On Tue, 1 May 2001, Matt wrote:
> I was looking at a recent sarien snapshot, and it looks like they've put a
> lot of work into abstracting their gfx and sound subsystems much in the
> way FreeSCI has done. Has anyone tried contacting them to see if we can
> share some code/components in these areas?
Yes, Christoph contacted me and it sounds indeed a good alternative.
Currently I'm cleaning up the code in Sarien and the graphics system
is still messy. It happens that sprite management in AGI is *very*
confuse: message boxes are not "real" windows and lots of original
Sierra AGI scripts exploit quirks in the AGI engine to work properly.
The graphic subsystem in any AGI implementation must be bug-compatible
with Sierra's AGI, and using a well-behaved graphics system could
break compatibility with Sierra's system.
The exact quirks are not completely known. We still need to study the
original interpreter to clear some obscure points.
The lowlevel graphics system in Sarien, however, is in fact very simple.
It just handles graphics initialization, block blits and pixel writing/
reading.
I'm using a modified version of the script used for FreeSCI daily builds
to generate Sarien's daily builds. It seems to be working well, so I'll
replace the old script by the new version for FreeSCI as well. (In Sarien
it currently builds a native Linux binary and cross-compiled binaries
(currently BeOS with SDL and Cygwin)). My page will be updated in the
process (it's very outdated).
claudio
