MRPGI/README.md

MRPGI — Monster Robot Party Game Interpreter

A new-school, Apple-Silicon-native reimagining of Sierra's 1980s AGI engine — the tech behind King's Quest, Space Quest, and Police Quest — rebuilt in Rust + macroquad so you can make cool, fun adventure games.

It keeps the soul of AGI (vector rooms, the invisible priority/depth screen, loops-and-cels sprites, a verb-noun parser, flags & vars, the ego) and bridges it forward (Retina-crisp rendering, hand-editable text resources, a real embedded scripting language, and an optional AI parser).

Run it

cargo run            # dev build (fast to recompile)
cargo run --release  # smooth, optimized build

A window opens with the demo room. Walk the robot with the arrow keys or by clicking — and stroll behind the column to watch the priority system place you correctly in depth. N toggles CRT scanlines. Esc quits.

How it works (the AGI model, faithfully)

Every room is drawn into two buffers at once:

Buffer	What it holds	Why
visual	palette indices (0–15, EGA)	what you see
priority	depth bands (4–15) + control lines (0–3)	depth sorting & collision

Lower on screen ⇒ higher priority ⇒ drawn nearer the camera. The ego is drawn a pixel at a time, only where its priority ≥ the scenery's — that's the whole "walk behind the tree" trick, with zero per-object Z bookkeeping. Control lines (priority 0) are walls the ego can't cross.

Source map

File	Role
palette.rs	the 16-color EGA palette (indices → RGBA)
framebuffer.rs	the visual + priority buffers and the band(y) depth table
picture.rs	vector room painting (PicOp rectangles / lines / pixels)
view.rs	sprites as loops + cels, authored from tiny ASCII grids
sprite.rs	the ego: movement, click-to-walk, collision, walk animation
room.rs	the hand-authored demo room
main.rs	window, game loop, fixed-step cycles, compositing, HUD

Asset pipeline (the new-school bit)

Images don't sit on top of the game — they're folded into it. Any PNG is quantized to the EGA palette (optional Bayer dithering for smooth retro gradients) and becomes indexed pixels, so from that moment it depth-sorts, gets occluded, and walks-behind exactly like hand-authored art. Three ways in:

• Tile an image across a region (textures — e.g. the floor)
• Pour an image into a shape via stamp_cel_fit with a fit mode (stretch / tile / center) — the shape also stamps depth & collision. This is the "draw a shape, load an image into it" idea, realized.
• Objects — a PNG becomes a Prop that sorts with the ego

Drop your own art into assets/, then press R in-game to hot-reload it.

Roadmap

• v0.1 — rendering core: vector room, priority depth, walkable ego, click-to-walk, CRT toggle
• v0.2 — asset pipeline: PNG → EGA quantize + dither, tile / pour-into-shape / object insertion, hot-reload (R)
• v0.3 — room editor: in-engine paint tool with edit/play modes, dual-layer LOOK+MEANING painting, flood-fill, tools (brush/line/rect/fill/pick/erase), undo, and JSON room save/load — see EDITOR_GUIDE.md
• Priority-mask backgrounds: a full-room art PNG + a companion mask PNG whose colors encode depth bands & control lines (the pro art workflow)
• True-color "HD" layer mode: skip quantization for painted backdrops; the priority buffer stays indexed
• Polygon shapes for stamp_cel_fit (not just rectangles)
• Directional views (4 loops + horizontal mirroring) for the robot
• Text parser: vocabulary with synonyms → said("open","door") matching, plus an on-screen input line
• Rhai room logic: rooms scripted in an AGI-flavored embedded language (if said(...) { print(...) }), hot-reloadable
• Room transitions (new_room), inventory, flags & vars
• AI parser adapter: when the classic parse misses, an LLM maps free text onto an already-allowed room command (deterministic core stays authoritative; works offline without it)
• 3-voice + noise chiptune synth
• Loadable game folders (text/JSON resources) so games ship without recompiling the engine