Cascade Quest dev blog

[troflip]

Finally got around to starting my Cascade Quest-specific dev blog!

http://blog.cascadiaquest.com/

[MusicallyInspired]

Really impressive stuff you're doing!

[Doan Sephim]

Finally got around to starting my Cascade Quest-specific dev blog!

http://blog.cascadequestgame.com/

Looks super cool! I am really impressed with your innovations. Does all this stuff negatively effect your heap space?

[Kawa]

Do you really think heap space is an issue when you're not playing by established rules?

[troflip]

I long ago ran out of heap space in the actual Sierra interpreter.

My 'terp uses the same technique as ScummVM for dealing with heap... each script gets it's own 64K address space. As do object clones, dynamically allocated memory, and the stack. Actually, objects/clones only take up 2 bytes of space for their pointer (their properties aren't even mapped into SCI heap space), so I could theoretically have 32,000 of them.

[MusicallyInspired]

He's combining it with Unity which is why he has auto-complete parser text and scaling. I still find it fascinating.

[Doan Sephim]

I long ago ran out of heap space in the actual Sierra interpreter.

My 'terp uses the same technique as ScummVM for dealing with heap... each script gets it's own 64K address space. As do object clones, dynamically allocated memory, and the stack. Actually, objects/clones only take up 2 bytes of space for their pointer (their properties aren't even mapped into SCI heap space), so I could theoretically have 32,000 of them.

Cool. Honestly, that's one issue that's very limiting that I wish were easily remedied. Dealing with heap makes me sad because I don't get to implement things how I would like. Best of luck!

[troflip]

Cool. Honestly, that's one issue that's very limiting that I wish were easily remedied. Dealing with heap makes me sad because I don't get to implement things how I would like. Best of luck!

I agree! As long as it's your scripts that are getting too big, and not just a memory leak/memory fragmentation (which is the problem that most people have). My core scripts (Controls.sc, Game.sc, etc...) started eating up too much space to load some rooms...

[lskovlun]

I agree! As long as it's your scripts that are getting too big, and not just a memory leak/memory fragmentation (which is the problem that most people have). My core scripts (Controls.sc, Game.sc, etc...) started eating up too much space to load some rooms...

In which case, target SCI01. Problem solved.

[MusicallyInspired]

I wonder why Brian never targeted SCI01 to begin with? Seems like he was too obsessed with using Leisure Suit Larry games as a starting base...

[troflip]

I wonder why Brian never targeted SCI01 to begin with? Seems like he was too obsessed with using Leisure Suit Larry games as a starting base...

There are some disadvantages... the available interpreters didn't come with debug switches, right?

Anyway, it only gets you partway - it basically doubles your available heap space, sort of. Memory pressure is still going to be an issue if you're trying to do complex stuff.


New post on parser autosuggest: http://blog.cascadequestgame.com/2017/05/04/text-parser-autosuggest/

[lskovlun]

There are some disadvantages... the available interpreters didn't come with debug switches, right?

This is true of QfG2 (contrary to what I remembered), but KQ1/SCI and the christmas card have a debugger (the KQ1 interp does not have pathfinding, but since you're rolling your own that would seem not to matter).