![]() SPUTM would interpret the scripts, load assets from disc, and handle the other user interactions with the game. The reusable interpreter was called SPUTM, the SCUMM Presentation Utility (TM) which was renamed on shipment of the game to the name of the game's executable. The SCUMM program was responsible for tokenizing the scripts and gathering all other assets (such as art and sound) as a package. Scripters could work with preliminary character and background art drawn by the artists to hone their scripts while providing feedback to the artists. The combined tools enabled for rapid prototyping of a game. The scripts included the ability to multitask, such as having background actors enact behavior while waiting for foreground actions to complete. The only exception was to display a character's dialog in a different text color for Maniac Mansion in which they had to include the number, but this was subsequently revised by the time Zak McKracken was released. They did not want to have specific details about a game hard-coded into the script, so the tokenizer would be able to recognize actors by their name from the script instead of by internal numbers. For example, the SCUMM command walk dr-fred to laboratory-door would be tokenized to a 4-byte command. SCUMM was developed to be a tool that converted human-readable commands into byte-sized tokens that then would be read by an executable interpreter program that presented the game to the player. This concept informed the idea of a scripting language that would be cross-platform. At the time, personal computers (PC) did not have large enough abilities or speed to edit and compile programs, so often the LucasArts coders would write code as cleanly as possible on a mainframe system to remove all errors so that, while compiling on a PC would be slow, it would be less error-prone. The nature of SCUMM emerged from the background of most of the early programmers at LucasArts, including Wilmunder, who have been programmers for mainframe computers. This is a token language that provided groundbreaking coding techniques. UnXman) in 1987, with later versions enhanced by Aric Wilmunder (a.k.a., the SCUMM Lord) and various others. The original version was coded by Ron Gilbert (with some initial help by Chip Morningstar aka. SCUMM has been released on these platforms: 3DO, Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, CDTV, Commodore 64, Fujitsu FM Towns & Marty, Apple Macintosh, Nintendo Entertainment System, DOS, Microsoft Windows, Sega CD (Mega-CD), and TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine. ![]() SCUMM is also a host for embedded game engines such as the Interactive MUsic Streaming Engine ( iMUSE), the INteractive Streaming ANimation Engine ( INSANE), CYST (in-game animation engine), FLEM (places and names object inside a room), and MMUCAS. This also allowed the game's script and data files to be cross-platform, i.e., re-used across various platforms. It falls somewhere between a game engine and a programming language, allowing designers to create locations, items and dialogue sequences without writing code in the language in which the game source code ends up. It was subsequently used as the engine for later LucasArts adventure games. Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion ( SCUMM) is a video game engine developed at Lucasfilm Games, later renamed LucasArts, to ease development on their graphic adventure game Maniac Mansion (1987).
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