Space Quest: The Lost Chapter Gold Edition Development Journal

EricOakford

The Master
Staff member
My original plan was to do an SCI remake of the game, but cloudee1, the admin of SCIProgramming, has made his return and upgraded his site. He was also working on his own remake of the first three SQ games plus the fan sequels 0 and TLC. He hasn't made progress with TLC, due to its massive size.

The first thing is that the game's engine was upgraded from 2.917 to 3.002.102. The interpreter, taken from one of the demo packs, had to have its game ID changed from DM to SQTLC with a hex editor. Once that was done, the data files and saved games now had SQTLC in their names.

One thing I did was merge Logics 249-254 (the alien shuttle cutscene) into a single Logic 249, freeing up some space for dynamic logics for underwater (and removing redundant code from each room as a result), as well as a RoomInit logic that properly implements local and dynamic variables and flags. A few other rooms were merged together in the same way, freeing up even more space.
I created dynamic logics for the Ghinusian and Aquinilian guards, removing their common code from the rooms.
I also intend to add a new puzzle to bypass the giant green tentacled monster. Go fetch that bone, Terror Fish!

Any views that aren't animated have been made into add.to.pics to save valuable memory.

I've been moving any variables and flags that don't need to be kept on room change into the 220-239 range.

Finally, I've removed the leftover items from SQ2 (save for the glowing gem, since only it returns in SQ3), which Wilco Interactive confirms are useless. That freed up some space for reorganizing the inventory and icons so that they can all be looked at via show.obj, which wasn't properly supported at first.
 
At last, I have fully ported SQ: The Lost Chapter to AGIv3! It's been heavily optimized, and now I've got to get to the best part - playing through and noting any bugs along the way.

Oh yeah, that annoying tentacle maze now has a much easier solution. Let's just say the Tiny-Toothed Terror Fish won't stay sealed up for very long...
 
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