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

[Sam Hart]

> > 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).

Basically, we want to make some edutainment point'n'click type adventure 
games. Games that fit in with the rest of what we've been doing.

There are so many proprietary games of that genre, that it would be nice 
if there was a free-software/open-source alternative.

> > 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.

We discovered that. We have one developer who is a Win32 user, and he said 
he was going to look into it this weekend. We also found the SCI compiler 
on SF.net, and have been looking into that as well.

>   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.

We may look into that as well. The main impetus of looking at FreeSCI for 
our engine is to make things easier on ourselves (our developers are 
already spread very thinly ;-) so we may or may not have the time to do 
something like that. We may just sluff off the actually compilation of 
media/stories/scripts/etc to our one Win32 user ;-)

> > 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.

I don't think it does. I've looked through SCI Studio's site, and it seems 
to be able to start from scratch.

> References
These will be most helpful, thanks!

-- 
Sam Hart
University/Work addr. <address@hidden>
Personal addr. <address@hidden>
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