Sarien.nethome

Instant adventure gaming

About Sarien.net

In 2003, I created Good Old Adventures. It was a chat environment set in the Sierra worlds without actual gameplay. All images were manually crafted, copy/pasting from WinAGI Game Development Studio. A time consuming process.

Space Quest screenshot

Four years later I wrote a few conversion tools in .NET to extract Sierra's in-game images and objects from the original games, and display them properly on the web. The "only thing" left to do then was to export and understand all in-game logics.

I was able to convert the logics to javascript, but there was one big problem: Sierra's code used GOTO statements, and those could jump anywhere in the code, even inside a nested "if"-statement. It seemed unsolvable in javascript.

I sat down together with Sjoerd Visscher, one of my collegues at Q42, and we came up with a solution. Using a decompilation approach to get rid of nested "if"-statements and putting the whole shebang inside a huge switch/case statement, we could mimic line numbers and GOTO's while maintaining performance. World domnination was within reach :-D

code

It was halfway 2008 when I started to work on it, and Sarien.net is the result. I sincerely hope that Activision Blizzard can appreciate this tribute to these game franchises (as their original creators such as Al Lowe do), and not ask me to close down the site due to copyright issues.

About me

My name is Martin Kool, and as you could've guessed I am a fan of Sierra adventure games. You can read more about me at martinkool.com, or read the interview that I gave earlier. I also opened up a Twitter account in case you want to know what I'll be working on next.

If you'd like to contact me, feel free to drop me an e-mail at martin AT my company's name DOT nl.

About my company

I work at the wonderful Q42, together with over 30 talented people. Most of them work in-house in our office in The Hague, although others like Anne van Kesteren and Mark Wubben hop in from time to time, as they have "more important" things to do ;-)

code

You could say that Q42 runs on on passion: passion for technology and what we do. Last year we started "passiontime", a few hours per week for employees to spend on whatever they love to do. Since then we've had talks on GTD, seen iPhone apps, been blasted away by GoTracer, and now you're playing Sarien.net...

If you're ever visiting The Hague, don't hesitate to drop by our office. We've got superb coffee.