Best program to develop a new adventure to be used with SCUM

[eriktorbjorn]

The biggest and toughest way has been opened by ScummVm project... the second one may be a easy tool to develop adventures playable through ScummVm..that may form the new generation of adventures' makers...anyone could write a crossplatform adventure and have the possibility to be discovered by a large audiance.

I very much doubt that it's small task to make a tool for creating adventure games. At least if you want it to be usable to a wider audience than the programmer himself.

How much could cost a tool like AGS?

I don't know. Apparently Chris Jones has been maintaining and developing it for the past ten years. How do you put a price tag on that?

But is it mandatory to have the code of AGS or it's just important to have Chris permission to implement it in ScummVm ?

When the target is a system that's being actively maintained and developed? I'd say we'd need both. The people asking us to add AGS support are, in effect, saying "please duplicate all past, present and future work Chris has done on AGS, but you need to do it better than him so I can play the games on my iNintendo DreamPhone 6000, too".

[seubz]

I'm still working on ScummGEN (a set of editors which will eventually be able to create SCUMM v8 based games). If any good programmer wants to join my, visit scummgen.googlecode.com

Sébastien

[rivadolmo]

anyway, CJ has consistently refused donations because they would make him feel guilty when he doesn't feel like updating the program.

If he does feel guilty why does he refuse to share the possibility to be a part of a bigger project ?
Does he fear to be called to improve the tools and he doesn't have time nor interest to do it?

Do you think he could just think about all this matters?


Let us know more!

[timofonic]

This is a forum post related to this on AGS forums

http://new.bigbluecup.com/yabb/index.php?topic=33101.0

[rivadolmo]

Considering that there are some games that have been freely distributed (like BOSS from revolution) is it possibile that the authors may also have some creation tools that may be "unclosed" ?

[SSH]

When the target is a system that's being actively maintained and developed? I'd say we'd need both. The people asking us to add AGS support are, in effect, saying "please duplicate all past, present and future work Chris has done on AGS, but you need to do it better than him so I can play the games on my iNintendo DreamPhone 6000, too".

I was only suggesting that scummvm would have to be specifically targetted by ags authors (and hence there would be no backward-compatible support) and so you're knocking down a strawman. Also, no-one suggested that scummvm tries to support the editor at all, which of course is a large part of CJ's effort. AGS runtime engines also only support a subset of AGS games. Some old games were recompiled, I recall, having to go through 2 or 3 intermediate stages of recompilation in successive versions since only the previous version or two was guaranteed any backwards compatibility at both editor and runtime level.

The AGS script API is well documented and the XML is highly readable. It's not exactly manual disassembly we're talking here.

But anyway, I can see that its a non-starter, so my hopes of a portable-backend adventure creation program will have to rest elsewhere.

[john_doe]

The AGS script API is well documented and the XML is highly readable. It's not exactly manual disassembly we're talking here.

That's not the problem.
As others already have stated:
1. CJ apparently doesn't want to help. Even if if would be possible to implement a AGS-engine without his help, it would be kind of unfair towards him.
2. AGS is in active development. It's a ever changing engine, and you'd have to keep up with the changes, or only games of one specific version would run in ScummVM.

There are imo only two reasonable ways to offer a way of creating own games which can be run using ScummVM:
1. Further development of ScummC to create 'real' SCUMM games. Since the SCUMM engine's feature set is fixed, no need to keep up with any changes.
2. Create a completely new engine and implementing the runtime directly in ScummVM.

I'd prefer 2. since you'd be free to design the engine you want. Both would be similarly big projects, even more so if you want to add some kind of nice IDE like AGS has.

Just my 2 cents.

[timofonic]

When the target is a system that's being actively maintained and developed? I'd say we'd need both. The people asking us to add AGS support are, in effect, saying "please duplicate all past, present and future work Chris has done on AGS, but you need to do it better than him so I can play the games on my iNintendo DreamPhone 6000, too".

I was only suggesting that scummvm would have to be specifically targetted by ags authors (and hence there would be no backward-compatible support) and so you're knocking down a strawman. Also, no-one suggested that scummvm tries to support the editor at all, which of course is a large part of CJ's effort. AGS runtime engines also only support a subset of AGS games. Some old games were recompiled, I recall, having to go through 2 or 3 intermediate stages of recompilation in successive versions since only the previous version or two was guaranteed any backwards compatibility at both editor and runtime level.

The AGS script API is well documented and the XML is highly readable. It's not exactly manual disassembly we're talking here.

But anyway, I can see that its a non-starter, so my hopes of a portable-backend adventure creation program will have to rest elsewhere.

SSH, I see you are being too much pessimist in this.

