Thoughts on the LSL4 babes

[robbo007]

Hi guys,
So I've decided to try and tackle the LSL4 babes like in LSL3 but with more interaction with the parser. Here is a test with Bippi. From Bippi's Land Liquors. (Downtown Nontoonyt Mall). "Bippi says: For those special romantic evenings, grab one of my jugs."

Any thoughts, opinions most appreciated.

[Kawa]

Nice rim lights.

[doomlazer]

I like the pixel art. Is it all done by hand with vectors or scanned in?

I don't know if you already have the whole game fleshed out, but I had an idea recently for a LSL Babe that I'll never get around to using. You'd be welcome to it if you wanted.

In the movie Dirty Dancing, Lisa sings a ribald little song about Hula Hana, a spoiled Hawaiian princess that demands impossible items.



LYRICS:

Code: [Select]

Who's this Hula Hana of Kamana Whala Hula Bay?
She will hula, when you have a lovely gift she wants, you'll hear her say,
"Bring me a pineapple that doesn't sting, a bird that swims, a fish that sings, I wanna, I really wanna.
"Bring me a volcano that blows up all the molten jama and a blue banana, I canna canna.
"Bring me a pineapple that doesn't sting, a bird that swims, a fish that sings, I wanna, I really wanna.
"Bring me a volcano that blows up all the molten jama and a blue banana, I canna canna,
"and you can wacka all you wanna, while I hula all the day away,
"and you can wacka all you wanna, while I hula all the day away."
All the boys of Okakokanoka Island gather all the gifts that Hula Hana asks.
They have combed their island home, fulfilling each whim, and it's worth it when they watch her shake her grass, four, five.
Bring me a gentle breeze that I can keep, an ocean that is oh so deep, I wanna, I really wanna.
She will hula, when you have a lovely gift she wants, you'll hear her say,
"Bring me a pineapple that doesn't sting, a bird that swims, a fish that sings, I wanna, I really wanna.
"Bring me a volcano that blows up all the molten jama and a blue banana, I canna canna,
and you can wacka all you wanna, you can wacka while I walk away.
and you can wacka all you wanna, you can wacka while I walk away, away, away, away!"
The idea being that Larry would need to find items that fit the adventure-game-logic of what she's asking for; maybe a portable fan for "a breeze that I can keep", a Billy Bass plaque for "a fish that sings", etc.. I just think it would integrate well into a Larry game and the reference is period appropriate. Maybe I just like the song, IDK.

[robbo007]

hehe. Thanks.

So, its hand drawn using Aseprite and then I pass them through the SCIVEC program that Erik wrote to compress the size down. The resource file is at 5.8mb which is massive but I think I can get it compressed onto 8-10 360kb floppies

So far there are 96 rooms where the player can go. Plus all the others that do the logics. I should have maybe tried sometime smaller for my first attempt but I'm going strong, 2 years now and want to get to beta by December which will make 3 years. Pretty much all the graphics are finished just some sprites left to do. I'm trying to tackle room scripts now. Once all the mechanics are working then jump to parser text and implement the story/conversations.

I like your ideas. Would fit really well. hehe.

[doomlazer]

96 rooms? Sounds like you're really quite far along. Might as well go big for your first project!

...The resource file is at 5.8mb which is massive but I think I can get it compressed onto 8-10 360kb floppies

LOL, I'm having flashbacks about how tedious and slow it was to disk swap while playing these games - at least with 5 & 1/2 disks.

[lskovlun]

It was way worse in other games. Early on, Sierra had this tool - written in Prolog - that would lay out the resource volumes on each disk with combinatorial optimization. They didn't carry it forward from AGI to SCI for some reason.

[cosmicr]

It's a lot of work, but you'd be better off tracing the pixelled version. You'd reduce the size by 95% I reckon. Very nice picture though. I can't recall sierra using a gradient background like that in EGA but it's a nice touch.

[Kawa]

I can't recall sierra using a gradient background like that in EGA but it's a nice touch.

Quest for Glory 2 immediately came to mind.



You'll notice if you look into it that this is one of the few non-vector backgrounds in the game. Cos there's no way you're doing that gradient in vectors.

[robbo007]

I can't recall sierra using a gradient background like that in EGA but it's a nice touch.

Quest for Glory 2 immediately came to mind.

You'll notice if you look into it that this is one of the few non-vector backgrounds in the game. Cos there's no way you're doing that gradient in vectors.

Do you know what tools they used to draw the backgrounds in Quest for Glory 2?

[Kawa]

Do you know what tools they used to draw the backgrounds in Quest for Glory 2?

It was probably their usual in-house picture editor. At some point the engine and the picture editor alike got the ability to use cels as backgrounds, so they could switch from sticking a pencil sketch under a digitizer tablet to just showing it on screen, like some hacky version of the "trace image" feature we have now.


This picture (QFG2 pic 400) has an image cell (the pencil sketch), with vector-based priority and control screens. The red boxes are also vectors. The mountain of corpses has only the visual.

For the later SCI 1.x games they probably just scanned and cleaned the art, or drew it in Photoshop or whatnot, imported it into the picture editor as a visual background, and used that to trace out the priority and control screens, both in EGA and VGA:


And here's what made me think they probably stuck a pencil sketch under a digitizer to trace from:

[cosmicr]

I can't recall sierra using a gradient background like that in EGA but it's a nice touch.

Quest for Glory 2 immediately came to mind.



You'll notice if you look into it that this is one of the few non-vector backgrounds in the game. Cos there's no way you're doing that gradient in vectors.

Wow I've played that game a thousand times and it never occurred to me that that image wasn't a vector image...

Takes away from some of the magic to be honest

[lskovlun]

You'll notice if you look into it that this is one of the few non-vector backgrounds in the game. Cos there's no way you're doing that gradient in vectors.

Sure, all they had to do was create a GradientFill opcode and... oh, never mind.

[doomlazer]

When was the image() pic command introduced? I thought it wasn't until sci1, but apparently not

[lskovlun]

I think it was SCI01, but it's been 25 years since I worked on this...

[doomlazer]

Whats the format of an image() compared to a scicompanion pic import? Was there a tool that got smaller file sizes? The HerosQuest2 pic is 3K+ so I guess not really.