Scorpion Engine

[earok]

Originally Posted by Lineof7s

As a long-time (PC) Blitz fan, I'm dying to know which Blitz you're using. Blitzmax? Or when you say "Blitz Basic" do you actually mean the original 2D PC version by that name? That would be (even more) impressive.

Amiga Blitz Basic 2

I've used Blitz 3D, Blitz Max and Monkey in the past. The Kiwi's Tale (another Amiga game that shares some source code with Scorpion) started life as a Blitz Max game for PC and Mac, before becoming a Monkey game for Web, and finally being back ported to original Blitz for Amiga.

Edit:

http://earok.net/game

Everything here listed under Browser was a Monkey game, and everything under PC was either a Blitz 3D, Monkey or Blitz Max effort. Admittedly they're all a bit amateurish, I can't produce anything polished without Tsak giving me a hand

[Lineof7s]

I stand corrected (and humbled).

Still, I must have got the wrong end of the pineapple from something I read recently, so now my quest in life is to find what that was and beat myself up over it.

[edit] No idea. I must just have seen "Blitz" and got carried away with myself. Nothing to see here.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

Thanks for the donation! It's very much appreciated.

Earlier versions of Scorpion used a scripting language broadly based on Ink, the current version is more or less just a 'visual scripting' version of that. I switched to visual scripting both to make it easier for non-coders as well as to make it easier to trigger specific commands without needing to refer to documentation.

No problem re: the donation. Ahh! I'll have a little look at ink a little and experiment with the demo projects, it looks pretty intuitive so far.

Klik N Play (as well as it's successors) was definitely an inspiration for how some of Scorpion works, particularly in regards to events and configuration of game objects. It's a little ironic given the Klik N Play series was partly a creation of AMOS maker Francios Lionet, but Scorpion is a Blitz Basic engine.

That's great and should help me a bit.. I have so many old abandoned Amos projects too but hahaaa.. My brother was the programmer and I was the A/V guy and without him I was like.. Uuuh I made a thing move?

One of my friends actually made a commercial release with Power Game Factory (https://www.macgamestore.com/product/4023/Soulless/)

Ha! Small world! I know Cobrablade from the PGF forums! Soulless was great! I made Zombie Holiday (Prologue) which ended up bundled with the later PGF releases. Now I have to emulate an old Mac to run it at all. (and the editor!) .. Ah well hopefully Scorpion will have a longer life! Now off to do a lot more graphics.

[earok]

Ink's honestly pretty good for what it is. I've worked on a Unity visual novel that uses Ink as the underlying scripting engine. I've also experimented with twine but I find the flowchart gets too complicated way too quickly!

It is a small world :O Cobra and I still keep in touch every now and then. We worked together on Powerslam (which was a Mac port and reskin of Federation Wrestling for Windows).

[earok]

Feeling a bit lousy lately. Thought I might try doing a bit more on the port of Weiring's Dos Mario to try and cheer up a bit.



Edit: Done a bit more

[Mixel]

Looking incredible still.. I like the alt graphics you’ve shown on twitter too..

I was thinking about big games.. I’m guessing there’s no way to implement disk swapping? Idk how that’d work.. large games with a ton of assets will have to be hd install / cd32 only, I’m guessing?

[earok]

Cheers Mixel

I've added 'consider handling multiple floppy game' to the bug tracker list, though it may be some time before I get around to it.

[nikosidis]

I tried the game on my A1200/030. Nice GFX and runs very smooth. The handling is little strange at least when character jump. It is difficult to control but looks very promising

[earok]

Originally Posted by nikosidis

I tried the game on my A1200/030. Nice GFX and runs very smooth. The handling is little strange at least when character jump. It is difficult to control but looks very promising

Cheers!

Originally Posted by nikosidis

The handling is little strange at least when character jump.

Agreed, it's a little awkward. I'll need to implement some fixes before publishing the source code, art and such in the next Scorpion release.


(for anyone following this thread but might have missed the other one, I've completed and zoned an alpha version of "Amigo the Fox", which is intended to be a fairly comprehensive example of a game developed in the engine)

[nobody]

Can it do flick screen games? I mean for sure it can but is there an option for it?

[earok]

Originally Posted by nobody

Can it do flick screen games? I mean for sure it can but is there an option for it?

Absolutely.

For reference, this is what you'd need to do:
- Select your player object
- Under events, for "On Leave Screen Left" etc, choose the Flipscreen option (alternatively, choose FlipscreenSmooth for NES Zelda style smooth flipscreen)

[earok]

I ended up publishing the latest Scorpion update + complete Amigo the Fox project source a little early.

