Scorpion Engine

[earok]

@Lemming880 could I get a copy of your latest code? I'll see if I can work out why it's working so strangely with cpu_accelerate

@ultranarwhal Great!

@mixel let me think about it. It could be pretty hard to do in a way that's efficient.

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Check in to experimental:

* DoubleSmooth takes into account animated tiles
* Animated blocks maintain a consistent speed in both 50hz and 25hz mode (regardless whether DoubleSmooth is used or not)

Between those two, the DoubleSmooth feature *should* be complete, unless I've missed something.

There is one other change that could be breaking - I worked out a way to optimise actors that only have one animation (eg most bullets). However there may be some edge cases I haven't thought of where the optimisation could break things. In any case, if there's any new animation glitches, please let me know.

[acidbottle]

Have been trying out the parallax features and finally getting the hang of it, was late to that particular party!

Quick(ish) question to, as ever .. am using an actor that spawns above the player and hovers over him for a short time. I used cpu_pursuit_direct which almost works, but the actor will dart from side to side when character is idle. Worse still, despite using collision boxes, offsetting the actor x and y co-ords and all that jazz, when going up and over slopes it hovers below head hight!

Only way around this would be complete player and actor combo, though would need to create many player variants and animations for this!

Am wondering if it would be possible to create an actor movement type that stays in a specified (offset) spot near the player. The same effect is used in loads of shoot-em-ups like 1942's tiny side fighters, as an example.

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

Only way around this would be complete player and actor combo, though would need to create many player variants and animations for this!

Am wondering if it would be possible to create an actor movement type that stays in a specified (offset) spot near the player. The same effect is used in loads of shoot-em-ups like 1942's tiny side fighters, as an example.

Confused by what offsetting you're already doing but if it's not this, maybe it'll work. Actor (no movement type) Timer expire code - set x to player / set y to player y - [value wanted].

[acidbottle]

Thanks Ultranarwhal

I had been using the on expire timer for simply ending the powerup, therefore never figured to set actor x and y there, doh! Had tried similar code in a loop (with actor set to no move) so began to wonder if that was correct. Anyway, it works now with expire timer, really appreciate that.

For my "offset" I had simply moved the x and y co ordinates of the actor in the animation frames and tried a collision box for the cpu_pursuit_direct actor to bounce around, useless hacks basically haha!

[earok]

Minor check in to experimental - fix for bug Lemming880 reported where CPU_Accelerate would not accelerate correctly when overlapping solid blocks.

It's a little hard to explain what the bug was and hopefully it shouldn't break anything else - but please let me know if "none" collision type doesn't work the way you expected any more.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

There is one other change that could be breaking - I worked out a way to optimise actors that only have one animation (eg most bullets). However there may be some edge cases I haven't thought of where the optimisation could break things. In any case, if there's any new animation glitches, please let me know.

It might be a glitch.. Or not, but my charge animations in wizonk, that are single frames at each charge level. I tried giving them a Delay of 0 and the charge animation stayed running until the wizard is hit or interrupted in some way. That might be entirely expected behaviour, not sure.

[earok]

That's pretty much by design - using a delay of 0 will set a frame to more or less run forever. There's a fair bit of overhead when a frame progresses (such as checking to see if it needs to run a codeblock, if it needs to loop etc) so by setting 0, you'll get the best performance possible on entities that simply have a single frame, like bullets.

If you want the shortest possible frame, 1 *should* run for exactly 1 frame.

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Daily check in to experimental. Fairly minor today, I might be busy for a little while:

- Fixed a bug reported by NEESO in that, for some reason, the left/right/up/down settings on camera box disappeared.
- Set 25HZ and Set 50HZ are now codeblock options under Display (no longer need to set Frame_Wait)
- Set Platform Snap (which is to say, the amount that your character "sticks" to vertically moving platforms to prevent both fall through and the character being bounced at the top of the arch) is a codeblock option under Level.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

- Set Platform Snap (which is to say, the amount that your character "sticks" to vertically moving platforms to prevent both fall through and the character being bounced at the top of the arch) is a codeblock option under Level.

Great additions.

Another thing that might be a "me" bug.. But I don't think so this time.. I set Platform Snap(to 8) in Wizonk for my falling platforms and it works great for players 2-4 but not for player 1..

