Hello Pierre,
Welcome to our AGI community. It's a great place to discuss AGI related issues, and you can always count on the users here to help answer any questions you might have.
I'm sorry to hear you are having problems with WinAGI. All I can say is that I've done extensive testing on it over the last ten years or so, and I have successfully decompiled and recompiled every original Sierra DOS game with no errors. But there were a lot of different versions of each game released, and it's possible you have a version that I don't have that does cause errors when loaded in WinAGI. I don't think that's too likely though.
And yes, you do see a lot of warnings when you decompile/recompile original Sierra games, but those are all there because of bugs or bad coding practices used in the original games. WinAGI is able to do deep analysis of the resources and logic code and exposes those flaws that other AGI tools gloss over or ignore. If you don't like the warnings, you can disable them by setting the error detection level to low. But you miss out on one of the best features of WinAGI (in my opinion) because it will help you find those subtle errors and bugs that are otherwise really hard to detect.
Regarding unrecognized resources, many of the original Sierra games had bits of old code, old resources and invalid directory pointers that got left in the game, even though they are never accessed. WinAGI is able to identify those 'orphaned' invalid resources so they can be corrected if doing a recompile. The errors are not caused by WinAGI- on the contrary, WinAGI points out what other tools miss.
I am not sure I understand your comment about message variables. The terms 'message' and 'variable' have distinct meaning in AGI syntax, so 'message variables' isn't a thing (translation error I assume?) I *think* you are referring to a decompiling option to hide inline display of messages as text strings; so when decompiled, you want to see this:
if (said("look"))
{
print(m1);
}
instead of this:
if (said("look"))
{
print("You see nothing of interest.");
}
If that's the case, then you are correct; WinAGI currently doesn't offer that as a decompile option. But it took me less than 10 minutes to add it. Unfortunately, I saw this post literally one minute AFTER I just posted a new version (2.1.4)!!! So I'll have to make another version, including installer, assuming this is the fix you want. If so, I can get that out in the next couple days.
Support for delimited comments (/* ... */) was removed intentionally from WinAGI several years ago. There were two reasons for this. First, the original syntax used by Sierra did not have this feature; keeping the syntax as close to the original for nostalgia purposes is something that many in the AGI fan community feel very strongly about. Secondly, removing them greatly simplified the logic coding functions, and also provided huge performance gains when using syntax highlighting in large source files. It's possible that support for them will be added back in when I move to C#, but most likely not. Time will tell...
Your comment about logics, views and sounds not being recognized, if true, certainly is a concern. But as I said, I have never had any issues like that in years of testing with original DOS versions of AGI games.
I encourage you to start another thread that includes the specific issues you are seeing. If you give me details, I may be able to tell you if it really is a bug that needs addressing, or if you are perhaps not using WinAGI correctly.
