Operation: RECON

[natbudin]

As a testbed for agikit development, I've reconstructed the source code for the Operation: RECON trailer and posted it to Github: https://github.com/nbudin/oprecon

Operation: RECON was a game project created by Randy Dykstra in the mid-90s.  He posted on the MegaTokyo message boards looking for programming help and I volunteered to do it.  We got to the point where we released a trailer, and eventually Randy brought in Leigh Ann Frey as a third member of the development team.

I eventually ended up stepping back from the project without really communicating it to my collaborators, which in hindsight I strongly regret.  The README for the Github repository goes into my side of the story in more detail, but the upshot of it was that I had a lot of complicated feelings around the project, but as a high schooler, I wasn't very good at expressing them at the time, and I wish I had been able to do so better.

Anyway, I hope this release brings back as many memories for you as it has for me!

[Collector]

You know that the original demo has a Wiki page.

http://agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php?title=Operation:_RECON_Demo

Feel free to update it as needed.

[natbudin]

Updated with links to Github.  I thought about putting some version of my story on that wiki page and decided it probably wasn't appropriate, since the project was mostly Randy's brainchild and I'm unsure of what he and Leigh Ann ended up doing after I dropped out of contact with them.

[Collector]

If you can still contact him, perhaps you can get him interested in the project again.

[Cloudee1]

I remember that one, I even added a review of it way back when

https://sciprogramming.com/fangames.php?action=review&id=162

[EricOakford]

I've been reconstructing the source for Residence 44 Quest, optimizing it in the process and upgrading the interpreter to AGI3. I did this in the process of researching the game for the SCI01 remake.

I may do the same for Space Quest: The Lost Chapter and Space Quest 0, for research into potential remakes.

[Cloudee1]

Don't be in too big of a hurry on the SQ remakes, I've got one in the works that attempts to combine SQ1-3 and Replicated and TLC into a single playable game.

[Collector]

SCI1.1?

[Cloudee1]

Pretty sure
Just played through it as far as I could from the beginning, Made it through 1 and 0, and ran into some dead ends in 2...
The way I have it planned, slightly reordered... starts with 1... taking the elevator at the end, takes you to a different level where instead of an escape pod, is the beginning of 0... at the end of that, blue chick drops you off at the beginning of 2... at the end of 2 we let TLC pick up from there, and at the end of TLC, the junk freighter beams up the junk ship from the planet to land us at the beginning of 3

[Collector]

Pretty sure

I take it that you are just at the planning stage then, if you have not started coding it.

[Cloudee1]

Oh no, a ton of coding has been done...
SQ1 about 85%, need more sounds, and more looks but can be played all the way through
SQ0 about 75%, can be played all the way through, but a bit buggy in places
SQ2 about 80%, can't be played all the way through, but only missing a few elements that make that possible
TLD 0%, that things just massive and haven't delved into it too far yet
SQ3 about 45%, most rooms are present but overall, very fragmented

[EricOakford]

Oh no, a ton of coding has been done...
SQ1 about 85%, need more sounds, and more looks but can be played all the way through
SQ0 about 75%, can be played all the way through, but a bit buggy in places
SQ2 about 80%, can't be played all the way through, but only missing a few elements that make that possible
TLD 0%, that things just massive and haven't delved into it too far yet
SQ3 about 45%, most rooms are present but overall, very fragmented

By TLD, I assume you're referring to TLC, The Lost Chapter. Yeah, that game is massive. I've been going through the game's decompiled code and reconstructing it. One thing I did was merge Logics 249-254 (the alien shuttle cutscene) into a single Logic 249, freeing up some space for dynamic logics for underwater (and removing redundant code from each room as a result), as well as a RoomInit logic that properly implements local and dynamic variables and flags.

Any views that aren't animated have been made into add.to.pics to save valuable memory.

I've been moving any variables and flags that don't need to be kept on room change into the 220-239 range.

Also, I've removed the leftover items from SQ2 (save for the glowing gem, since only it returns in SQ3), which Wilco Interactive confirms are useless. That freed up some space for reorganizing the inventory and icons so that they can all be looked at via show.obj, which wasn't properly supported at first.

[Collector]

Might be nice if Replicated could be fixed to run on the AGI executable rather than NAGI.

[Collector]

Should we split the SQ chatter off into its own thread and leave this thread for the Operation: RECON trailer? It kind of took over this thread.