AGS engine PSP port

Started by JJS, Fri 15/07/2011 16:27:57

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JJS

#60
Actually plugins are supported by the PSP port and there are already the AGSBlend and ags_snowrain plugin available. I am at the moment working on a recreation of the flashlight plugin, you can expect a new release in one or two weeks I think.

What will also be fixed is Ben Jordan facing the wrong way after entering a room. The cause for this was that the new engine doesn't put a character immediately to the new location after a script call to change the room but does so on actually changing the room only. This is why the FaceLocation() call didn't produce the desired result as the character was still standing on the old coordinates.

If I cannot figure out how to make it possible to draw after a screen fadout without glitches in other games, I will add a setting in the config file so that A Tale of Two Kingdoms becomes fully playable without disappearing text.

Edit: Almost forgot, the score sound will also be fixed (for real this time ;)).
Ask me about AGS on PSP, Android and iOS! Source, Daily builds

monkey0506

The Flashlight plugin is deprecated though. You should just tell those MMD guys to get with the times and use the module. ::)

[/shameless plug]

lestat666

The MMD guys are no longer working on the game.  It was released back in 2004 and I read somewhere they have since gotten a cease and desist letter.  So, unfortunately, it is going to have to use the flashlight plugin.

I am really excited for the new release though.  This and ScummVM made me love my psp that much more.

I plan on playing Gemeni Rue on it soon.  It's great, because I don't get much time to sit in front of a computer, but being able to bring my gaming with me, allows me to actually get some time to play.

Icey

Just a thought. Would it be possible to port AGS to the ps3? I mean sure I could plug my psp into the TV but wheres the fun in that when the screen doesn't even line up right. Also this would allow games to run in their correct/appropriate dimensions.


Icey

But it must be possible. I think it will take more time to create a port but it has to be possible.

Khris

Sure it's possible. You could port AGS to cash registers with LCD screens; the important thing is, what's the point?
Pretty much everybody who plays console games has a laptop nowadays, too.

lestat666

That never stopped ScummVM from making all their ports.

timofonic

#68
Quote from: lestat666 on Mon 03/10/2011 02:07:29
That never stopped ScummVM from making all their ports.

Indeed...

And it's one of the nice points of the project: their romantical hacker (I mean the true hackers, the ones that revolutionized the computers) attitude :)

WARNING: Please do not talk about ScummVM! If you do it, others from this forum will accuse you of:


  • Troll
  • Traitor and conspirator of massive borg assimilation
  • Not true to the AGS community spirit
  • Killer of Bambi's mother
  • Erectile problems
  • Internet connection problems
  • Guilty of the global warming
  • Decline of adventure games and FPS games ruling the videogame industry
  • Global economical crisis
  • End of the world in 2012
  • Tons of other nonsense, unrelated, absurd and without reason arguments.
  • Many more no sense arguments too.
  • Plus some pejorative comments.
If you mention it, you will also go to hell. But not a simple hot hell with lots of sadomasochistic torture, but one full of computers where the only program available are (clonical) First Person Shooters.

All this while ScummVM project gets exponentially more success and more games supported (both from current engines and new ones).

So... What's happening? :)

JJS

Jeez... can we please remain on topic and stop the trolling  ::)

It was a perfectly legit question imho. Unfortunately I don't have a PS3, so I will not make any effort in that direction. But I am sure it would not be all that hard since porting Allegro doesn't seem to be very difficult as it can do all drawing in software and you only have to blit the final image to the screen. What remains is audio and input which should be straightforward.
Ask me about AGS on PSP, Android and iOS! Source, Daily builds

Snarky

Quote from: timofonic on Mon 03/10/2011 03:46:46
WARNING: Please do not talk about ScummVM! If you do it, others from this forum will accuse you of:


  • Troll
  • Traitor and conspirator of massive borg assimilation
  • Not true to the AGS community spirit
  • ...
  • Plus some pejorative comments.
If you mention it, you will also go to hell. But not a simple hot hell with lots of sadomasochistic torture, but one full of computers where the only program available are (clonical) First Person Shooters.

All this while ScummVM project gets exponentially more success and more games supported (both from current engines and new ones).

So... What's happening? :)

Yeah, that has never happened. Specifically, no one has ever called you names on the forum for advocating an AGS-ScummVM merger. Having people disagree with you is not the same as being persecuted for your opinion.

There's been a lot of discussion around making AGS ScummVM-compatible, and everyone tends to agree that it would be very nice in principle. However, there are practical problems in refactoring the code base, reconciling the licenses, and managing the development. The result of this is that the ScummVM devs are currently not interested in porting AGS 3.x, and since AGS 2.x remains closed-source for the moment (I'm guessing mainly because CJ hasn't had time to do anything about it), that's not feasible either.

timofonic

#71
On topic discussion: Are there plans to merge the different AGS ports and forks into a common code base?



