I was looking at the source code for some of the AGI games found in the repository that EricOakford posted in
this post.
The source for Black Cauldron includes a set of interpreter files (agi.exe, agidata.ovl, etc). The version for this set of files is 3.002.097, which is not one that I have ever seen before. So I disassembled it to see how it might differ from other versions. There is a publicly released version 3.002.098, so I expected it to be very similar to that.
It is not.
Instead, this appears to be a special version, presumably used by Sierra developers and testers during game development. It does not use VOL files or DIR files. Instead, it looks for a file named 'WHERE' in the game directory that has four directories which point to where individual resources are stored. The first points to compiled logics (which need to be in the form of 'RM.0, RM.1, etc.), the second points to picture resources (PIC.1, PIC.2, etc.), the third to view resources (VIEW.0, VIEW.1, etc.) and the fourth to sounds (SND.0, SND.1, etc.)
I imagine it was a lot easier to do testing with this interpreter, because you didn't have to rebuild the VOL and DIR files every time you made a change to a resource. You would only do that for the final release.
The source also includes volume definition files (BCVOL0.DRV, BCVOL1.DRV, etc) that I am guessing were used by their in-house tools to actually build the VOL and DIR files. Each definition file is a text file that lists the resources that would be included in each VOL file (same format for resources, RM.0, PIC.1, VIEW.2, SND.3, etc).
I'm still looking at the disassembled code to see if there are any other testing/debug features in this version that don't exist in the publicly released versions.
