Pic Editor¶

Priority screen¶

The priority screen defines depth layers to your background. As characters move around in your game, they are assigned a priority value (ranging from 0 to 15) by the game engine. Their priority depends on their current y coordinate (generally at their feet). If a character’s priority is equal to or greater than the background pixel behind it, it will appear in front of the background. Otherwise, it will be oscured.

On the left, the box (pri 9, blue) is obscured by the waterfall and rock (pri 10, lime). On the right, the box has moved lower and changed priority. It is now pri 11, and appears in front of the waterfall and rock.

Choosing a priority value to draw with.

Control screen¶

The control screen is used to prevent (or permit) the ego (or any character) from moving in certains areas. It can also be used to trigger in-game events.

In SCI0 and SCI1, characters are generally set up to treat control value 15 (ctlWHITE) as impassable. Use this to define boundaries for your charactrer (in SCI1+, polygons are generally used for this purpose). Other colors may be used to trigger doors and such, by checking in code if a character is standing on a control value of a certain color.

Moving around¶

Since the picture resource consists of a series of vector commands, you need a way to move around to different points. Any drawing commands you do are added to that particular spot in the picture.

Slider bar¶

The quickest and most obvious way is to use the slider bar at the bottom of the screen. It shows the current position, and lets you instantly move to another position.

Command list¶

You can also click on a command in the Toolbox pane, and the picture will move to that point. A thin green line reminds you exactly where you are positioned.

Drawing tools¶

There are three main drawing tools: pen, fill and line. Unlike SCI Studio, SCICompanion doesn’t make you choose between “short” and “long” versions of them. The editor will automatically use the most space-efficient commands when saving the pic to the game file.

The command list¶

In the picture editor Toolbox is the command list. It shows the commands around the current position in the editor. It can be used to move to another position by clicking on a command.

Copying and pasting commands¶

More interestingly, you can also copy commands from here, and paste them into other pics - even in other running instances of SCICompanion - so you can copy and paste commands from one game into another. It takes some practise to select the correct set of commands to copy. Generally it is best to click on the command you want to start with, and then progressively scroll down the list and use the SHIFT-click to find the end command. Then click Copy at the top of the command list.

When you paste a series of commands, they will be added to the pic in a special mode that allows you to reposition them. You may see strange behaviour as you move the drawing commands around the screen, but that is due to the vector nature of the commands.

Tip

You can stretch or shrink the pasted commands using the arrow keys, and you can rotate them by dragging on the corners.

The fake ego¶

This feature lets you superimpose an image of the ego (or any view resource in the game) onto the pic, and drag it around. It interacts with the priority screens, control lines and polygons, and can help you size elements of the picture correctly.

By default, the view resource used for the “ego” is the one that is currently selected in the resource explorer. In the preferences dialog, you can also specify that a simple box should be used instead. You can also choose recent views from a dropdown list, or enter a view resource number manually.

If nothing shows up when you turn on the fake ego, it may just be hidden behind a higher priority object in the picture. In that case, right clicking on the picture will center the ego under your mouse cursor.

Right clicking on the fake ego offers a number of options with regards to how the ego interacts with the pic.

Priority bands¶

The priority bands (corresponding to the “depth layers”) can be toggled on and off with the priority lines button. They show the boundaries of the priority zones.

In SCI1 and above, these priority bands are adjustable. To do so, click on the boundary between to priority bands just outside the right edge of the pic, and drag the boundary.

Tracing image¶

You can paste a bitmap into the pic editor, and it will be used as a tracing image. You can also open an image from a file .

The tracing image can be turned on or off , and its opacity can be set:

Transforming coordinates¶

If you realize you need to make some changes to an earlier portion of the pic, it can be tedious to scroll back to the desired position to make those modifications. Instead, you can change your line, fill and pen commands instantly with the Transform Coords mode .

This mode works in combination with a drawing tool (line, pen, fill or ellipse). When it’s active, the points that comprise the drawing commands in the area of the mouse cursor will “light up”. You can then click on them and drag them around.

Dragging the point between two lines to change the image

EGA pic palettes¶

EGA pics support a fixed palette of 16 colors. However, dithering can be used to mix any two colors together. So the visual screen of EGA pics is actually drawn with a 40 color, customizable palette.

