What's up peeps!

[russdanner]

Wow I feel like we're in a bit of a quiet time here. The sierra movie is in production, the conferences are all done and Ken and Roberta are cruise'n.  What's AGI or SCI projects does everyone have planned for the year?

[Kawa]

Well, there's one or two features for SCI Companion that've been requested, but I really don't see myself implementing scaler support for the picture editor's fake ego so make of that what you will. I really ought to continue working on my SCI game too, but the only work recently done on that was to begin reworking the you-know-what at the end of the day, while the rest of the game remains unwritten.

I have non-SCI/AGI projects to work on too, but you didn't ask for any of those.

So yeah, it's been a time.

[Collector]

The scaler thing sounds like it would be a pain to implement.

[EricOakford]

What I'd been doing is AGI3 remasters of certain fan games. This had been going on for a while, but now I'm ready to share updates on that.
At this point, the Tex McPhilip games are all set and optimized. with various quality of life improvements. I tested them to completion with no known issues. What's cool is that I merged the first two games into one. The third game was too big, and different enough to remain its own game, but I did quite a bit of cleanup and optimization for that game too. Same for Tonight the Shrieking Corpses Bleed and Residence 44 Quest.

In all of these cases, the games have been re-coded to use the local/dynamic flags/variables system that's common in the Sierra games. I also did proto-SCI room scripts that were common in KQ3 and PQ1. That freed up a lot of globals.

When rearranging the flags, I discovered that flag 16 was often being used for various things. Problem is, if this flag is set, you get no confirmation if you want to restart the game. Obviously, during the AGI Studio days, it wasn't known that this flag was being used by the interpreter. Now we know (thanks to discovery of original source) that flags/vars 0-29 are all in the interpreter range. I rearranged things with this in mind.

I even tested the remastered games with really low CPU speed. 2000 cycles works well for most AGI games, but Tex McPhilip 3, with its larger views, chokes with anything lower than 3000. The games clearly weren't optimized with these slower speeds in mind. I took care of that.

So there you go. That's what I'd been doing all this time.

[lskovlun]

What is gained by moving these games to AGI3?

[doomlazer]

What I'd been doing is AGI3 remasters of certain fan games...

Cool stuff!

I've got my hands on a few projects atm, so I'll just mention one. French translator Ulyssom is working on a QfGIV translation that integrated AshLancer's awesome QfGIV-Enhanced. Only problem is that he's run into a few bugs that are verifiably caused by AshLancer's patches. Unfortunately, the source code for Ash's work was never released and decompiling the patches with SC has major issues for various reasons.

Since Sluicebox released his decompiler, SCI-Tools, I thought I'd fork Ash's repo, start with Sluice's qfg4-cd-dos-1.0 decompile, then decompile the qfg4-enhanced patches with SCI-Tools. That should give me a near perfect picture of Ash's changes, right? Well there were a few issues with that, the worst of which the method order being different in Ash's patches produced nearly unreadable diffs.

I spent a few days reordering those methods and resolving the other issues. Now I've got a clear reference for Ash's fixes. I still need to address a few things about compiling the source in SC, but that process should remove some of the unfortunate issues that found their way into Ash's patch files.

Also working on some fun projects with Threepwang and Avo323 that I won't go into here. Thanks so much to AGKorson for his support on Threepwang's projects and the incredible AGI PowerPack. A very special thanks to Sluicebox for tolerating me bugging him several times about the Ashlancer stuff.

[AGKorson]

Still working on WinAGI v3. I was hoping to have the beta release out by now, but as I continue to work on the Help file, I keep finding more and more things that need fixing or refactoring, especially older code when I was first starting. I do see the light at the end of the tunnel though, so hopefully it'll be done soon.

[Collector]

Hey Eric, good to see you around, again. I was just thinking about you. Yesterday, I was adding entries in the new unified Wiki for your template games and found a couple of them won't launch. The SCI1, both the EGA and VGA variants fail with "Can't find INTERP.ERR" error messages, even though the files are present in both.

The SCI1.1 Redux and SCI2.0 bomb after the debug popups. These I assume are just because they have no first room.

[russdanner]

Awesome. Everyone is busy busy I'm being lazy. Of course Space Quest 1 turns 40 in October..... Might have to not be lazy.  I've been kind of holding off on the AGI-AI integration front. I'd like the smaller models to get a little faster... if that makes sense, A big slow reasoning model isn't needed for a Sierra game and no amount of reasoning is going to figure out a moon logic puzzle so I'm more interested in the small models.