FreeSCI, An interpreter Alternative

[Cloudee1]

To those people who aren't really sure what the FreeSCI project is or how it pertains to our community, you should check out this old article I dug up from a linux dev site, featuring bits from our own member Lars.

The articles a few years old now, but it tells you enough that you'll probably want to try out FreeSCI after your done reading it. Have a look.

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2003/02/03/freesci.html

[jtyler125]

A long time ago I tried downloading it and could nto do anything with it.  Sci Studio was just so much more user friendly with a walkthrough on how to get started for the dumb newbies like myself...sci studio was my gateway into programming games.  I am starting to reallt get excited about sci companion...I used it to make my competition entry...I see huge promise in Troflip's sci companion...and he seems excited to keep making improvements...it is a very exciting time for novice game development.

[Cloudee1]

 

Alright JT, the shorthand version of what FreeSCI is. In our template games and all of the ones downloadable on the fangames page include an sciv.exe file. That file is Sierra's and it is the interpreter which uses the resources you make in scistudio or companion and interpret them into the playable game. So with every game made available, by all rights Sierra could come crashiong down on us with intellectual property or copyright laws for including that file.

FreeSCI is an alternative interpreter. It replaces the sciv.exe file. The article implies some game editing properties, but I think at the time those were based off planned semi integration of sci studio vga (this is just my guess) but with the end of that project that also ended that branch of development.

[troflip]

That's great to hear you used SCI Companion for your contest entry!  (me too, of course)

As for interpreters, my favorite way is to run sciv.exe in DOSBOX Although DOSBOX is noticeably slower than running sciv.exe natively on XP, I like the fact that it's in a window, and it seems to crash less often than XP's dos virtual machine.

I've tried FreeSCI, but it had some different behaviour than sierra's sciv.exe interpreter - notably it treated some Said strings differently (which was making my game unplayable), and also I tried using the file operation kernel functions, and they behaved completely differently in FreeSCI.  I opened bugs against freesci for these about a year ago - I don't know if they've been fixed on a later build since I haven't checked it out lately.

[Doan Sephim]

As for interpreters, my favorite way is to run sciv.exe in DOSBOX Although DOSBOX is noticeably slower than running sciv.exe natively on XP, I like the fact that it's in a window, and it seems to crash less often than XP's dos virtual machine.

Have you tried pressing ctrl-f12? By increasing the dosbox cycles it speeds up emulation. If you increase too much it will begin to have an adverse effect, but I have found that this works prefectly well to get the same speed as running sciv.exe natively on xp.

[Cloudee1]

What's your computer speed, and how high do you crank your cycles?

[Doan Sephim]

I run a AMD athlon 2500+, 1.25 Gb 2700 RAM, with geForce 5700ULTRA 128Mb DDR2

I boost the cycles up to 10,000 or so.

[jtyler125]

So how do I write a game with FreeSci and make my games look as good as those screen shots in the article?

JT

[troflip]

You don't write games with it jt.  Re-read cloudee's first post in this thread.

Your game should already look "as good as those screenshots" if you run it using freesci.

[jtyler125]

Is there anything special I have to do to run it using freesci....?

[troflip]

Did you download it and read the instructions?

[jtyler125]

I don't even know what to download there are so many choices?  Remember I am not a programmer even though I have reached that status on this site.  If someone could lay it out like
1) download this...for your windows xp
2) do this you idiot
3) dumb newbie then do this
4) almost done spaz
5) last part dumbo...

And that is all I need...
I am all about easy to find and simple...then I tweak it after that...

[MusicallyInspired]

Just look for the latest Win32 binary version on the site and unzip (if it's a zip file) it's contents into your game's directory and run the FreeSCI.exe file you unzipped in your game directory.

Works fine for me. I used to have trouble with the sound a long time ago but their latest win32 version works pretty well. Even with a real MT-32! though the absence of reverb is annoying. It must be holding back some of the SysEx commands for reverb that are meant to be sent to the MT-32 or something.

[jtyler125]

Ok that was easier than I thought it was...now how do you get free sci to stop playing the lame music eveytime you get a point?

Thanks,
JT

[MusicallyInspired]

Three questions. What music? What game are you playing? What's lame about it?

Any music it's trying to play it played from the game itself. It doesn't add anything.