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News:

Server operational again

Author: jameson Date: Tue 22. Apr 2008

Due to hardware failure, bug tracking, DARCS, and server logs were unavailable between the 19th and the 22nd of April. We have now restored all functionality; apologies for any inconvenience caused by our service interruption!

FreeSCI 0.6.3 binaries now available

Author: jameson Date: Wed 27. Feb 2008

For your convenience, Alex Angas and Hubert Maier have provided Win32 and AmigaOS 4 binaries of FreeSCI 0.6.3. These binary packages should be sufficient to run SCI games on the two platforms, with no messy compilation required.

Please be warned that 0.6.3 is still an experimental release-- your favourite games may or may not be completable.

FreeSCI 0.6.3 (Glutton/unstable) released

Author: jameson Date: Sun 24. Feb 2008

The FreeSCI development team is proud to announce the release of the next installment in its continuing series of development releases: FreeSCI 0.6.3 is the latest and greatest (well, minus stability) we have to offer. Changes include but are not limited to:

Pathfinding support and collision detection (Walter)
Savegames (Lars)
Automatic game search (Walter)
SCI/Amiga instrument support (Walter)
Win32 port working on glutton, with DirectX driver (Alex)
AmigaOS 4 port (Hubert Maier)

Please note that this is a release of our "Glutton" development branch, and thus unstable-- it may or may not allow you to beat your favourite SCI game, and we know of quite a few bugs that might prevent you from doing so. Thus, make sure to check our bug tracker before you bet your first-born on whether you can beat LSL3 blind-folded in FreeSCI!

Ports and Updates

Author: jameson Date: Sun 3. Feb 2008

Apologies for the lack of updates in recent months! But never fear-- we haven't abandoned the project. In fact, we're preparing for the most feature-laden FreeSCI version yet!

We expect to publish the next release of the experimental Glutton branch in less than a month. Apart from the usual bunch of bugfixes and from the long-awaited savegame support (thanks to Lars) and automatic pathfinding (thanks to Walter), the next release will work on two more platforms:

Glutton should now work on Win32 again (previously, only our Stable branch supported Win32), thanks to Alex' unrelenting porting efforts. (Note that you will need a recent version of Visual Studio to compile it yourself).
Thanks to a new contributor, Hubert Maier, FreeSCI/Glutton now supports AmigaOS 4.0

More updates soon!

FreeSCI source repository moved

Author: jameson Date: Mon 11. Jun 2007

We have moved our source code repository to the University of Colorado, where it is now hosted via Darcs.

The updated repository includes Jordi Vilalta's significant source code cleanup.

Please refer to the development page for details.

Pathfinding project report now online

Author: jameson Date: Mon 24. Jul 2006

The final project report on the FreeSCI pathfinding extension is now online, for those of you interested in the technical details or in SCI pathfinding in general. Walter's implementation not only avoids any clashes with Sierra's patent, but also uses a significantly more sophisticated algorithm for finding optimal paths.

Pathfinding and Win32 binary

Author: jameson Date: Sun 21. May 2006

Walter van Niftrik, responsible for several of our ports, struck again: Thanks to his tireless coding, Glutton now includes a pathfinding mechanism which supports Sierra's underlying polygon format. This fixes the perhaps most glaring hole in Glutton with respect to SCI01 and SCI1 support. To avoid patents held by Sierra on their pathfinding method, Walter picked an alternative algorithm-- more involved, but faster, more aggressive-- and much better for taking over the world! (Wait, wrong game engine.)

Pathfinding will be part of the next Glutton release, whenever that may be.

Near-simultaneously, Alexander Angas updated the Win32 port and provided a full Win32 build of the 'stable' branch.

As always: Share and enjoy!

SCI Studio source code released

Author: jameson Date: Mon 6. Mar 2006

Brian Provinciano, author of SCI Studio, the Win32 SCI game development IDE, has released the source code to his system into the public domain (though the release apparently includes a syntax highlighting component which is licenced elsewhere).

SCI Studio can be used to create SCI games for several versions of the SCI system, including several which are already supported by FreeSCI.

Anyone interested in taking over or porting the project is advised to check out the SCI Games forum.

Source code is available here and mirrored here.

Note that the FreeSCI developers would be very interested in collaborating with whoever picks up the project.

FreeSCI 0.3.5 (stable) and 0.6.2 (unstable) released!

Author: jameson Date: Sun 12. Feb 2006

Over two years after the last elease, updated versions of FreeSCI have finally been unleashed unto the general public.

Highlights from the stable release nclude:

GP32 port and WinCE port (Walter van Niftrik and Ismail Khatib, respectively)
A game selection screen (by Hugues Valois)
Per-resource shading, to allow manual fine-tuning of SCI game graphics
Background image drawing optimisations
Many, many bugfixes (and maybe a couple of new bugs to spice things up).

The unstable release is meant as a technology preview only, as we still offer no savegame support. Significant changes include improvements to the new sound subsystem, a mark-and-sweep garbage collector for the virtual machine and the usual allotment of bug fixes.
Below is a quick demonstration of the new per-resource shading feature, based on palette modifications provided by Matt Hargett:

Plain SQ3

Per-resource shading in action

Correction

Author: jameson Date: Wed 26. Oct 2005

Apologies for an incorrect statement made in the last news post: The GP32 port DOES have sound support.

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