To get the Windows based editor for Scorpion up and running, download the "source code" zip from here. If there's any issues running the editor, please try the installer.

https://github.com/earok/scorpion-ed.../tag/v20.06.22



Other than Amigo the Fox, the update includes:

- Mid-air platformer control is drastically improved, though there's still some refinements to be done.
- Ability to set collision handling per direction. It's now possible to define that an enemy will bounce off walls but won't bounce when hitting the floor from height, for example.
- Ability to configure a platformer actor so it won't walk off it's platform (this is done from the 'collision down' parameter).
- Previously, a "player projectile" type couldn't collide with the player itself. This has been fixed, allowing for objects that collide with both the player and other objects.
- Removal of various unused parameters for simplicity.
Improved efficiency of animated tile system.
- AGA enhancement: Fades are super smooth 24 bit. On OCS machines, fades remain at 12 bit.
- AGA enhancement: Color palette is 24 bit. On OCS machines, palette remains at 12 bit.
- Map compilation has been made much more powerful. You can include any number of background and foreground layers and the compiler will merge them all down to a tight and efficient tileset, containing no visually redundant tiles.
- A1000 officially supported.
- ECS/AGA enhancement: Border blank. Border is always black, even when index 0 of palette isn't.
- Various improvements for Backbone importer.
- Default fonts are included with every new project (cheers to Koyot for this).
- Commercial derived sample games have been depreciated, and will be replaced and removed in future updates. They were never meant to be finished, they were simply meant to show that commercial quality, console like games are entirely possible in the engine. They'll be replaced with similar games featuring free assets.
- Various other minor tweaks to support 'Amigo the Fox' and future Scorpion games.
- Interim NTSC support. Games will work on NTSC, but there's still some issues to be solved so far as framerate adjustment goes.

[earok]

Unity port of the editor is coming along, might be another week or two before I release it. I'm still not 100% sure at this stage if a Mac version would be possible, but I guess we'll find out.

[Mixel]

Looking great!

Whether there’s a Mac editor or not.. (very neat if there is, and I’m definitely up for testing that if/when it happens)

Will it being made in Unity ultimately lead to being able to compile Mac and Windows games themselves as well as Amiga ones? I think I read that at one point but can’t remember where/when or if I imagined it. (Sorry if it’s earlier in the thread, lol)

As for music, you say it allows mods but with sfx on top, does it prioritise a particular channel so I know where to put my least important music track, or does it just shove it over any of them? (Again sorry if you already answered this! ??)

[earok]

It's possible that it would allow Mac and Windows versions of the games, at least in theory - in practice, bringing things like ANIM5 and ProTracker support to Unity might be a pain if someone hasn't come up with a solution for those already.

I'm also talking with someone about the possibility of a Javascript version of the engine.

I don't believe it prioritises any particular channel - from what I understand, the PHX tracker plays the sound on the channel that has the longest wait before a next sample plays. If your mod is three channels, it'll always play on the fourth. Otherwise, if it's a four channel mod, it'll do the best it can to squeeze the sample in without disrupting the music.

[earok]

I had bit of a rough time working on Scorpion this weekend. I had planned to put together a new sample game during a 48 hour game jam, and made a start of it, but.. ehh. Performance just wasn't acceptable - I wanted something that, performance wise was closer to Apidya than UN Squadron, and I wasn't going to be able to pull that off with the engine in it's current state.

I need to spend some time thinking and reworking the engine to iron out bottle necks - collision detection in particular is too slow.

I did make some progress on the engine though. I added a new movement type for "sine wave" type enemy patterns, as well as (finally) implemented some hardware sprite support. It's possible to tag BOB animations as being "auto sprite", which means that it'll use sprite channels if available but fall back to BOBs if not.

[DeaTure]

Hi Earok,

Is it possible to set the tilesize to 8x8?

[earok]

I haven't really got any plans for 8x8 tiles right now, the main problem is 8 pixels wide isn't good for using the Blitter.


Other news - I've been sick lately but I'm still making progress with the Unity version of the Editor. Also found some nice alternative Alex Kidd graphics that I'll reskin the sample game with.

[UltraNarwhal]

Query on how actors are handled when not on screen.

I've been testing speed on stock Amiga 500 setting and can handle about 4 actors before slowdown. Do actors when they're a certain distance from player revert to being a block? If it's distance rather than is off screen, is there a way I can adjust distance values?

Thanks

[earok]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

Query on how actors are handled when not on screen.

I've been testing speed on stock Amiga 500 setting and can handle about 4 actors before slowdown. Do actors when they're a certain distance from player revert to being a block? If it's distance rather than is off screen, is there a way I can adjust distance values?

Thanks

Performance is something I'm working on, the big bottleneck with actors is that all movement types are axis-aligned-bounding-box which is probably overkill for the vast majority of NPCs, so I'll simplify collisions and make AABB an option for anything that needs super precise collision detection. A future release will also have the option to render certain actors as sprites which will save a bit of time blitting.

At the moment, it essentially uses a timer. Something like, if an actor can't be rendered for three seconds or more because it's off screen, revert it to a block (but give it a little bit of time so it could walk back on screen if it's only a tiny bit off). I may need to think about how to give more control over that function.