AGI / SCI Messageboard FAQ

sonneveld	THE AGI / SCI Messageboard FAQ Just what is AGI and SCI, anyway? AGI stands for Adventure Game Interpreter. It was used in the 80's to make graphical adventure games. Some of the most known would be Space Quest, King's Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. SCI stands for Sierra Creative Interpreter. It was the system that replaced AGI and was used to make their newer adventure games from 1989 - 1997 It is a much more advanced system with many changes through its years. It first started out with a mouse pointer, 16 colors, and a text parser then it evolved into the point and click adventures with 256 colors, and icons. (AGISCI - Chris Cromer) What tools and resources will I need to create my own AGI game? Resources: Game Template - A very basic AGI with all the foundations set for you to create your own game on top of. There's the original Peter Kelly version and another version by Chris Cromer with some extra features. Peter Kelly: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~ptrkelly/agi/utils.html Chris Cromer: http://www.agigames.com/index.php?action=utilities AGI Specifications - The specs contains most of what we know of AGI. People have been lazy though, so it hasn't been updated for a while. http://agi.helllabs.org/agispecs/ AGI Studio Help - The help file that comes with AGI Studio has a lot of information. It has details for every command available in AGI. Tutorials - Check out the links section for these. A lot of people have taken the time to write a tutorial. If you want to write your own tutorial, make sure you don't duplicate these guys. Messageboards - Most of the messageboards available are full of people willing to help. Tools: AGI Studio - Originally released by Peter Kelly, it had all the stuff you needed to make an AGI game (if you didn't want pictures or sound that it). When Kelly released the source code, two versions of AGI Studio were forked from it. The first was a "linux" version ported to C++/QT. The linux version (which was later ported to Windows) has a picture editor as well. The other was a version by Nailhead that was compiled with a later version of Delphi and has extra features as well (but not a picture editor). There was another group planning to rewrite most of it, but unfortunately nothing was ever released. Peter Kelly: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~ptrkelly/agi/ QT: http://samhain.cc.huji.ac.il/agi/ http://people.brandeis.edu/~natb/agistudio.html Nailhead: http://www.nailhead.org/agistudio/ Chaos: http://www.tstonramp.com/~paradox/agistudio.html Visual Picture Editor - Latest picture editing tool from Joakim. Runs in Windows with .NET and is very very nice. http://visualagi.cjb.net/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/downloads/howtoget.aspx Visual Sound Editor - Another tool to complement AGI Studio. Very handy tool to create AGI sound resources. http://visualagi.cjb.net/ Sound - Sound is a bit iffy for AGI at the moment. The best way to get music and sound effects into your game is to borrow it from another game. The other method is to create a midi or rol file and convert it to the AGI sound format. There's a MIDI2ROL and a ROL2SND converter available. http://www.classicgaming.com/agisci/agiutil.shtml Pic Edit - The old work horse of AGI. This program has very little bugs but runs in DOS. The Linux version of AGI Studio has a picture editor as well. http://www.agidev.com/download/ What tools and resources will I need to create my own SCI game? Resources: FreeSCI/SCI Docs - The FreeSCI team have their own SCI specs here. http://freesci.linuxgames.com/scihtml/book1.html Lar's Skovlund - Lars Skovlund has put together a bunch of classes and utils to help you make an SCI game. Basically, all the Sierra games worked off a bunch of standard classes, Lars helped to make SCI Studio's compiler link with these. http://sci.locuples.com/scituts.html Messageboards - Just like AGI, SCI has messageboards available for you to ask questions. agigames.com message board: http://www.agigames.com/index.php?action=board_index Tools: SCI Studio - The only editor available that has the potential to make a full SCI game. Create the first SCI fan game and be famous. http://www.bripro.com/scistudio/ How can I make AGI Studio work in Windows NT or XP? I can't compile/it doesn't execute/it makes faces at me. Try the version Nailhead released, compiled with a recent version of Delphi. As a bonus, it also has a bunch of new features too. http://nailhead.org/agistudio
sonneveld	What program do I need to run these AGI fan made games, or a game I'm making myself? You will need an original Sierra interpreter taken from one of their games or one of the free interpreters made by AGI fans. To use Sierra's interpreter, take these files from one of their games: AGI, HGC_FONT, SIERRA.COM, AGIDATA.OVL, CGA_GRAF.OVL, EGA_GRAF.OVL, HGC_GRAF.OVL, HGC_OBJS.OVL, IBM_OBJS.OVL, JR_GRAF.OVL, VG_GRAF.OVL Depending on what system you have, you may not need all these files, but it's better safe than sorry. This interpreter supports Tandy and PC speaker, EGA/CGA/Hercules and PC games. Depending on the game, you may need to tweak the game.id (future FAQ). At the moment there are three main AGI interpreters currently being working on: AGIL, NAGI and Sarien. They all run under Windows but only AGIL and Sarien run under Linux and other operating systems. Currently Sarien runs on the most systems, NAGI has the best compatibility (I wrote it but I'm trying to be objective) and AGIL catching up very fast on both fronts. It is possible to finish games on all three interpreters. AGIL: http://www.elite.za.net/ NAGI: http://members.dingoblue.net.au/~sonneveld/nagi/ Sarien: http://sarien.sourceforge.net/ How legal are these games? Can I take a few pictures