SCI games

[luke_scoffield]

Has anybody written a program to create SCI games?

[Chris Cromer]

There is a program called SCI Studio that is being created by this guy named Brian Provinciano. He has released a beta of it but it is very buggy and practically impossible to make an SCI game with. Sonner or later he will release the finished version which should be able to let people create SCIx.0 games.

[RaDIaT1oN]

Is the SCI interpreter (or FreeSCI) documented properly, I mean to the level of game creation?
I know that there are some docs at the FreeSCI website, but I haven't checked these for a long time.

Unlikely that I will do any work on anything in this line for a while, but I may look at this for a future project sometime.  Also I know Brian says that the final code for SCI Studio will be released under GPL, but does anybody know it it's written for portability? Or when it will be finished (stable I mean)?

[Chris Cromer]

I don't beleive the free sci web site documents game creation yet. They are still trying to get it to work with all of Sierra's original SCI games.

There is no telling when SCI Studio will be complete. The complete version will be the next version he releases though. I am not too sure if it is written for portability though.

[robingravel]

I could make "Naturette in treeland" with present version of scistudio but lack of documentations prevent me to go on.

Yes! You can write commands and compile them. I changed
some codes in the demos and they work. But making a serious games like Naturette we need more knowledges of it.

Robin Gravel

[Chris Cromer]

I know you can write commands and compile them. But the amount of errors and lack of documetation make it impossible. I will hopefully make a SCI game once more documentation is made and it is a little less buggy.
Here is one of the characters I was making in my RPG/SCI game:

[Atogus]

It is possible to write and compile commands using the SCI Studio script compiler (although there are still a few problems with the code generation...), but the biggest problem is that in SCI, the script resources script.989 - script.999 contain many predefined classes (such as ego) and script.255 contains the dialog and control classes, and until someone rewrites those resources it willl be virtually impossible to "seriously" create a game in SCI...

However, if someone does rewrite those resources correctly, creating an SCI game should become quite simple :-)

[RaDIaT1oN]

I've been looking at the FreeSCI docs.  Doesn't seem simple at all, but I'm thinking that I may be able to figure something out.

Does anybody have a hard copy of the FreeSCI documentation (zip or tar.gz)? Reading online is killing me.

Also Brian's SCI studio refuses to run on my 'doze box, it says it needs HHCTRL.OCX, can somebody please send me this file.

[RaDIaT1oN]

Sniff, Sniff. Nobody's replying to my post.
Aside

Does anybody know whether it is (will be) possible to write SCI games that combine features of various SCI versions?
IE. A game with 256 color images and a text parser.

[Atogus]

For now it is only possible to create SCI version 0 games (text parser, 16 colors)

Is it very unlikely that you'll be able to create SCI version 1 games soon, because the SCI1 interpreter hasn't been fully decoded yet and not much is known about it.

However, maybe someone will write some sort of patch for SCI0 which will allow 256 colors :-) That would be cool!

[Chris Cromer]

I have 2 different versions of HHCTRL.OCX I don't know what the difference is one is in the windows\system directory and the other is in my Visual C++ directory. I don't know which one to send both are different sizes and look to be a little different.

[Atogus]

Right click on the HHCTRL.OCX file and select 'properties'. There should be a 'version' tab in the properties window. You can see which file is the most recent that way.

[Chris Cromer]

I know how to tell which one is older or newer. I was just wondering which one he needed. The one that is supplied with windows or the one that is supplied with Visual C++.

[RaDIaT1oN]

I don't have any.   Therefore none came with my windoze.
I would think that the newer version would be binary compatible with the old version (Anything else would cause too much confusion with windoze people.  This is of course provided they have the exact same filename.

If you could send me the newer one, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks

[Ch. Reichenbach]

Hi,

Try this:
http://darmstadt.gmd.de/~jameson/freesci-docs-onehtml.tar.gz

You can also generate them from docs/sci.sgml from the FreeSCI source distribution by using an SGML processor and a DSSSL spec for the 'docbook' document type (Unfortunately, the docs are in no shape for XSLT processing ATM). Please note that I've been unable to generate PDF or PostScript documentation yet; looks like the document structure is too weird for the DSSSL to handle.

-- Christoph