Off topic, ignore this if you aren't interested on...

Of course, don't keep my message too serious as I was exaggerating a lot about it. I was joking about it, of course the topic is somewhat controversial but I see the AGS community a good one considering the diversity of people here. My humour can be quite weird and not so obvious, so I hope this reply can make things more clear this time :)

CJ is aware about releasing older versions and such, I even mentioned his older Visual Source Safe could be converted to Git by using the vss2git tool and some work from people could make the full repository from early AGS development days to be available to everyone. That's even better than just releasing older versions, because it can be used for a proper development process to track changes and check bug regressions. Of course he is too busy IRL and wants to do a full source code release of the editor first.

You are wrong about ScummVM Team not interested in AGS. They showed interest on it in their forums and Chris Jones showed his opinion on the matter. His main reason were

The license issue of AGS is no problem, as the Artistic License 2.0 is GPL compatible.

Also, Chris Jones changed his mind on the matter as he was against Open Source because negative experiences in the past. What are his current reasons for not using a widely used FOSS license instead now? I appreaciate his works, but it seems he still not understands the nature of the authentic Open Source that derives from the hacker ethic.

ScummVM project members don't want to control any project, that not happened and this is a wide effort done by volunteers instead some commercial group. In fact most engines have separate subteams working independently, and most of them "just" caring on their part of the code. They share a common code base in form of things like the OSystem framework (the part that does the crazy wide portability magic) and the User Interface (list of games to load, savegame management...). They are more like separate projects inside a common ecosystem.

Code refactoring is an issue, of course it is. But ScummVM Team has quite experience refactoring source code from different sources (other reimplementations, from the original game(s)...) and as their team has a good number of reverse engineering geeks they have the skills to even work with spaguetti and assembly source code. The only problem is the motivation, so it's up to motivate enough developers for the task. Some examples of code refactoring happened on ScummVM are:  Discworld, Drascula, Flight of the Amazon Queen, FreeSCI, Revolution Software games, Sarien, Soltys, Sword25 (authorized Broken Sword fangame), TrollVM...

About management, each engine is managed by a group of people (often called subteams). There's common issues, but the project management is very flexible because that's how Open Source communities work better. I'm sure all parts can have a nice agreement and solve differencies by consensus, that's how community-driven Open Source works.

ScummVM Team is very open to debating and they talk with individual and corporate entities to different kinds of topics.

In my opinion this project is strong in technical, management and legal sides.

Chris Jones Said this on the ScummVM forums too...

Quote from: CJ-AGS
I've said that, should the ScummVM team want to, they are welcome to go ahead and implement support for running AGS games into ScummVM.

I didn't want to write about this again, as it has been discussed previously in the forums. But ScummVM got mentioned, I made a joke that got interpreted wrongly and wanted to clarify the topic too. Maybe it's because I'm not a native English, so sometimes my sentences aren't understood in a correct way.

Now this it's up to Chris Jones, when he finds enough time to release all the necessary source codes and   can be possible to pragmatically discuss if both parts (ScummVM and AGS programmers' communities) are iterested on this or not. The key people are the developers of the projects, beause that's where the major and essential effort must to be done.

Quote from: Snarky on Mon 03/10/2011 11:43:19
Quote from: timofonic on Mon 03/10/2011 03:46:46
WARNING: Please do not talk about ScummVM! If you do it, others from this forum will accuse you of:


  • Troll
  • Traitor and conspirator of massive borg assimilation
  • Not true to the AGS community spirit
  • ...
  • Plus some pejorative comments.
If you mention it, you will also go to hell. But not a simple hot hell with lots of sadomasochistic torture, but one full of computers where the only program available are (clonical) First Person Shooters.

All this while ScummVM project gets exponentially more success and more games supported (both from current engines and new ones).

So... What's happening? :)

Yeah, that has never happened. Specifically, no one has ever called you names on the forum for advocating an AGS-ScummVM merger. Having people disagree with you is not the same as being persecuted for your opinion.

There's been a lot of discussion around making AGS ScummVM-compatible, and everyone tends to agree that it would be very nice in principle. However, there are practical problems in refactoring the code base, reconciling the licenses, and managing the development. The result of this is that the ScummVM devs are currently not interested in porting AGS 3.x, and since AGS 2.x remains closed-source for the moment (I'm guessing mainly because CJ hasn't had time to do anything about it), that's not feasible either.

monkey0506

This isn't even so much about merging or compatibility with ScummVM as it is about you telling us how wildly unsuccessful AGS will be if we don't adapt exactly the same project model. You yourself said that the Artistic License is "GPL compatible" and then in the same breath turn to ask, to the point of being reprimanding, why Chris hasn't used a "widely used FOSS license" instead of using one that he personally felt would reserve his rights whilst giving the freedom of opening the source.

