The focus over the last three months has been on achieving a 3D effect. If you’re unfamiliar with these games, they were marketed as “3D” back in the day, though they are what we would now call pseudo-3D. In simple terms, this means that the character can move in front of or behind background objects based on the sprite’s y-position. Later Sierra games using the SCI engine included perspective, but this feature was never supported in AGI games.
For those interested in the technical aspects, here’s a link: http://agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php ... ty_Screens
I’ve also prepared an animated GIF that illustrates this concept better than words. (Note the dithering effect is just an artifact of the animated gif tool)
- 3dDemo.GIF (5.53 MiB) Viewed 290 times
My major goals for the next three months are:
- To implement a 3D effect backbuffer to reduce the risk of IRQ overruns.
- To add sprite garbage collection to free up VRAM for the buffer. The introductions contain many large, short-lived sprites (e.g., credits in the King’s Quest III intro), so garbage collection could effectively reclaim VRAM.
- To implement a "wander" feature, so that the chickens in King’s Quest III will roam around their cage without leaving, and the crocodiles in the moats will move around naturally.
