Re: [freesci-develop] Question about non-Sierra content...

[Christoph Reichenbach]

Hi,


> (Forgive me if my question is answered somewhere on the site or in the 
> mailing list archives... If it is, I haven't found it ;-)

It may be in there somewhere, but if it is, it's not really the topmost
item on our news page ;-)

> I run Tux4Kids (tux4kids.org) and we've been discussing the need for a 
> graphical adventure engine which we can create edutainment apps around. 
> Designing such an engine would be very hard, especially considering there 
> are already great engines that do the things we want such as FreeSCI.

What precisely are the things you want? There are certain limitations to
what FreeSCI can do, some of which we have fixed in our unstable branch,
and others that would require extensions (which are conceptionally
possible, of course).

> So my question is this: Is it possible to create /new/ content 
> specifically for FreeSCI? I'm assuming that answer is 'yes', so the real 
> question becomes "How"? (Is there some documentation, other than the 
> source code, that details the specifics of the FreeSCI version of the 
> script interpreter?)

There are many documents that discuss the specifics of SCI [1,2], and
one that discusses recent improvements in our VM (unstable branch)[3].
There's also a program for creating SCI programs[4], created by
Brian Provinciano and published under the GNU GPL, but it has not been
ported to non-Win32 platforms yet.
  Therefore, if you find that FreeSCI meets your needs, I'd recommend
that you have a look at this program and try to estimate what you need
to do in order to port it to UNIXish platforms.

> If it is possible, does anyone know if creating new content would violate 
> some sort of Sierra copyright (perhaps on their scripting language, file 
> structures, etc)?

I am not a lawyer, but I'm not aware of any issues with respect to
legality (except for some patents we are trying to work around, but
we don't intend to violate these). Re-using data explicitly created
by Sierra would be a problem, of course; I'm not certain whether
SCI Studio currently requires an existing SCI game to work
correctly.


llap,
 Christoph


References

[1] The Sierra Creative Interpreter
    Lars Skovlund, Christoph Reichenbach et al.
    http://freesci.linuxgames.com/scihtml/book1.html
[2] SCI Studio 3 Help Documentation
    Brian Provinciano
    http://www.bripro.com/scistudio/help/index.html
[3] FreeSCI VM Extension
    Xiaojun Chen, Sean Terrell, Christoph Reichenbach
    http://freesci.linuxgames.com/fsci-final-revision-A.ps
[4] SCI Studio
    Brian Provinciano
    http://www.bripro.com/scistudio/index.php