Scorpion Engine

[Rochabian]

I tried the scorpion engine yesterday. How it works is relatively easy to understand by studying the demos provided and the comments on the code for a newbie like me. Very educational.
Spriter seems to be a little more complex to handle but very complète

Impressive game engine!

[earok]

Cheers!

Sadly, the spriter beta is bit of a difficult and buggy beast to work with, something I may look at doing at some stage in the future is replacing it with a new animation editor. I don't tend to use it so much any more for Scorpion projects, I mostly rely on the "import spritesheet" function inside Scorpion itself to generate spriter files from PNGs.

[breech]

I was trying out Scorpion by converting a C64 graphic adventure but Spriter wouldn't cooperate, so I've given up for now.

[Rochabian]

If you don't use spriter, how do you set the animation frames from png ?
In actor tab for alex kidd, i can see the animation name : alexkidd-walk_right for example,
but i don't find a way to edit this (modify name or png to use )
Spriter is not able to open .sprtr file

[earok]

Originally Posted by Rochabian

If you don't use spriter, how do you set the animation frames from png ?
In actor tab for alex kidd, i can see the animation name : alexkidd-walk_right for example,
but i don't find a way to edit this (modify name or png to use )
Spriter is not able to open .sprtr file

If spriter isn't able to open the file, it must be a bug with spriter :/ there's not currently a way to edit animations other than using spriter (though you can import entirely new ones through the Scorpion Editor)

You could try manually editing the sprtr file in a text editor.


I've actually started writing a replacement animation tool as the first priority for Scorpion, so hopefully that won't be too far away.

[Rochabian]

Originally Posted by earok

If spriter isn't able to open the file, it must be a bug with spriter :/ there's not currently a way to edit animations other than using spriter (though you can import entirely new ones through the Scorpion Editor)

You could try manually editing the sprtr file in a text editor.


I've actually started writing a replacement animation tool as the first priority for Scorpion, so hopefully that won't be too far away.

No bug, i wasn't doing things correctly
It's ok with Spriter, i think i understood its principle and i'm able to use it

Keep up the good work with the new animation tool !

[earok]

Originally Posted by Rochabian

No bug, i wasn't doing things correctly
It's ok with Spriter, i think i understood its principle and i'm able to use it

Keep up the good work with the new animation tool !

Ah, right! It can be confusing.

Spriter is a seriously powerful sprite animation tool, it's used to make those gorgeous (and extremely memory efficient) animations used in Metro Siege (by composing frames out of numerous small sprites, rather than treating the entire frame as a single sprite)

I think it's too complicated for Scorpion, given that it's primarily aimed at games with 16-32 pixel wide sprites, so I'll implement a much simpler animation editor for that.

[earok]

Minor update:

I went ahead and made a replacement for the Spriter Beta in Unity, which I'll keep working on so it can (hopefully) become a useful tool for the Metro Siege guys, but it's definitely too powerful for Scorpion - the Spriter Beta replacement is more for games like Metro Siege with massive and fluidly animated sprites rather than the tiny sprites used by Scorpion (though maybe in future Scorpion will accept animations made with that tool).


It did prove that Unity is indeed a viable platform to make a game editor in, what took me a week in Unity probably would have taken me a month with the WPF framework I'm using for the Scorpion editor (and of course, Unity also offers the ability to output Mac and Linux builds). So I'm going to make a much simpler animation tool for Scorpion, which will eventually become the entire editor.

[earok]

I'm hoping to get the new Unity-based animation editor out this weekend.

Compared to spriter, it's extremely simple, so it should be much easier to create and edit animations.

[Clydos]

Yes, this looks very good!

What does the number "10" under the graphic in the "Frames" panel mean?

[Tsak]

It's the time delay for each frame

[earok]

Yes, as Tsak said ^, it's the animation delay.

Currently I'm still using spriter units (which is 100 units per second). I was thinking about changing it to being based on PAL frames (so 50 units per second), simply because an Amiga in PAL mode can't render faster than 50 FPS, and it might be useful for the box to accurately reflect exactly how many frames each animation frame is going to be on screen.

But I'm definitely not decided on that. It may still be useful to have the units in divisions of 100 per second, if only for the sake of clarity (eg, from the screenshot, we can see that each frame lasts for 10% or 0.1 of a second).

[breech]

I've been wondering about frames, how would I get roughly correct speed and scrolling from a dos 70 kHz port working on 50/60?

[earok]

Originally Posted by breech

I've been wondering about frames, how would I get roughly correct speed and scrolling from a dos 70 kHz port working on 50/60?

If you've got the original source code, I'd recommend multiplying the values by 7/5 (1.4) and rounding if necessary. For character movement speed, fractional values are supported - though I haven't yet got the ability to nudge the camera by a fractional amount. In any case, subpixel scrolling (An AGA only feature that allows scrolling by quarters of a pixel) isn't yet supported.

NTSC is technically not supported yet, when it will be I'll probably do it the same way as I did for Raid Over Moscow (insert a frame wait every 5th frame so that the game speed remains constant across PAL and NTSC), so the logic for an NTSC and PAL game should remain identical.

[earok]

The new animation editor itself is done, but the main Scorpion Editor doesn't yet support the new format. Hopefully that'll all be transferred across in a day or two.

[breech]

Nice, looking forward to your Shantae conversion

[saimon69]

The game company who develops Shantae - WayForward - is in Santa Clarita - ok, Castaic to be precise, a bit north but same city; wonder if working on a tribute game does affect my hireability :P

[note: i don't think Earok is working on a Shantae port nor a fan game, he simply used sprites to test, however a "Shantae and the legend of the cursed wonder computer" seems an appealing title]

[earok]

Haha.

Honestly, my pipe dream is to make some sort of legit and licenced Shantae game for Amiga - maybe a port of Shantae 1 with some of the enhanced sprites from Shantae 2 and 3. I don't think Wayforward would be open to that, but I can dream at least.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by earok

Haha.

Honestly, my pipe dream is to make some sort of legit and licenced Shantae game for Amiga - maybe a port of Shantae 1 with some of the enhanced sprites from Shantae 2 and 3. I don't think Wayforward would be open to that, but I can dream at least.

Well we can think on a plan B and do our own sprites and background in case ^^

[nobody]

Not really following the development so what is the status, you can do games now-you need to know programming etc?