mattkc

BONUS: LEGO Island Scripting via SI Files

Added 2023-09-06 18:29:37 +0000 UTC

Hey everyone! I'm nearly done with the next part of the decomp series, but I thought I'd provide a sneak peek at one of the recent discoveries I made!

There's been some debate over how much LEGO Island's SI files actually control the game, especially since they're in a folder called "Scripts". Is the game just an engine that interprets instructions from the SIs, or are the SIs solely asset packs and nothing else?

Turns out the answer is... a little bit of both, but mostly the latter.

The vast majority of LEGO Island's game logic is hardcoded. When you click a door and move from one room to another, 99% of the time, it was hardcoded C++ code that told the game to do that. In the decomp, we've found a class for just about every room and object in the game, and when we dive into their methods we'll almost certainly find scripted actions that tell the game what to do and when.

That being said, the SI files do appear to have scripting functionality in them; an object can describe an "action", which provides a fairly high degree of control over the game. However, this only appears to have been used 3 times throughout the whole game (the main one being when you click on the Infomaniac at the start of the game). It's currently unclear why this functionality wasn't used more, though I can guess that writing in C++ was probably faster and provided more versatility (or perhaps you couldn't trigger the pixelation transition through this method). Anyways, I hope you enjoy this small insight into the game!