Hero’s Quest used dithering extensively.

Each pic can have up to 4 palettes of 40 colours, which can be switched during gameplay. Using different EGA palettes can be useful if you need the same pic resource to be used for both day and night scenes, for instance.

The 16 natural EGA colors on the bottom, and the 40 customizable dithered colors on top.

The palettes are chosen using the palette button in the toolbar. This brings up a dialog where you can assign colours to each of the 40 positions of each palette by right and left clicking on the source colours at the bottom. When you close the dialog, the palette is set in the command stream, at the particular spot in the pic. So you can change the palette many times through the sequence of commands that makes up the pic.

Comparison of day vs night scene in Quest for Glory. This uses the same pic resource rendered with different palettes.

Converting a bitmap to a vector drawing (SCI0)¶

SCICompanion has the ability to take an image file (or an image from the clipboard) and convert it into vector commands that can be added to your pic.

The Convert Bitmap dialog

The conversion process works as follows:

1. Choose Pic->Import bitmap to pic. This will open a dialog. If an image is on the clipboard, it will appear on the left. Otherwise, open an image using the Browse button.
2. Adjust the picture using the Brightness, Contrast and Saturation controls.
3. Click the Convert button. A progress bar will animate as the conversion takes place, and the resulting image will appear on the right.
4. Check the image size - is it small enough to be a SCI0 pic resource? (less than 64000 bytes)
5. The options on the right control the conversion process - which colours are allowed, and how many to use. Selecting different options can have a big effect on picture size.
6. Once you are satisfied with the result, click Accept. The vector commands that make up the image will be added to your pic at the current location.

Importing a VGA pic background (SCI1+)¶

VGA pics can use bitmapped graphics for the visual screen. To set the background for a VGA pic, click on Set background in the Toolbox pane, or choose Pic->Import bitmap to pic.

The Import Background dialog

You’ll note that this looks fairly similar to Import Image dialog for view resources. As in that case, you have three palette options:

1. You can have SCICompanion generate a palette automatically, replacing the selected colors of the existing palette of the pic
2. You can try to map colors to selected colors of the existing palette (using either RGB or CCIR color matching)
3. You can use the palette included in the image file, if available (for instance, .gif files may include a palette).

You also have control over which palette indices are actually used. One difference is that by default, the “non-fixed” palette indices from palette 999 are used. This is generally what is desired for pic backgrounds.

If you want to customize which indices are used, you can check or uncheck the Only use x free palette entries checkbox to quickly control which palette indices are used, or you can manually select them in the palette and press the refresh button.

There is also an option to overlay an image onto an already existing background (this can be useful for things like palette cycling), in addition to all the same dithering options available in the Import Image dialog.

Editing a VGA pic palette¶

The current palette for VGA pics is shown at the bottom of the Toolbox pane, below the command and polygon lists.

Choose Pic->Edit palette or click the palette button in the Toolbox pane to invoke the Palette Editor dialog. See the section on palettes for more information on the Palette Editor dialog.

Polygons¶

Polygons are essential to SCI1.1 games, and there is a lot to discuss. Therefore, they get their own polygon page.

Changing a pic’s height¶

Pics are generally 190 pixels tall. However, they can be extended to 200 pixels if you want to use them in a scene in the game where the icon bar won’t be shown. To do so, choose Pic->Change height and input the new height. After doing this, you will need to reimport a background image in order to officially set the height.

Pic helper pane¶

On the right side of the Pic Editor is a pane that shows two views.

The top view (labelled Zoom) shows a zoomed in view of the region that the mouse cursor is currently in. This is useful when you need very careful pixel placement.

The bottom view (labelled Final) shows what the completed pic looks like. If the pic position slider is already at the end of the pic command list, then this will be identical to the main view. However, if you’ve scrolled back to an earlier position in the list pic commands to change something or fix something, this can give you a preview of what the final result will look like.

For both these views, you can set them to show the visual, priority or control screens, or to just follow whatever screen is showing in the main view. Showing different screens can be very useful when you’re trying to line something on the control screen up with something in the visual background.

In Code¶

The pic background is specified in your room instance’s properties:

(instance public rm210 of Room
    (properties
        picture 210
        noun N_ROOM
    )
    ...
)

You can also use the DrawPic() kernel, or the drawPic method on Room.