AGI Sound Situation

[Joel]

This issue was of concern to us when that group of us got together a couple years ago to think about doing a new AGI Studio in C++. Obviously, the project never went anywhere, but one of the possibilities we had discussed was having a simple main application and have all the tools such as logic editor/compiler, picture editor, etc. in DLL files so that they would be interchangeable without anyone needing access to the source code for the main environment. Obviously, that adds some difficulty in developing tools since they have to be written as DLLs instead of simple applications, but it is a solution.

[Nick Sonneveld]

I think Nailhead gets the right idea.. DLL's are nice but you'd use a different interface if you wanted to port it over to Linux or any other operating system.  I thought we could use pipes to send it from program to program.  But that's just an idea.

I think.. just like people making games, they're getting overwhelmed with all the bits 'n pieces you have to code.. so if you can break it up into little managable pieces.. it would be great.

There was this interview i read a while ago, I wish i could find the link, but basically, the guy was trying to say that you should never rewrite code.  A lot of people, with the post-story comments were ridiculing this idea but I think his idea is very intellient.

When he says rewrite, he means start from scratch and not use your original code.  He believes that if you want to majorly change the design of the code, you should do it in small bites, just enough to slowly get to your new design.. but it should always compile and still work.  That's the idea here..  We should keep the AGI Studio code, and just code in support for these little programs.

The core of my agi2scr and scr2agi are working.. I just need to code in something to read parameters (hardcoded filenames atm).  Using these tools you can decompile agi sounds to a textfile, edit the file and then compile it back up.

I tried larry's theme, decompiling and recompiling and they were an exact match.

So hopefully, if you want to write a converter, just write it to the sound script format and then use the compiler to write up an agi file.  That way you don't have to worry about registers, splitting freq_counts and stuff like that.

I'll set up a website soon with the code.

- Nick

[Nick Sonneveld]

ok, found a link to that interview..  And a couple of articles he wrote on rewriting software

http://www.softwaremarketsolution.com/SMS%20Articles/An_Interview_with_Joel_Spolsky.htm
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html

- Nick

[Joakim]

Have you tried impulse tracker?

[Nick Sonneveld]

I didn't mean any offense.  I just meant that one game had successfully used written music using IT.

The more sound tools the better really.

- Nick

[Nick Sonneveld]

Joel is working on a staff editor but there would be applications for either type of editor.  If we can get some editors/tools out along with a tutorial or two, it could solve the problem of having all these people ask how to add sound.

- Nick