I'm not part of the ScummVM Team, but I'm quite sure they have nothing against a possible merger of AGS into ScummVM, it seems you misunderstand some comments by ScummVM devs (I see their comments quite clear and specific). Just they don't want to be a "second runner" so if AGS is supported by ScummVM, it would need to be the official implementation.

Let's see what CJ (the AGS author) says about this, as he is the owner of AGS and his opinion is the only valid for making this happen or not. I would be extremely happy if AGS becomes part of ScummVM, but that must be decided by the AGS author.

[sev]

1. Further development of ScummC to create 'real' SCUMM games. Since the SCUMM engine's feature set is fixed, no need to keep up with any changes.
2. Create a completely new engine and implementing the runtime directly in ScummVM.

I'd prefer 2.

Indeed. And I really believe if someone will create a usable SCUMM compiler, the day of the release will be the day when LEC lawyers will line in front of his/her door. The main reason is that SCUMM (Script Creation Utility) in contrast with SPUTM (SCUMM Presentation Utility (TM), the thing which ScummVM implements) was subject of licensing. At least one different company, Humongous Entertainment was licensee of it, and thus, such utility author will directly be a target for a lawsuit. Beware.


Eugene

[rivadolmo]

..no valid tool based on SCUMM has been devolopped so far...

So I recommend to the persons that are spending some time on ScummC to look elsewhere.

Revolution has some tools used for BSS that may be shared?

[eriktorbjorn]

I was only suggesting that scummvm would have to be specifically targetted by ags authors (and hence there would be no backward-compatible support) and so you're knocking down a strawman.

I was talking about the people who want ScummVM to support the AGS games, not the people who are suggesting a new backend for the AGS compiler. These are clearly two very different problems. A SCUMM backend for the AGS compiler was discussed at least once in the past on the AGS boards, but back then it was considered impractical because "SCUMM and AGS are fundamentally different, so there's no easy way to convert between them."

I don't know if the same is true for the other engines in ScummVM, but it wouldn't surprise me. It's probably much easier to design a language around a known engine than it is to hook up an existing engine to an existing language, unless the two happen to make very similar assumptions.

[sev]

ScummVM is an open-source project, AGS is not. Therefore, it wouldn't really be possible to incorporate the AGS code into ScummVM, since it's all open source.

Why don't I make AGS open source? Well, one good reason is this from the FAQ page:
(2) The AGS file formats are proprietary to make it harder for people to "hack" other people's games. If the source code was available, it would be easy for someone to write some sort of de-compiler for use with other peoples games.

I may make the AGS 3 editor source code available at some point if it would be beneficial, but currently I have no plans to release the engine code.

Pumaman is Chris. Taken from this AGS thread which was started by johnadv. Nuff said. End of discussion.


Eugene

[rivadolmo]

I'm a kind of rookie in programming graphic engines and tools.
The strongest knoledge is on Visual Basic 6 (i've made a king of simple ERP for my company).
Do you thing is enough to create an engine and tools for games running at 320x200 256 colors?

[seubz]

I'd like to bump this thread and react on sev's post about the licensing issues he talked about.

As you said sev, SCUMM was a script creation utility. I'm the author of ScummGEN, and I think that what I'm doing is a copy of what SCUMM was at the time, even though I don't really have an idea of how SCUMM worked and looked like. Thanks to the ScummVM team who reverse engineered SCUMM, I just made a program which compiles resources the way ScummVM reads them - I didn't reverse engineer the original LEC interpreters myself, I didn't even need to. I'm just wondering why this would be illegal at all as after all, I could simply be doing just any kind of adventure game creation utility and make it work with ScummVM, and this just by studying your code. I'm not stating that what I'm doing is legal, I'm just asking myself why it wouldn't be, and please sev, if you have information that could clearly explain me why it wouldn't be, or maybe just point me to a specific site where you learnt this, I'd appreciate it.

Thank you,
Sébastien

[rivadolmo]

Is you compiler ready to b tested?

I'd like to bump this thread and react on sev's post about the licensing issues he talked about.

As you said sev, SCUMM was a script creation utility. I'm the author of ScummGEN, and I think that what I'm doing is a copy of what SCUMM was at the time, even though I don't really have an idea of how SCUMM worked and looked like. Thanks to the ScummVM team who reverse engineered SCUMM, I just made a program which compiles resources the way ScummVM reads them - I didn't reverse engineer the original LEC interpreters myself, I didn't even need to. I'm just wondering why this would be illegal at all as after all, I could simply be doing just any kind of adventure game creation utility and make it work with ScummVM, and this just by studying your code. I'm not stating that what I'm doing is legal, I'm just asking myself why it wouldn't be, and please sev, if you have information that could clearly explain me why it wouldn't be, or maybe just point me to a specific site where you learnt this, I'd appreciate it.

Thank you,
Sébastien