Script issues with QFG1VGA

[Leshy]

Hello, everyone! Some time ago, I came across some fantastic tools to edit the old SCI games with, including SCI Companion. Being a long-time fan of the Quest for Glory series and a father of two young children I'd like to play the game with, I figured it would be a fun project to translate Quest for Glory I into Dutch (as I could not find any record of such a version already existing).

The good news is that it was largely indeed fun, and also that it is 95% done ? the bad news is that the remaining 5% is doing my head in. Translating the message files and updating the pics and views was all pretty straightforward, but there is some pesky text that is stuck in the game's script files. Although I can decompile them using SCI Companion and edit them, the decompile process suggests that it isn't 100% successful on all scripts, and a recompile also throws a bunch of errors. And although I can definitely see that some of the edited scripts are working correctly (intro sequence, stat allocation screen...), the ones that will not recompile correctly obviously do not do so, and the game often ends up crashing in other locations; these are of course not really a desired outcome.

I have found two sources of full decompiles by sluicebox and EricOakford that I hoped would work; however, unfortunately the first set of scripts also results in errors when recompiling, and while the second seems to recompile successfully without any errors, the game subsequently does crash with an Error 4 when clicking the money pouch on Shema, Zara, or the bartender in the Inn, Magic Shop, and Tavern to make a purchase (even when used on a completely fresh and otherwise untouched install) ? although buying things from Hilde and Caspar seems to work correctly again.

So in short, I am not sure whether I am going about this the right way, or how to succesfully recompile the scripts to translate the phrases contained in them (mostly the purchase window text, but there are a few other random sentences). I did find a seemingly amazingly complete Italian translation of the game, which does have these script files translated, so there very clearly is a way to successfully do this.

I have searched quite a bit online, including through these forums, but unfortunately haven't found the solution on how to edit these scripts and get them back into the game in a way that they actually play nice with each other. Any help would be appreciated. For what it's worth, I have the 2.00 version from GOG, which runs via DOSbox.

[Kawa]

If you want to avoid having to decompile and recompile scripts just to edit local strings, have you considered extracting their heap resources, editing them in a hex editor, and doing your best to keep the Dutch sentences at most the same length as the English originals?

Of course, for some places that won't work right like script 32, which has the line "It only took you %d game%s to win.", with the "s" to pluralize "game" right before it.. which could be adjusted to "len" despite being two bytes longer if you're willing and able to mess with the raw script bytecode. So of course I randomly picked that one to demonstrate the technique with. Just my luck.

(For the record and those playing along at home: oops code 4 would be "not an object".)

[Leshy]

I actually did see a similar suggestion mentioned in another thread and did have a look at it. When talking about extracting the heap resources, does that mean saving the heap file as a .HEP patch file and editing that with a hex editor? I tried doing that using an online hex editor, but could not really find the content I was looking for in the resulting output. Not sure if I did it right or should be doing something else.

Additionally, there are two issues in that in several cases it may be difficult to replace the English language text by a Dutch language text of equal length or shorter (as you likely know, Dutch can be a bit more verbose than English). Secondly, there are two scripts where I need to make some other changes than just translating text strings (the stat allocation and intro scripts), so I would need to mess with some of the scripts at some point in any case.

[Kawa]

I did indeed mean extracting HEP files as patches and using a hex editor. You'll find the local strings, if any, near the bottom of the file. Class and instance names count as local strings so you'll know it when you see it.

[doomlazer]

Are you compiling with a nightly Kawa build or the SCICompanion from the website?

If EO's decompile has any asm blocks in the script your working on, that's a likely source for recompile bugs. That can be replaced using Sluices repo as reference.

You could also post on the Spanish or French translation boards. I'm sure one of them has dealt with this already

Edit: invent.sc does have asm. That's a likely culprit

[Leshy]

Edit: Yup, it's me, I'm the idiot.

I may have just tracked down the reason EricOakford's decompiled scripts were not working correctly for me. In the folder where I installed them, I forgot to delete the .SCR (and .HEP) files from the default install. So the game's default patch files were overriding the newly-compiled scripts and of course not playing nice.

I realised that it was completely strange that the game would crash on the 'purchase' action for some vendors, but not for others. That meant the source of the crash couldn't be on some shared function, there had to be something affecting specifically these rooms' scripts and... oh God don't tell me I forgot the patch files... I forgot the patch files. Yup, works now.

Don't mind me, I'll be having the Dragon's Breath now.

(On the upside, chances of a Dutch translation have increased.)