SCI/Specifications/Graphics/Pictures and movement control

Pictures and movement control

Original document by Lars Skovlund

A pic in SCI consists of three layers (called maps - they are unrelated to the map resources found in SCI1 games). The visual map, used for the picture which appears on the user’s screen. The priority map which tells the interpreter which things go in front of which in the three-dimensional room. Without the priority map, a room would just be a flat, painted surface. The control map decides where game characters (called actors) can walk and where special events occur. These special events are triggered by a game character walking on a particular spot. Where the visual map is almost always very complex and using dithered fills etc., the latter two consist of large areas of solid color.

Many functions which need to access these maps do so by using a bit-field. The bits are laid out as follows (but don’t set more than one at a time!) bit 0 - Visual bit 1 - Priority bit 2 - Control.

It is important to understand that, although being represented as colors on the screen, a prior­ity/control ”color” should be considered a number. The colors map to values according to the standard EGA color values.

Every animated object in SCI has a priority. As the object moves, its priority changes according to the so-called priority bands, explained next (it is, however, possible for a script to lock the priority of a view). The picture window is divided vertically into 16 priority bands. The priority of an animated object is determined by the position of its ”base rectangle” in one of these bands. Things are drawn in order of ascending priority, so objects with priority 15 are guaranteed to be in front of everything else. The default priority mapping gives priority 0 a fairly large space, the 42 topmost rows (including the menu bar which AFAIK is 10) in the picture. All other priority bands have the same size. A script can choose to alter this mapping, specifying the amount of space to assign to priority 0, and the number of the last row to include in the mapping calculation.

In most rooms, it is desirable to limit actor movement, confining the actor to a specific part of the screen. In other cases, special events are triggered by movement into a specific screen area. On some occasions, even room switches are implemented using control polygons. While the meaning of priorities is determined by the kernel, the meaning of control values is entirely up to the script. It is more or less a standard, however, that actors can’t walk on white control areas.

As the control map is not consulted by the interpreter itself (except in a few cases), scripts need a way to do so. That way is called OnControl, and it is a kernel call. Supplied with a point or a rectangle, it returns a bit mask containing the control values of all the pixels in the desired region. If a specific control value is encountered, it is used as a bit number, and that bit is set in the output mask. This bit mask system is also used in another place, namely the illegalBits selector of the Act (actor) class. The illegalBits selector determines in which areas the actor may not walk.

The OnControl() system call is explained in Kernel function 0x52: OnControl(word, Point | Rect) section.