AGI or SCI?

[charred jawa]

I was wondering if people had any recommendations on which system to design games on.  I'm starting a new game and the most important thing to me is to use the text command interpreter.   I'd also like to have the ability to use 256 colors.  Does anyone have any recommendations?  256 color AGI or SCI?  What are the pros and cons of the two?

chris

[Majin_Trugeta]

Well I'm just starting out myself so I don't have much room to talk or have much experience, but I have been playing Sierra games since the mid 80's, and have lurked around the AGI community for a few years.

256 color can be done in both AGI & SCI. AGI requires a special patch, I haven't tried it out yet tho, so I'm not sure how effective it is. SCI has much better graphics though. I took a short look at SCI Studio and was a little overwhelmed. Quite a lot to learn. I didn't fool around with it to long tho, but making games in SCI is quite new, and with the exception of the Naturette 2 game being done in SCI, I'm not aware of any others being worked on currently. To work in SCI, I would wait till theres some good tutorials out, I've found a link to one so far. So unless your already an experienced programmer, I'd stick with AGI first. Thats what I plan to do, then after I'm well versed in that, I plan to give SCI a better look.

[bokkers]

I can only say that although AGI is in some ways very limited (memory access, resolution, etc), for me it was the perfect system to begin game design/game programming. Once you figure out the priority-system AGI, work becomes quite intuitive. How to write the logic scripts is very easy to learn,a and you can use your knowledge when you move to other languages. I particularly like, that the AGI-system is so compact, you got your vector-rooms, your sprites, your scripts, maybe some sounds and thats it. Although I have never really worked with SCI Studio, I have the impression that it is more complicated than AGI.
Another system I can recommend is the AGS (Adventure Game Creation Studio or something like that). Its even easier to create games in than agi, but it features hi-color, really cool resolutions, and it is very easy to import self-painted or self-rendered sprites. You will find a link to AGS at http://agisci.cjb.net
b.o.k.