Sarien / News: Recent posts

Sarien has merged with ScummVM, no its not a long running april fools joke. Work is ongoing for the migration of Sarien code into ScummVM development branch.

All future development will be happening in the ScummVM tree.

Sarien 0.7.0 has been released. Many new features are available in this release: hi-res mode, better sound, noise channel, ports to MacOS X, Amiga and PocketPC devices, a rewritten savegame system and more -- see the Changelog for a full list. Many v2 games have been finished with 0.7.0, including Kings's Quest 1 and 2, Space Quest 1 and 2, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry.

Sarien 0.6.2 has been released with bugfixes backported from the 0.7 branch. Work will now focus on stabilizing the 0.7 branch and finishing the ports to Amiga and MacOS. The preliminary Amiga port (show in the front page screenshot) is being built with DICE C (Storm, GCC and SAS will probably work as well). It's currently very slow and has no sound support. Help from Amiga programmers is appreciated.

Curious about what's being prepared for Sarien 0.7? New screenshots are available at http://sarien.sourceforge.net/screenshots/ comparing the new features with the original Sierra AGI. All these features are already available in the CVS snapshots, test them and report bugs!

Sarien 0.6.1 has been released with many bugfixes to the previous stable version, 0.6.0. The most significant changes are in the implementation of many AGI commands and fixes for the menu crashes and inventory item viewing. Source packages and precompiled packages for a couple of architectures (including S/390) are available in the files section.

Sarien 0.6.0 has been released. It uses a new sprite manager algorithm and a redesigned interpreter core, and is expected to be much more accurate than the previous versions. i386 and PowerPC Linux, Intel BeOS and Win32 pre-built binaries are already availailable in the download page, FreeBSD and Debian packages should be available soon.

Good documentation is an important component of any project, and it becomes essential when the complexity of the project exceeds a certain limit. To provide a painless introduction to Sarien internals to new developers, and also to document the system for future maintenance, the Sarien Hacker's Guide is now available at http://sarien.sourceforge.net/hackersguide/. If you wish to contribute to Sarien development, please read the document. If you're a project maintainer, please consider adding similar documentation to your project. By doing so you'll have an easier way to evaluate design decisions, isolate and fix bugs and write better code, and all these factors will result in a better product.

Starting this week, experimental CVS snapshot tarballs and binaries will be available at http://sarien.sourceforge.net/daily/. Binaries will be initially available for ia32 Linux and BeOS, and possibly extended later to Win32, FreeBSD and other architectures. With a milestone release not so far ahead, it's important to have the development snapshots tested and bugs reported.

New developers have joined the project: Joep Grooten, working on FreeBSD, and win32 hacker Igor Nesterov (who already worked with us in the 0.4 series). In the ports front, I have successfully executed Sarien in BeOS using SDL. The code changes are already in CVS, and the configuration system tweaks needed to build it out of the box will be commited soon. (Thanks to Eugenia Loli-Queru for BeOS PE support!)

After an initial code clean-up (along with some minor bugfixes here and there) we're staring the graphics system modularization process, and the first goal is to isolate the visible screen 320x200 graphics subsystem from the 160x168 AGI subsystem. Components requiring direct access to the visible screen (e.g. menus and dialogs) should not mix with AGI functions. Why? Because it will make the code more maintenable, and also because we want to see Sarien running in the 160x160 PalmOS screen ;) Any handheld developer interested?

After a long time, I'm back to Sarien development. Stu moved from Melbourne to London, Felipe is working with HP-UX administration, I finished my thesis and got my MSc degree. Hopefully we'll all contribute to implement the missing features and squish the remaining bugs of the interpreter. Of course we'll need your help as well, so please contact me if you wish to join our effort.