Author Topic: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)  (Read 10306 times)

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Offline russdanner

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #60 on: May 04, 2024, 02:31:31 PM »
There is a ton of helpful information in the Help file that should show you how to do all the things you need to finish adding all your resources and getting things running. And you can also always contact me, either here in the forum, or by PM, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you have - either about how to use WinAGI to do what you want, or generic AGI related questions.

So far I am only really running into one issue:
pic.ControlRoom and pic.OuterBay PICTURES are so large that I run out of memory with AGI.EXE in DOS BOX.  These work fine in AGILE.  Is there any way to tell DOSBOX/AGI.EXE to give me more memory? These are not any bigger than SpaceQuest 2 PICTURE files so I am kind of surprised -- but I would like to be able to run in DOSBOX for all this effort.  Any ideas? 

Offline Collector

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #61 on: May 04, 2024, 04:40:09 PM »
Remember that DOSBox already gives you all or at least nearly all of the 640KB base memory, more than any real machine. Any memory issue loading resources would be more likely internal to AGI, but I would imagine that Andrew could say better than I.
KQII Remake Pic

Offline russdanner

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #62 on: May 04, 2024, 05:19:13 PM »
Remember that DOSBox already gives you all or at least nearly all of the 640KB base memory, more than any real machine. Any memory issue loading resources would be more likely internal to AGI, but I would imagine that Andrew could say better than I.

I assumed the same. I tried loading that room right away without any other resources without much luck just to make sure it's not a slow leak. I'll go back and actually look at the asset in the vol file in a bit but for the moment I am have it on hold while I port the rest of the game.

Offline doomlazer

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #63 on: May 04, 2024, 05:36:14 PM »
You've got 30 Kb of 0x00s at the end of your pic.outerBay file for some reason. You can probably remove the empty data with a hex editor and the pics will work fine.

Edit: 30 KB, not Kb
« Last Edit: May 05, 2024, 10:57:21 AM by doomlazer »

Offline AGKorson

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #64 on: May 05, 2024, 03:54:29 AM »
Yeah, 30kb of extraneous data would probably be enough to overwhelm available memory in MSDOS AGI.

The memory model for AGI is very simplistic- a 64kByte block is allocated for the game (not counting the picture buffers- they are located in a separate segment), but the agidata.ovl file occupies the first ~8K, leaving only ~56K for actual game data. The room.0 portion will typically use another 7 - 10K depending on the size of your game. Each room also needs some memory to handle displaying objects on screen. So best case scenario is around 45K or so for resources in each room. The WinAGI help file includes a detailed discussion on memory management if you want to learn more.

There is no way to adjust available memory in AGI. You get what you get. (OK, there IS one way, by using the AGI Power Pack, but that's a hack, not a built-in capability of AGI. And it's an entirely separate topic.)

If you need to know how much space a resource takes up in your game, it's displayed on the property pane beneath the resource tree. Select the resource you are interested in and the 'Size' property will give you that info. Most of your pics have sizes that seemed too big to me given the displayed output - I checked, and every single one of them has the extra bloat. You may need to check your save function to see why your pics are getting extra data appended.

You have shown me a minor bugfix that I need to make sure gets added to the next version. WinAGI should detect cases where unused data exists in resources and provide a warning to the user. And also include a way to fix the problem. In the current version, you will need to export the picture resource to a file, use a hex editor to remove the extra data, then re-import them.

« Last Edit: May 05, 2024, 03:57:52 AM by AGKorson »

Offline russdanner

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #65 on: May 05, 2024, 11:28:12 AM »
Thanks guys!

That last part about exporting, fixing outside, and reimporting is what I needed! 

I'll start with the ones I MUST do and then worry about the others (given that I just got done porting a ton of rooms into the game, and I'm crunch'n.) I never noticed the issue when I built these binaries from the JSON commands -- and I only worried about problems that presented themselves. Bringing the game into the "real" world definitely shows where the compiler and engine I worked on differed from the spec.

Offline lance.ewing

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #66 on: May 09, 2024, 01:36:00 PM »
@russdanner, have you played through version 0.7 of LTEC, i.e. the one you sent me?

If you find any issues, let me know and I can upload a new version of the ZIP for you.

I did try just now and couldn't seem to get out of the first SQ scene. It looks like I've swept the whole deck, the message has appeared from my watch, I've read through that, but I don't seem to be able to walk out of that room to the right. I'll try again this evening but just wanted to check with you if everything is okay in that room.


Offline lance.ewing

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #67 on: May 09, 2024, 02:58:25 PM »
I think the issue is the following line:

Code: [Select]
if (posn(ego, 145, 135, 160, 160))

I can't seem to get any closer than X = 144. Oh... is it because I'm holding the broom? :D  ;D

Yeah, that was it. I didn't need to do that in the other version, so didn't realise that that was part of the puzzle.

Offline lance.ewing

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #68 on: May 09, 2024, 05:56:01 PM »
I have just finished a full play through of Let Them Eat Cake running in AGILE, with 37/40 points.

Offline russdanner

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #69 on: June 05, 2024, 09:34:54 AM »
The latest build of Let Them Eat Cake is here: https://let-them-eat-cake.com/ltec-1-7-1.zip
There are some bug fixes in there, and ... I added Cedric to a scene per request of Ricky on the Sierra Universe forum :)

How is traffic to the AGIle site? There are a lot of games there. I've tried a bunch but haven't gotten to far in many of them.

Offline lance.ewing

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #70 on: June 05, 2024, 07:20:49 PM »
Thanks Russ. I'll try to get the new version of LTEC on the site over the next 24 hours.

The traffic to agi.sierra.games has died right down now. It got a big boost after I posted the article about the original AGI interpreter source code, and the github repo for agile-gdx ended up on 30 stars after that, an increase of about 25. I don't think many people are going back to it regularly. Most requests to the site came from France so far, and I think that was mainly due to one particular post someone there did with regards to my article about the original AGI source. You'll notice that many of the AGI fan games were made by Robin Gravel and he generally supported French in his games. I'm not sure if that might be why it has been popular there. The main reason I made sure I got the various AGI hacks working in the web version of AGILE is because Robin's games tended to use them, e.g. the AGI Mouse hack.

Offline doomlazer

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #71 on: June 05, 2024, 07:47:07 PM »
It would be great to see AGILE support AGK's PowerPack down the road. Threepwang has already used it to create a French translation of SQ1 (with SQ2 nearing completion) that supports extended characters in player inputs. That was a big limitation in Robin's French games.

Plus, the PP demo game is pretty good in its own right.

There are some bug fixes in there, and ... I added Cedric to a scene per request of Ricky on the Sierra Universe forum :)

lol

Offline lance.ewing

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #72 on: June 06, 2024, 06:05:20 PM »
Thanks Russ. I'll try to get the new version of LTEC on the site over the next 24 hours.

This has now been updated to the new version.

Offline lance.ewing

Re: CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)
« Reply #73 on: June 06, 2024, 06:09:21 PM »
It would be great to see AGILE support AGK's PowerPack down the road. Threepwang has already used it to create a French translation of SQ1 (with SQ2 nearing completion) that supports extended characters in player inputs. That was a big limitation in Robin's French games.

It would be much more involved to add support for the PowerPack, but I do hope to implement it at some point.


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