like, then work on drawing something from that, or if it's good enough then I might use it instead.

http://scicompanion.com/Documentation/pics.html#importing-a-vga-pic-background-sci1

[CTxCB]

How do I limit the game to a VGA Palette?

Not sure I understand that sentence. The game is VGA. It can use any palette.

My idea is to take a real image (creative commons) and then try to convert it to VGA, and see what that's like, then work on drawing something from that, or if it's good enough then I might use it instead.

http://scicompanion.com/Documentation/pics.html#importing-a-vga-pic-background-sci1

What I meant to say is that I want to limit Paint.NET to a VGA Palette. How do I do that? The same one that SCI1.1 Games use.

[troflip]

What I meant to say is that I want to limit Paint.NET to a VGA Palette. How do I do that? The same one that SCI1.1 Games use.

http://scicompanion.com/Documentation/palettes.html#import-export-import-at-export-range

Export a palette as a .pal file, presumably paint.NET can read that.

But... you generally wouldn't want to do this for backgrounds. Each background generally uses different colors for palette entries 96-254. There's no "single palette".

For drawing views, then yes, you'd want do that. Export palette 999, load that into paint.NET and use the first 64 colors.

Or, again, you can just use SCI Companion to automatically map the colors...