Both the editor and the engine are now open-sourced, the only piece missing is the compiler itself. The engine is powerful and dynamic enough that new functions, properties, and structs can even be added without requiring changes to the compiler. The only thing you would need the compiler source for would be to include new keywords or operators, or include other features of a similar nature.

So, the compiler source really has nothing to do with portability.

As for the forks you've mentioned, nearly every user-submitted change has already been merged into the main codebase, and those that haven't likely will be in the next version.

Please, stop complaining about how deviant we are from the "norms" of FOSS. This is CJ's program that he started, and until very recently has been the sole author of, more than a decade ago. Seriously, I think he has some idea of what he's doing at this point.

timofonic

It's not about norms, it's how it works after all. Projects need organization, he'd currently quite busy and no other people has steped up at this time for the management tasks.

The interesting thing is to have a very portable engine, that would probably require a considerable effort to have the AGS runtime on a wide variety of platforms.

I appreacite his "rights" and such, but I also appreciate my rights as user. But please not start an ideological/technical debating.

Anyway, this is just speculating because it's up to CJ for the task. And it's offtopic...

Quote from: monkey_05_06 on Mon 03/10/2011 16:26:13
This isn't even so much about merging or compatibility with ScummVM as it is about you telling us how wildly unsuccessful AGS will be if we don't adapt exactly the same project model. You yourself said that the Artistic License is "GPL compatible" and then in the same breath turn to ask, to the point of being reprimanding, why Chris hasn't used a "widely used FOSS license" instead of using one that he personally felt would reserve his rights whilst giving the freedom of opening the source.

Both the editor and the engine are now open-sourced, the only piece missing is the compiler itself. The engine is powerful and dynamic enough that new functions, properties, and structs can even be added without requiring changes to the compiler. The only thing you would need the compiler source for would be to include new keywords or operators, or include other features of a similar nature.

So, the compiler source really has nothing to do with portability.

As for the forks you've mentioned, nearly every user-submitted change has already been merged into the main codebase, and those that haven't likely will be in the next version.

Please, stop complaining about how deviant we are from the "norms" of FOSS. This is CJ's program that he started, and until very recently has been the sole author of, more than a decade ago. Seriously, I think he has some idea of what he's doing at this point.

pcj

Quote from: timofonic on Mon 03/10/2011 17:44:43I also appreciate my rights as user.

What rights are those, the ability to demand that the author change his code to accommodate your wishes? I'm not familiar with those.
Space Quest: Vohaul Strikes Back is now available to download!

Snarky

Well, the discussions on the ScummVM forums showed that while making AGS and ScummVM compatible was an attractive idea technically, there didn't seem to be a way for the projects to work together that both AGSers and ScummVM devs would be happy with. So the idea was shelved for now.

As for the rest of it, if someone wants to make it happen, they can. It's just a matter of stepping up to the task and putting in the work. Refactoring, porting, even source control, bug tracking and all the rest doesn't magically happen just because you adopt some particular development model. You need people to do the work. Ultimately, the form of the project will be decided by those who pitch in.

Icey

So how did this start anyways.

lestat666

I can't believe I started that with one comment.  WHOOPS....

So in the new release, with the flashlight plugin implemented, should Maniac Mansion Deluxe run in that release or is that still for a future release?

I also just want to say, that I appreciate all the work you are doing on this.


JJS

#78
New release: R7!

This one brings mainly backwards compatibility fixes:
- Talk animations are fixed for Sierra style speech because they now default to speed 5 instead of using the respective global var.
- Narrator text is now displayed after a fade out in ATOTK. Seems like 2.x always does a fade-in if a message box is displayed.
- Fixed various wrong character loops in Murder in a Wheel caused by different FaceLocation() logic in the 3.x engine.
- Fixed Ben Jordan looking the wrong direction after entering a room. This was caused by the 3.x engine not setting the new char coordinates immediately after a room change request so that the FaceLocation() call would operate on the old location.
- Fixed Ben Jordan being chained to the ceiling in the game show scene. E: Fixed that again, it was also caused by the FaceLocation() logic.
- Fixed invisible mouse cursor in certain dialogs. The 2.x engine implicitly makes the cursor visible when starting a dialog, the 3.x one doesn't.
- Fixed the game show not ending in BJ5. This was caused by a bug in my old style dialog script interpreter that caused the StopDialog() function to not work.

Also a flashlight plugin workalike was added.

Download and source link as always in the OP.

Enjoy!
Ask me about AGS on PSP, Android and iOS! Source, Daily builds

lestat666

Maniac Mansion Deluxe is working!

I am a happy camper   ;D

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