Scorpion Engine

[earok]

Originally Posted by Mixel

Another thought.. does the existence of foreground tiles on the map use extra ram? If so does reusing the same tiles in the fg layer repeatedly use up less? There are some places I’ve done uneccessarily elaborate stuff on the foreground layer, if it uses ram in the same way as the other map layers that’s fine but if not I can probably simplify things.

Each foreground tile also stores the background image that it's underneath so that it can be blitted extremely quickly (it only blits overtop of things behind it when there's actually something behind it), but it doesn't store any redundant graphics so it should be fairly trivial.

If you check the size of the ".gfx" files (1.gfx for your first level, 2.gfx for your second level etc), that will tell you how much chipram they're consuming, since those files get loaded straight into chipram without decompression.

[earok]

Posted an experimental update to the experimental branch. It's a performance update only, across the board there's been a lot of tweaks and rewrites.

It could very well break things that worked before (though everything seems OK on the demo games), if you try it out, please let me know if it's messed anything up.

Edit: Some technical details if anyone was interested. The color bands are a way I have of measuring performance, overall the show how long it takes a frame to render. Left is the previous version, right is the current version.

You can see that, even though there's more happening in the right frame (twice as many onscreen characters), it's slightly faster than the left frame when it's the player character alone. That doesn't mean that you can put twice as much onscreen as you could before, but you should at least be able to fit a few more actors on screen without hitting any speed issues.

[Mixel]

Woo!! First of all, that seems a pretty sizeable performance boost on unexpanded A1200 again! TY!

My errors so far..

1) the last frame of sprites sticks around on screen.. (like, if I do the attack anim swoosh, it hangs around until the next sprite appears, applies to explosions and stuff too)

2) a lot of nasty graphical artefacts appearing all over the place, and they get worse over time..

3) "Prevent collision" on animations no longer works..

4) I got a guru meditation when I play through the whole game so far Intro barge, World map (pressing 1 to teleport to Level 1) on reaching tunnels2 it Guru'd (but by this point there was so much corruption on the screen im not surprised, hehe.. It seems to massively increase whenever foreground layers are on screen?)

I'll push up latest CMO in case it's helpful. Press N to disable the unfinished weird music.

[earok]

Originally Posted by Mixel

Woo!! First of all, that seems a pretty sizeable performance boost on unexpanded A1200 again! TY!

My errors so far..

1) the last frame of sprites sticks around on screen.. (like, if I do the attack anim swoosh, it hangs around until the next sprite appears, applies to explosions and stuff too)

2) a lot of nasty graphical artefacts appearing all over the place, and they get worse over time..

3) "Prevent collision" on animations no longer works..

4) I got a guru meditation when I play through the whole game so far Intro barge, World map (pressing 1 to teleport to Level 1) on reaching tunnels2 it Guru'd (but by this point there was so much corruption on the screen im not surprised, hehe.. It seems to massively increase whenever foreground layers are on screen?)

I'll push up latest CMO in case it's helpful. Press N to disable the unfinished weird music.

Ah, great to hear that it's given you a boost!

Sounds like CMO is a good test case for the latest build, so I'll grab your latest source and do another update in a day or two after testing.

[malko]

@earok:

[earok]

Editor updates checked into both CMO and experimental repositories. Should resolve issues with foreground/block overlap (which was the likely cause of guru), disabling collisions in animations, and sprites not disappearing. Not sure if it's absolutely everything fixed, but it seems to be much better than it was.


@Mixel - I noticed a glitch where there's a thin blue line at the top of the screen after dying. Is that deliberate? I assume the cause of that is setting Color00 in a codeblock.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

Editor updates checked into both CMO and experimental repositories. Should resolve issues with foreground/block overlap (which was the likely cause of guru), disabling collisions in animations, and sprites not disappearing. Not sure if it's absolutely everything fixed, but it seems to be much better than it was.

Woah! Super fast update again! TY! I'll see what else I can break.

@Mixel - I noticed a glitch where there's a thin blue line at the top of the screen after dying. Is that deliberate? I assume the cause of that is setting Color00 in a codeblock.

Oh boy, that's all related to me using non-black for 0.. I'd been using palette overrides to try and replace 0 with whatever I didn't think I needed in each particular level. I really need to fix it but I'm having some issues trying to get it to not make the wrong things transparent. Tried sacrificing my darkest green pair.

Weird EAB was down for me when I tried to post this and I've msg'd you about it already, but interesting transparency stuff.

[lesta_smsc]

I don't have time to trawl to nearly 550 posts on this but just want to say I watched that YouTube clip from the first post and @earok wow this is great!

My brother once made a pokemon game on the Amiga and wrote it all in AMOS! He extracted sprites from the original game.

If this engine let's you essentially take the base files and run them on Amiga that would awesome. Even better if it was over a few disks and asked you to insert another disk for loading lol.

If I have completely misinterpreted the nature of this engine then apologies.