thirty-two
Construction of The Secret Hangar: Leisure Suit Larry 2 - Looking For Love Demo (1989). :ms_floppy_disk:
PIC.095
Engine: SCI0
Resolution: 320x190 / 16 color
Commands: 1,315
Size: 6,435 bytes
🗜 Compression:
Type: Huffman (2)
Size: 5,332 bytes
Ratio: 5.7∶1 | 📉 −82.5%
#SierraOnLine #LeisureSuitLarry #AdventureGame #SCI0 #RetroGaming #RetroComputing #DOSGaming
powersoffour
@32bitkid This is fascinating. Do you think that the art style substantially changed as a result of this? You cite the day/night in QfG1 but are there other prominent examples you know of?
thirty-two
You don't start to see the full palette reassignments until Codename: ICEMAN and Colonel's Bequest in late 1989.
Hero's Quest (QfG1) would use that feature *extensively* for its rendering of day/night cycles, so it definitely exists by then. But yea... KQ4 and LSL2 definitely didn't have access to that tooling, and so you see weird stuff like this in the byte-stream.
thirty-two
…and you can only pick from those pairs!
Dark-green/dark-magenta dither is not an option! But, that was the dither pairing that the artist was going for, so... they just drew the dither *manually* across a ton of commands! Easily way more "expensive", in terms of bytes-on-disk than a palette command, but i'm sure there were other "risks" involved with updating the engine itself to support that.
By PQ2 you start to see some of the PALETTE_UPDATE commands (which alter single palette entries)
thirty-two
…and if this game was released in '89, it probably *would* have done that.
However, LSL2 released in Oct '88, it was the immediate follow-up to Sept's KQ4.
Its important to remember that the SCI0 engine wasn't an atomic "thing", instead it was constantly evolving behind the scenes. In this case, the SET_PALETTE commands hadn't been implemented yet. They do not appear *at all* KQ4, LSL2, or PQ2. Meaning, they pretty much were stuck with the default palette.
thirty-two
So, you might be asking yourself: "What was up with that colorization action on the 'copter?!" Well, you might be asking yourself that if you are weirdo like me.
It fills with a Black/Green dither, and then manually draws magenta lines over the black to get a "manual" Green/Magenta dither... A natural question to ask is "Why didn't it just fill with Green/Magenta in the first place?", something if you look at the "spec" for SCI0 and ScummVM/other-implementations would allow!
powersoffour
@32bitkid OH, wow. Looking him up, I was familiar with the B5 logo (keyhole) but was unfamiliar with the story of his passing or his broader background before CoC. CoC really does have such an amazing artistry to it.
thirty-two
@powersoffour
There are contemporary accounts of Peter Ledger's (artist on Camelot) frustration over some of the limitations of EGA and engine. Ledger was a traditional artist with a background in comic books and illustration. Some of the artwork in Conquests of Camelot is really impressive—like better than anything else from the era, tbh—even given the frustrating constraints for him as an artist. He tragically passed away in 1994.
thirty-two
@powersoffour But also, you can look at those early SCI0-era games, and kinda see where those limitations had affected the "style". And how they could have (probably would have) looked a little different given some future advancements. Thats not a "knock" on them, as games, but its interesting to see how they adapted to those constraints.
thirty-two
@powersoffour Oh for sure, one could definitely say that ICEMAN (and by extension Conquests of Camelot) took custom dithering pairs a little *too far*, a common critique of those titles' graphics.
But you can see Doug Herring's work on Colonels Bequest, that in the right hands, its quite powerful. It's a beautiful EGA-era game
On the tech side, by the time you get to QfG2, some of those backgrounds have 4 variants: day/night in two different cities. A EGA palette swapping feat!
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