Scorpion Engine

[nikosidis]

Whow, Daemon Claw using Scorpion Engine.
That would be the perfect game to blow peoples mind about what the engine is capable of.

[Mixel]

That sounds amazing.. and confusing, haha!

That tall and thin foreground possibility would be incredible for something I was going to fudge a differerent way.

So colour0 will probably definitely need to be black.. I need to find my least useful colour pair (silly EHB).. and make that extra blacks. if I avoid using AGA copper etc can it do all this without the borderblank grey/black/weird left fringe issues?

[xboxown]

I would like to download scropion engine and play with it and even try a simple Amiga game on it. How do I download it and is there resources to show me the ropes in using it?

Thanks in advance.

[earok]

@malko cheers! Good to know it works on Windows 7. All the best.

@nikosidis DaemonClaw probably won't be made in Scorpion Engine. Another developer (one of the best on Amiga) has tentatively offered to port sometime in the future. Though there's one or two other BitBeamCannon projects I'd like to get involved in.

@Mixel I'm thinking I might scrap borderblank entirely and just make it so that you can pick which of the 32 colors you want as the background color (so if you pick 0, it'll stretch to the edges).

@xboxown Download of demos and editor is at https://github.com/earok/scorpion-editor-demos

There's unfortunately no tutorials yet, best thing to do is to tinker with the existing demos to get a feel for how the whole system works.

[Mixel]

[QUOTE=earok;1463230]@Mixel I'm thinking I might scrap borderblank entirely and just make it so that you can pick which of the 32 colors you want as the background color (so if you pick 0, it'll stretch to the edges).

Ah,that sounds great!

There's unfortunately no tutorials yet, best thing to do is to tinker with the existing demos to get a feel for how the whole system works.

Hmm. Given the changing periphery but largely solid core - would setting up a documentation wiki be a good idea? Rather than attempting the probably gruelling idea of writing a manual.. You’ve maybe explained the same things to me, and other people, multiple times and between the various scorpion users we’d probably be able to help each other out? Either that or a scorpion support forum, it looks like scorp is growing faster than PGF did and that had an active community of people helping each other out, posting their projects etc.

Maybe EAB could give it a whole section instead of just the thread..? (Idk enough about how eab does stuff to know how viable that is.)

[earok]

[QUOTE=Mixel;1463246]

Originally Posted by earok

@Mixel I'm thinking I might scrap borderblank entirely and just make it so that you can pick which of the 32 colors you want as the background color (so if you pick 0, it'll stretch to the edges).

Ah,that sounds great!


Hmm. Given the changing periphery but largely solid core - would setting up a documentation wiki be a good idea? Rather than attempting the probably gruelling idea of writing a manual.. You’ve maybe explained the same things to me, and other people, multiple times and between the various scorpion users we’d probably be able to help each other out? Either that or a scorpion support forum, it looks like scorp is growing faster than PGF did and that had an active community of people helping each other out, posting their projects etc.

Maybe EAB could give it a whole section instead of just the thread..? (Idk enough about how eab does stuff to know how viable that is.)

A wiki sounds like a good idea. Would definitely help both newcomers and experts, hell I could probably learn tips about my own engine heh. Wouldn't know the best way to get started on that though, and if it'd be better to host my own wiki or use wikia etc.

I think EAB probably wouldn't allow for an entire section for one tool, it'd also mean that there'd probably have to be sections for every other game tool too.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

A wiki sounds like a good idea. Would definitely help both newcomers and experts, hell I could probably learn tips about my own engine heh. Wouldn't know the best way to get started on that though, and if it'd be better to host my own wiki or use wikia etc.

Ahh! Ive never used wikia. In my limited adventures in wiki stuff I really like dokuwiki because it uses plain text files and isn’t yet another thing you have to mess around with sql for. Just drop it in a folder and customise. But everyone seems to use mediawiki. (Maybe as they’re used to it from Wikipedia)

I think EAB probably wouldn't allow for an entire section for one tool, it'd also mean that there'd probably have to be sections for every other game tool too.

Good point. I wish they had that too though, tbh! I love the idea of support.grac, support.redpill , support.scorpion, support.seuck (lol) curated by the community in the case of antique engines and the developers for newer ones. That may just me though, haha.

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by earok

I think EAB probably wouldn't allow for an entire section for one tool, it'd also mean that there'd probably have to be sections for every other game tool too.

Originally Posted by Mixel

Good point. I wish they had that too though, tbh! I love the idea of support.grac, support.redpill , support.scorpion, support.seuck (lol) curated by the community in the case of antique engines and the developers for newer ones. That may just me though, haha.

Create a new thread under the project.EAB section.

...and / or PM RCK; as only he can decide on / make this happen.

[malko]

Originally Posted by mixel

[...] i wish they had that too though, tbh! I love the idea of support.grac, support.redpill , support.scorpion, support.seuck (lol) curated by the community in the case of antique engines and the developers for newer ones. That may just me though, haha.

