Learning to program AGI games

[Paladinlover]

Hello people,

I've been thinking about making games with AGI, SCI, and AGS studios (all three), and naturally the single biggest thing that's been on my mind is to how to write the code for it. Back in 2003, I took a course in C++ and after I was done with it, I found myself able to 'read' the inner workings of the code on Brian's SCI game template with a fair amount of skill, but I never got around to making games since I was waiting for the never to arrive SCI studio VGA (Brian said it would permit the code to be viewed as easily as looking into the original code of sierra AGI games with AGI studio) to learn more by seeing how the more complex stuff worked.

At any rate, I've regained some interest in creating games after finding some inspiration as to what to create. So my question here is this: What would be a good way to learn to program AGI games? I heard that since AGI uses a procedural programming language, would it be a good start to learn BASIC to get an idea to how things work or not? What do you people recommend?

Till next time stay cool 

[Collector]

Hi, PL. Though there are some AGI resources here, the AGI community is not what it used to be since agigames.com was closed. Someone that knows more about AGI might see this, but outside of Lance Ewing, there are only a couple AGI people that (rarely) post here. You will find a lot more help with SCI.

[lance.ewing]

In my opinion AGI is definitely easier to program and has less of a learning curve. AGI doesn't have functions or procedures or methods or anything like that. All it has are scripts. The syntax is actually visually more like C than BASIC. But it doesn't support the more complex keywords, such as for loops or switch statements or while loops or anything like that. Apart from all the action commands (built in functions), all it really has is an if/else. At least that is how I remember it.

SCI, on the other hand, does have things like for loops, switch statements, etc. It also has classes and methods and all those things that languages like C++ and java have. Brian must have had plans to build a decompiler in to that version of SCI Studio. Something like that is actually very tricky to build. I've been thinking about attempting it at some point myself but as yet all I've done is investigation.

AGI is indeed a lot simpler, but it is amazing how much you can achieve with that simplicity.

[Collector]

I would love to have some kind of decompiler for SCI that could render something intelligible to make it easier to fix some of the bugs in existing games that never got fixed. Of course this would be a lot more useful for the VGA games as there are few unfixed bugs in most of the EGA games.

[Paladinlover]

I would love to have some kind of decompiler for SCI that could render something intelligible to make it easier to fix some of the bugs in existing games that never got fixed. Of course this would be a lot more useful for the VGA games as there are few unfixed bugs in most of the EGA games.

I've been dreaming of something like that since 2003 at least. I've always wanted to edit and modify SCI games beyond the meager SCI0. Also for my purposes in making games, I would much prefer using a fully operational SCI VGA than AGS studio. Not because I think AGS is inferior, but I just want it to have as much feel of an early 90's Sierra game.

In my opinion AGI is definitely easier to program and has less of a learning curve. AGI doesn't have functions or procedures or methods or anything like that. All it has are scripts. The syntax is actually visually more like C than BASIC. But it doesn't support the more complex keywords, such as for loops or switch statements or while loops or anything like that. Apart from all the action commands (built in functions), all it really has is an if/else. At least that is how I remember it.

SCI, on the other hand, does have things like for loops, switch statements, etc. It also has classes and methods and all those things that languages like C++ and java have. Brian must have had plans to build a decompiler in to that version of SCI Studio. Something like that is actually very tricky to build. I've been thinking about attempting it at some point myself but as yet all I've done is investigation.

AGI is indeed a lot simpler, but it is amazing how much you can achieve with that simplicity.

I've been looking into the logic inside the AGI games, and I showed it to my sister, who is a software engineer and she did tell me that it looked like a very simple programming system. Also you're right about the predominance of the If/Else statements, it almost looks like that is all it has on a glance. At any rate, I realize that I still have a lot of learn about programming before I can look towards making anything with AGI.