Scorpion Engine

[Z-TEAM]

Hi everyone, is it possible to run a game developed under Scorpion Engine with X-benCh (Amiga WhdLoad game launcher) on CD32 ?

[earok]

I never thought to test that but I don't see why not - if you can do the WHDLoad export, you should be able to run it on a WHDLoad launcher.

[Samurai_Crow]

CD-32 only has 2 megs chip in its stock configuration but if it fits in that amount with no fast RAM, go for it!

[UltraNarwhal]

Is there currently a way on the Amiga side to stop current music and load a new track in the background? At the moment switching a music track on the same level causes a few seconds pause while it loads.

[earok]

There isn't right this moment - generally having a single track and switching patterns would be the way to go, *but* I have been giving serious thought to adding the ability to add music to asset bundles, which would allow multiple songs to be loaded at once and hence an instant transition from one to another.

--

A couple of minor fixes. I'm very behind on things right now so it might be a little while before I get on top of every bug reported lately.

- (hopefully) fixed issue by Gemintronic where creating a new block could show an error.
- Made it so you can determine whether setting an automatic scroll speed also turns off camera follow (this also fixes bug where camera follow would be disabled rather than enabled by default).

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

There isn't right this moment - generally having a single track and switching patterns would be the way to go

Thought I may have to do that. Luckily it was easy enough to combine tracks, just had to be careful not run out of memory on A500(512/512).

[earok]

Latest update. I'm a little worried that this may have introduced instability given the magnitude of internal changes, though I do need to focus on getting things stable for imminent 2023.4 release.

- Considerably reworked memory management relating to actor variables, and as such the 68K compilation of codeblocks is a little more efficient. Dynamic variables such as "actor_x" are no longer part of the virtual machine memory, though they can still be used in expressions and set manually. The point of this was to save a bit of memory for variables (it's possible to use 200~ variables more than it was before) but also it was optimisation and general tidy up in preparation for array support.
- Actor_OriginalX/Actor_OriginalY (and all variants for player/new/projectile) is added so you can reference the original place that something spawned from.
- Not tested, but attempted fix for issue reported by @zooperdan where reset/respawn recycle types will not run the onspawn code a second time.
- Fixed bug reported by @Master Linkuei in regards to glitches with loading levels or panels on Mega Drive.

Also there were some fixes in the last few days for Mega Drive palette issues, and loading time issues on Amiga (issue where a level would start to fade in, stop for several seconds, and then continue fading in)

[earok]

Checked in a modification to the parallax generator for OCS Amiga in order to make it easier to make effects like the flame effects on Shadow Dancer (Mega Drive).

Settings used for this particular effect:
* Scroll offset: 0
* Sine amplitude: 8
* Sine wavelength: 256

Then in the CSV, it was 0.5 for the left/right/idle scroll speeds.

[earok]

- Further fixes to recycling.
- Tidy up for debug mode. If a line is disabled, it won't pause execution if you're stepping through code (excluding if the disabled line is manually set as a breakpoint).
- Fixed issue where, if a command is added that has no buttons set, the command would execute automatically. (based on issue found in one of Fibble's projects). Joystick commands now require a joystick button or direction set to compile.
- Issue reported by msmalik681 where parallax generator would no longer work (divide by zero bug when not using the sine wave function)
- Issue found in Flibble's invaders game where it would crash if there was >64 actors even though it was configured for 128 actors

[earok]

Latest experimental:

* The "load panel" command now lets you have both a frame wait and a joystick button wait simultaneously, rather than only one or the other. So you could make a panel display for five seconds, but also have it that the player can interrupt that wait at any time by pressing fire or space.

* "Respawn" and "Reset" recycle types removed. In their place are three checkboxes that can be combined as you wish to create more flexibility than was possible before.

1. Recycle after destroy - will trigger a recycle any time an actor is manually destroyed
2. Recycle to original position - will recycle to the actor's spawning location as opposed to the place where it is right now.
3. OnSpawn after recycle - will trigger the OnSpawn event when a recycled actor is brought back to life.

* All four controllers (max two on Mega Drive) can be used to control the menu options, so long as the appropriate control mode is set.

* Wait command can both wait for the player to press fire or for the timer to expire, instead of one or the other.

[Aladin]

Port of Kenseiden by Master Linkuei for Megadrive under Scorpion Engine.

Video megadrive WIP 1 (23/09/2023)
[ Show youtube player ]

Video megadrive WIP 2 (21/10/2023)
[ Show youtube player ]

Source:
https://twitter.com/masterlinkueibr
https://www.youtube.com/@LinkueiBR
https://www.mobygames.com/game/13748/kenseiden/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenseiden

[earok]

Kenseiden is looking very promising. I may ask Master Linkeui at some stage if I can take on responsibility for an Amiga port.

---

Latest experimental:

* In addition to waiting for the player to press fire, "Say" command can now be made to wait a number of seconds before progressing. May be useful for cutscenes etc.

* New Amiga option - "ignore index 0 on tiles" on map tab. Use this when you want to make absolutely sure a solid pixel on a map will never use index 0 (this is to make sure that the auto lookup doesn't confuse a dark area of the map for a transparent area). Based on bug report by @DanteMendes

[earok]

Checked in the last major update to 2023.4. I'll be doing only bug fixes and minor changes until public release.