+1

[earok]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Create a new thread under the project.EAB section.

...and / or PM RCK; as only he can decide on / make this happen.

I'll pitch the idea in that thread.

[Mixel]

What’s the biggest hardware factor in compile speed? I’m guessing single core CPU performance? Various things about my PC have needed upgrading for a looong time and I have a feeling that by the end of CMO the compile times are going to get pretty cumbersome considering how I edit something and compile every couple of minutes to check it worked.

[mjnurney]

Looking good, I’ve only just loaded this up in Windows 10 x64 and it works well. No idea how to use it but I’ll give it a good shot

[ChefDeadpool]

I've been playing with this the last few days, and wow is this a quick development tool.

I write code for a living, so it's wonderful to have a well organized, code-free interface that lets you focus on content creation rather than code optimization, or at very least learning someone else's coding style.

[earok]

Apologies for the slow response!

@mixel I'll work on optimizing compile speed at some point (or maybe look into multi-threading, or maybe seeing if I can make it not recompile stuff that hasn't changed), but yes currently single threaded CPU performance would be the main drawback.

@mjnurney Good luck! I liked some of your Backbone titles so I'm interested to see what you come up with in Scorpion.

@ChefDeadpool Cheers! I'm glad you're enjoying it. I've really tried to balance the flexibility needed for a polished, unique and well performing Amiga title against simplifying development as far as possible.

[Mixel]

Good to know it can be sped up a bit, my cpu is ancient anyway so I should be able to half compile time by finally upgrading. (And also get better performance in no man’s sky, hehe)

When scorpion loads all of the .8svx files into chip ram is that all the ones in the project folder or just ones that are referenced in codeblocks? I’m guessing just the ones in codeblocks?

If it does it to everything in the sound folder I need to rethink how I’m storing my files.

[earok]

Originally Posted by Mixel

When scorpion loads all of the .8svx files into chip ram is that all the ones in the project folder or just ones that are referenced in codeblocks? I’m guessing just the ones in codeblocks?

It loads all of them. It doesn't filter anything out because it assumes you could need it in one way or another even if you're not directly referencing it.

For example, if you had

sound1
sound2
sound3
sound4
sound5

You could do something like, "playsound sound1 + 1" to play sound2 (the value of sound2 will be 1 more than sound1 because of alphabetical sorting).

[Mixel]

Ah that’s fine. I need to decide on a sound ram budget then. I’ve already decided to try and keep .mods to <20KB each, which is an interesting challenge, it’s very chippy. But a couple of sound effects can easily take up more.

Hmm that’d maybe be a good distant feature request actually, I think Seuck had a sound editor so you could make simple sinewaves and stuff.. and avoid having to use samples. Just thinking - a lot of games sound like they’re using chippy warbles rather than samples, presumably to save space? Not sure that would even save chip ram though.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by Mixel

Ah that’s fine. I need to decide on a sound ram budget then. I’ve already decided to try and keep .mods to <20KB each, which is an interesting challenge, it’s very chippy. But a couple of sound effects can easily take up more.

Hmm that’d maybe be a good distant feature request actually, I think Seuck had a sound editor so you could make simple sinewaves and stuff.. and avoid having to use samples. Just thinking - a lot of games sound like they’re using chippy warbles rather than samples, presumably to save space? Not sure that would even save chip ram though.

The original Reshoot used AHX as its sound engine. This allowed samples to be recycled by every sound in the player including sound effects. The 20 minute music loop took about 20k or thereabouts because the player computed all the waveforms at startup. If you're developing on a Windows box, use HivelyTracker as your editor but stay away from mixing and the HVL format.

Another sequel to AHX by the same author as the original is Pretracker which algorithmically prerenders samples using subtractive synthesis and chord mixing. It takes more chip RAM than AHX but sounds much better if you know how to do subtractive synthesis. Pretracker was used in Tiny Galaga, Tiny Invaders and Tiny Bobble to save disk space.

One thing all of these have in common is that they aren't currently supported by Scorpion yet.

[earok]

If you wanted something like a sawtooth wave, maybe this would work?

- Make a sample that runs for 0.02 seconds
- Make a codeblock like so:

start
yield 1
play shortsample
goto start




In all seriousness, I'm up for adding other sound engines to Scorpion at some stage. P61 is the one I'm most keen on, but for now PHX suits the engine well (makes it so easy to put in samples and songs without needing to worry about assigning channels)

---

I've sorta just been trying to optimize the engine lately, there's a whole lot of minor inefficiencies (things like checking for slopes on platform games that have no slopes anyway, for example) and they all add up, so hopefully it'll be a fair bit faster once I'm done.

[Mixel]

That’s really interesting about sound formats. Sound is definitely the area I’m most confused by.. I’ll spend a long time noodling about. I might use some simple waves, not sure. I need to do a pass reducing sample rate etc on the sfx anyway. I had no idea that’s how AHX works, neat!

—

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.