and objects from Sierra's games? Is it alright to bundle an interpreter with my game? What has Sierra said about this? I don't know if Sierra has stated their position on these games but some people have decided that the copyrighted material is old enough for Sierra to not care. You might want to risk borrowing resources from other Sierra games, and they might not mind in the end, but the fact is that Sierra is still releasing their very old games in collections and there's other third parties cracking down on piracy. Anyway, it's not all gloom. Make your own graphics, bundle the interpreter separately (or use one of the free ones), and make sure you modify anything you borrow so it could be covered under fair use. I want to contribute to the AGI community but I don't want to make a game. What can I do? There are some things you could do: Music editor - We need one. Perferably one written for AGI Studio, but a stand-alone utility would be great too. Cached websites - Unfortunately, the AGI community's history is disappearing. Old sites, that haven't been updated for months are being deleted and messageboards are getting hacked into and erased. If you could download all the pictures and html from an old website from the Internet Wayback machine and zip it up, it would be great. We need to preserve our history. http://www.archive.org/ Help other people - Simple, if you know something about AGI, try giving help to other people on the messageboards. How do I contribute to the FAQ? Post a reply to this FAQ in the messageboard. The current moderator will add it to the FAQ, add credits and then remove the original post. That's the easiest way I could think of. Whenever I post a URL, the messageboard stuffs it up and adds other text to the end of the link. Try adding a few spaces at the end of the URL to prevent the messageboard code from making a mistake.
Andrew_Baker	What is a UHS?
AGI1122	UHS stands for Universal Hint System, it is used for helping people in beating games. It is sort of like a walkthrough except for it only gives you the hints you need without spoiling the rest of the game. You can download the reader and many UHS's from www.uhs-hints.com and I have made my first UHS for my fan game V, http://www.members.aol.com/agisci/v.uhs This is kind of off-topic for this "Message Board FAQ"
Joey	question: is there anyway we could make the board display the time each of us is in? so i post and it says 8 o clock, but if chris posts, its 10? so it shows the exact time it is where each of us lives near each post? that would be helpful for me. answer: none yet
CESS.tk	Joey wrote: question: is there anyway we could make the board display the time each of us is in? so i post and it says 8 o clock, but if chris posts, its 10? so it shows the exact time it is where each of us lives near each post? that would be helpful for me. answer: none yet answer: go into your profile and change Time Offset
Joey	well no i mean it tells you the board time doesnt it? it doesnt tell what time it is where each of us lives. i was wondering if we could make it so it shows the time it currently is for each of us. not to adjust it to our time. maybe it does do that (the offset) i dont know. does it?
AGI1122	The time offset lets you change it to your time Joey, you just set how many hours are different from your time and then it will show you the forum in your time.
Andrew_Baker	Is there a limit to the size of my words.tok?
Zero2003	Can a Admin select you to be a Mod or a Admin or do you have to have a certain ammount of posts?
Zero2003	what is diffrent between Yabb SE and Yabb? ???
smartguy240	YaBBSE is SQL and PHP YaBB is Perl/CGI
AGI1122	People who ask tend to not get picked to be it in my opinion. I generally have the same kind of thing going on my board, if you ask I won't make you one.(unless I said something like this "Please ask if you want to be an admin or moderator").
Sidrious play	Nick Sonneveld wrote: Sound - Sound is a bit iffy for AGI at the moment. The best way to get music and sound effects into your game is to borrow it from another game. The other method is to create a midi or rol file and convert it to the AGI sound format. There's a MIDI2ROL and a ROL2SND converter available. http://www.classicgaming.com/agisci/agiutil.shtml Is there anything else like that? For XP? (I use Home Edition)
AGI1122	Follow the link in your quote, it has some tools to convert them. Anyway, there are some other tools besides those as well on http://www.agidev.com and http://www.agigames.com. Note: I modifed the first post to fix some broken links to my site.
Robin_Gravel	I can attach any files on this board but it does not allow to attach gif files. Gif images are smaller than jpg images. So I don't understand why the board cannot accept gif images. Robin Gravel
AGI1122	It can accept them, but they are currently turned off. I will ask df if it's ok to turn .gif files on for attachments.
Kon-Tiki	It's probably to prevent people of getting seasick of animated gifs attached to several posts in one thread.
AGI1122	... that's just silly, you can use .gif's in your signature, your post, and your avatar. It's just attachments right now that arn't allowing .gif's to be uploaded. Actually the only thing I hate is when people use large images in their signature, just irks me...
rwfromxenon	Chris Cromer wrote: ... that's just silly Chris... look who you're talking to. I dunno if I should start a new topic about this, but for some reason AGI Studio v1.35+ crashes upon opening. I'm running from XP Pro SP1, with a Geforce 2, 512MB ram and AMD Athlon XP 2000+ What's the problem? Compatability? This has been going on for too long, and I've reinstalled twice since it started a year ago.
AGI1122	Couldn't really say, I didn't write AGI Studio, but it works on my xp... so not sure.