Decompiler, new SCI Studio (in development)

[Veej]

Way before, I was checking out this: http://www.bripro.com/oldnews.php

A relevant quote: "It's a shame I didn't have my decompiler back when I recoded the entire SCI0 and SCI1 class systems from bytecode into high level scripts manually."

This from a guy who doesn't then bother to release the thing for the rest of the community. Great guy. Anyway, for those curious, I've started work on a new decompiler for SCI. I've had to do all this mostly from scratch and I'm sure it's not perfect.

I should have something ready to go pretty quick, though. Probably by the end of this month.

I will be releasing this as open source. I'm also re-doing SCI Studio (well, something like it) in C#. That won't be available at the end of the month, but it will be available and it will be fully open source. In fact, I'd like to get various people working on it so it will go up on sourceforge pretty quick. I'll post the link once there. I think .NET will give provide a lot more opportunities in terms of the tool. I'd also like to incorporate the decompiler but for now they're separate.

Again, I'll post links soon but I at least wanted to make a semi-official announcment for those that might be interested or want to help out.

[Cloudee1]

It's good to hear that more tools are being developed ... However

I edited the worst of your post 

Seriously, think positive here, a whole negative atmosphere could kill any new fledgling forums. Especially one that has been humping along for a while before attempting to branch off on it's own. Let's make sci fun again, and leave our old M-T baggage at the door. Announcing the development of some new tools is great news, don't poison it.

[Veej]

In any event, part of the reason the SCI community is on life support is because it spends most of its time not learning from its past and being critical (harshly so, sometimes).

[MusicallyInspired]

What's that supposed to mean?

[Cloudee1]

In any event, part of the reason the SCI community is on life support is because it spends most of its time not learning from its past and being critical (harshly so, sometimes).

I wouldn't call it life support, I own the domain name for the next 9 years, so for that long whether or not it's active, these forums will always be present. To say that we haven't learned from our past just isn't fair, I have tried to design our new home to directly combat some of the problems which we used to have as I saw them. The forum boards themselves were carefully considered to try and ease a users ability to find and use tools and resources and to provide a wealth of scripting examples that are easy to find and understand.

I can personally pinpoint the day Mega-tokyo started it's decline, it all stemmed from one moment. Now there is only a small percentage of users who were around then and can point to the same day, with a new home and new users coming just let it go, less and less people will even know what you are talking about anyway. In three years when new members are reading this thread looking for your decompiler are they even going to know who he is, assuming by then we have a bug free studio to replace scistudio and documentation to match. It might be nice to have his mythological decompiler, but we don't, and we don't know how well it even really worked anyway, but everything else he has released will fade into the background as better less crash prown tools are created. Considering the state of scistudio vga, if the decompiler was remotely usable, it probably would have been released. I have my own opinions of Brian as I'm sure everyone else does, but airing them doesn't progress the community, that's something I have learned from our past.

If you have suggestions to make the community better or stronger in any way, by all means, let's hear em. But bitching about Brian isn't going to help anything. I read your thoughts in full, I never said I disagreed with any of it, all I'm saying is that it isn't going to get us off of "life-support" only prolong it.

All right, now that that's over, have you figured out a name for your studio. Is it going to start off with just ega support or are you going to try and incorporate vga  elements. Trodoss and Lars both have ideas for getting vga resources to work via our measily scripts. A studio and template that was built around that concept would fit the bill nicely.

[trodoss]

Veej,

I can definately appreciate working on a decompiler.  I have been doing 'decompiles' manually (well, sort of, just staring at bytecode in UltraEdit32 and interpreting it into SCIScript).  Heinous, but I have learned a lot from the exercise.

Re: Brian P. - I think that he would never have even released his SCIStudio VGA code if he was a bad guy.  After all, he wanted to sell it as a 'registered' version at one point.  I think his dream of making money off of SCIStudio and ports of Sierra games on the GBA went by the wayside, and now he is working for a game company.  I certianly can't knock him for needing to make money.