Byte Arrays are supported finally. There's a whole bunch of notes here:

* The memory of the virtual machine is still capped at ~2kb, you should be able to use maybe 1500 bytes for arrays at most. I may look at being able to increase this in future (or simply make it so arrays are outside of the regular virtual machine reserved memory)
* Can set array values with myarray[index] in the variable field of set, or get values with myarray[index] in any expression.
* Indexes are currently only supported with simple expressions with a single variable or constant - myarray[index] and myarray[5] will work, myarray[5+index] will not
* Only byte sized arrays are currently supported, word sized arrays will be added in future.

In addition to all of that, strings and bytearrays are identical "under the hood", so you could theoretically use this function to do any kind of string manipulation you want by directly reading and writing the ASCII codes for each index of the string. Though this is not really tested.

[earok]

Latest experimental fixes:

- Stability bug for Mega Drive (crashes after many, many level loads) reported by Master Linkeui
- Palette oddities for Mega Drive reported by Master Linkeui
- Kickstart 1.3 crash on Amiga reported by Zooperdan

[earok]

Latest experimental is an attempt to quash bugs and crashes that happen when there's actors or melee attacks on the edge of the map.

It should be fairly solid now, but there is one quirk to this - even when when solid sides are turned off, an actor cannot move more than 16 pixels off the edge of the screen (rather than infinitely into space as it currently can). Making it completely safe to move infinitely off the map would add performance overhead for the vast majority of situations where actors remain the map's boundaries.

I may look at making that 16 pixel padding bigger, or adding some way where a developer can define that padding for themselves. But for now, it should be more stable with actors moving and punching around the edges of the map.

[earok]

Further experimental check in - fixes issues with the previous checkin, also allows the amount of "padding" (the empty space around the level) to be set on a per-level basis. So you can allow actors to move further off from the actual level if that is needed (this replaces the "solid wall" tickboxes. Levels always have a solid wall surrounding them now, but you can add as much padding as you need between the level and that solid wall)

[earok]

Latest experimental:


- One semi-major new feature. There's an "on type" event on panels in the talkpad section. Essentially it's an event that triggers whenever a letter is 'typed' on screen - the obvious use for such a feature is to add a "typing sound" to the talkpad, but you could maybe exploit that for novel purposes such as animated avatars talking, playing different sounds for different characters, and so on. Dialogue demo has an example on this.

- Minor bug fixes for displaying projectile position in actor editor.

- Untested, but bug reported by UltraNarwhal where 'Onspawn after Recycle' breaking OnTimer should be fixed.

- First 32X game example - Gothicvania can now be compiled in Sega 32X mode. Whether it runs on a real 32X, I'm not totally sure yet, I may need to get someone to test.

[earok]

Latest experimentals:

* Fix for stability bug that could cause screech sounds on level startup.
* Fix for event tag - event tags can now be straight numbers.
* Various attempts to optimise and improve performance.
* Fixes for various mathematics bugs
* Tight memory limitations on Mega Drive mean that the maximum size of a level is 128x128 tiles (wider maps are fine if they're less tall, and taller maps are possible if they're less wide). The calculations weren't counting the solid wall around the map, nor the padding, so it was possible to create maps too big to fit in memory. Now it'll throw an error instead of compiling.

In future, this will be improved with the ultimate goal of being able to support "Sonic" sized levels. But for now, this is the restriction as it is.
* The limit of 32 events has been removed, though there's still a hard limit on 32 events that have the 'once only' flag ticked. This has not been thoroughly tested.
* Also not well tested, but bug where a platform block would be treated as a solid block if it had a collision event attached has been fixed.

[earok]

Two fixes into experimental:
- Bug reported by Master Linkeui where we could get crashes between levels
- Bug reported by MsMalik681 where platform blocks wouldn't be solid if they have a player collision event attached to them

[earok]

Posted a release candidate for 2023.4. I've been a bit slack with posting updates here so there's a fair bit here:

* Fix for bug where delete key would sometimes trigger the advanced condition editor to open
* Fix for bug where retro animator animations wouldn't correctly flip the melee hit box
* Fix with panel palettes on Mega Drive
* Change to logic for the "replace tile properties" checkbox on blocks. Essentially it should be a bit smarter with choosing when to replace the solid property of a tile when a block is added, changed or removed.
* Fix for bug where dividing by an actor var wouldn't work
* Fix for bug where setting certain actor variables (in particular, actor_x_lower) wouldn't work
* Added variable for showing or hiding talkpad (still need to trigger the regenerate screen codeblock for this to work).
* Loading a level will close any open talkpads.
* Quick fix for issue where unloading a level could have a delay if the level unload was simultaneous with a yield on level operation
* Added batch files for running and updating experimental to latest version (assuming git is installed and the experimental build was cloned from git rather than downloaded as a zip)
* Some tidy ups for codeblock json files
* Attempt to resolve music crashing issues on Mega Drive
* Fix for bug relating to spawning player actors that have animations with event triggers
* Fix where platform block with player collisions would not be solid
* Resolution for some stability issues, particularly with switching between levels