And, his decomplier probablly was buggy, but it worked well enough for him.  The thing is, Brian contributed a great deal to the AGI/SCI fan community.  I know he was dissapointed with the lack of games (or quality of games) that was being made with SCIStudio, but the community has survived even if he does not have time/interest to contribute anymore.  Heck, for all we know he is reading these posts right now.  What has kept people interested?  Well, I think it goes back to that child in each of us that looked at the Sierra games back in the 80's/90's with wonderment, wishing some day to be able to make cool games like that.  I would say if you asked a lot of hackers-turned-"IT Guys/Gals" why they are in the industry today, it had something to do with those 'old' games

C# is what I use all the time.  Definately would be able to help you there.  I don't know if troflip is still wanting to keep working on the SCI Companion or not, but I was hopeful that he was going to make that a full-featured port of SCI Studio.   I would have certianly liked to see an editor for SCI1 views, pics, and palettes.  I don't know if he was even headed in that direction though. 

[trodoss]

Cloudee1 (and all),

I have heard the term 'Life Support' used a lot, and really, it is no more alive/dead than it has ever been.  People come and go in and out of virtual communities all the time.  I don' t know how many 'farewell' posts I have seen on other boards when people leave, mad about something or other, only to have them show back up months/years later when their interests 'swing' back.

Seems like people announce that they are working on a game, ask a few questions, and either stick around until they really make something, or give up and loose interest.  There is nothing wrong with that.  There is a lot that goes into game design.  Usually people try to do it 'backwards' (as in they create backdrops/characters/etc., and *then* come up with a storyline), and maybe that can work.  If you look at the video game industry and how they manage their products, the storyline comes first, then the game is made. 

[Cloudee1]

The first real game I ever played was Space Quest III on a monochrome green screen with a 56k 5 1/4" Low-Density floppy drive with no harddisk and I loved every disk swapping moment of it.

I want nothing more than to make sci fun again. Really that is my number one goal. It goes beyond just a general forum atmosphere. The number 3 reasons in my mind why people drift from the sci community have absolutely nothing to do with Brian. I am taking the approach that Brian has contributed as much as he is going to at this point. His sci knowledge would be a tremendous asset to this community and I would love to see him sign up and participate, but there are no signs of that happening, anyway, I think the reasons why people stray from the sci path

• The games they are making become epics ~ they simply get bored and eventually set it aside, hence the competitions to try and break up the monotony of that other game, making development fun again, not a tedious chore.
• Not enough examples ~ you can't tell me a procedure name and I'll know how to implement it, I need to see it used first. I don't have any formal programming experience, as you'll notice from my preferred code indentation, so resources that help me are far and few between, I know a lot of other user start out the same way. Hence the how to section to try to make it less overwhelming.
• Too many crashes ~ scistudio just doesn't run great.  scicompanion still has issues with win98, but is far more stable than scistudio.

I only mentioned life-support because its a term veej used. If anything the sci community has just emerged from infancy seeing the birth of an sci studio of any kind, the early pages of Mega-Tokyo are filled with scistudio news before it could actually do a whole lot, before there was a template game to even build anything with,  and is only now entering it's adolescence. I realise there's an ebb and flow to virtual communities, but I'd like to see a big ebb soon.

[OmerMor]

Veej - Great news!
I'm a pretty decent C# myself, and I'd love to help & contribute.
I don't know much about SCI internals, but I think this would be a good opportunity to learn.
As soon as you open source your projects, I'll get started.
Omer Mor.

[trodoss]

Veej,

Just wondering if this is still something you are working on or not, or if you were needing help getting this done.

[troflip]

  I don't know if troflip is still wanting to keep working on the SCI Companion or not, but I was hopeful that he was going to make that a full-featured port of SCI Studio.   I would have certianly liked to see an editor for SCI1 views, pics, and palettes.  I don't know if he was even headed in that direction though. 

I'll keep working on it as I have time (not much lately, and winter/spring is a busy time for me)... it is nearly a full-featured port of SCI Studio.  I was in the middle of adding support for C++ style syntax as I stopped working on it due to busy life stuff... today I'm taking a look at the code for the first time in a few months to try to get back up to speed :-)

I have no intention of having it edit SCI1 resources at the moment though.  Mainly because the motivating factor for writing it is to use it to develop my own game, which is SCI0 (since I prefer the text parser interface, and 256-color graphics would be too hard for me to draw)

[MusicallyInspired]

Good to hear work is still being done. Still looking forward to it!

[Cloudee1]

It's unfortunate, it appears as though Veej was more interested in bashing Brian than he was in making a decompiler. I was really looking forward to one too. I would LOVE to see how astro chicken works.

The bright side, SCI Companion has a small disassembly feature that lets you view a little more info about the script than just the instances names, but not a full decompile.