[ Show youtube player ]

Player 1 is the Purple wizard here, he falls straight through the platforms while the other 3 players work correctly. I can't see any difference beween the actors.

Another bug: I can no longer duck on ramps in CMO.. I jiggle downwards a pixel when i hold down.

Edit: Oh, and feature request! Can I have a setting on full screen panels that allows all 4 players to control the options, somehow? It’s odd only having p1 being able to do it in a multiplayer game (not exactly a critical feature though haha)

[gimbal]

Nice idea by the way, like a 2D Fall Guys I guess

[acidbottle]

Now, its either a bug has developed or a fix has turned into bug for my project!

Everything was fine until up to the 02/09/21 (which says build 2021.6.0).

My actor has my jump (up) animations on the down left and down right move animations. So basically when I jump the landing anim is also the jump. When I am not jumping neither anim is activated, so moving the stick down left or right while running does nothing.

As of the latest build, I think also the one previous, when I move down left or right whilst running the jump anim "slides" my player across the map. If I take out the jump anim from down left or right, it uses the idle anim when falling from a jump, the idle anim also slides across the map instead!

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

As of the latest build, I think also the one previous, when I move down left or right whilst running the jump anim "slides" my player across the map. If I take out the jump anim from down left or right, it uses the idle anim when falling from a jump, the idle anim also slides across the map instead!

I get the same behaviour.. holding downleft or downright on ramps slides me along in my jumping frames. Sometimes I can fall through the ramp too when there's a change in incline if i hold Downleft/right on a ramp.

Ed: one other thing I’ve just noticed. I used to be able to override a tile’s properties by sticking a (transparent) block overlapping it.. eg, there’s a “platform” tile but it want this one instance of it to be solid, so I put an invisible solid block on top of it. That no longer works? It goes off the tile properties instead. The solid tile out on its own works, just when it’s on another solid/platform tile it seems to get ignored?

[earok]

Checked in a fix for moving platforms on experimental when more than one player active. It's not well tested but it seems to work on the Wizonk collapsing tiles. I'll take a look at other issues in another few days.

@Mixel it may not be possible to fix the platform with overriding with blocks, now that both the platform flag and solid flag are taken into account by collision detection. There's only four combinations which are:

Neither: No collisions
Solid only: Don't pass through any circumstances
Platform only: Pass through every direction except down, except when holding down
Platform+solid: Pass through every direction except down

So if Platform is set, it'll always mean that a block can be passed through on any direction except down.

[Mixel]

Ah, Thanks for that explanation, I hadn't realised it was adding to flags from both, I thought it was supposed to be overwriting the tile ones with the block ones. That's no problem at all I just need to be go through my levels correcting the places i used it.. (there aren't many of them)

And Thanks for that platform fix, wizonk's working great now.

[earok]

No worries! Glad to hear Wizonk's working better.

Daily experimental update:

I downloaded the Wonderboy source code again and found the issue was specifically when holding down while standing on a slope as opposed to a platform. So I reworked some things and made a change that is -hopefully- useful but may break some codeblocks.

Basically, before IsOnPlatform was just true and false. Now there's three states:

False (0) = Not on any platform
True (-1) = Standing on a platform or solid block that is NOT a slope
1 = Standing on a slope specifically

It might be useful to know for code reasons if you're standing on a slope as opposed to a platform, maybe for sonic like games?

If you just need to check if they're standing on solid ground and don't care if it's a slope or not, just make sure your condition is "not zero"


Mixel, please do let me know if this has fixed the CMOHX issues too

[acidbottle]

Awesome earok, thanks for sorting that

Tested wonderboy on the latest build, fingers crossed, all working great here again. Just hope noone else experiences issues.

I checked slopes on all my platform blocks, even when not sloped, was no real need to I guess. However, there are a few slopes in game so had to be used!

Incidentally, if you have ever watched or played wonderboy in the arcade, the screen scrolls different to camera follow. It pushes the screen instead of 2 axis scroll, is this possible in the future of scorpion?

[earok]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

Awesome earok, thanks for sorting that

Tested wonderboy on the latest build, fingers crossed, all working great here again. Just hope noone else experiences issues.

I checked slopes on all my platform blocks, even when not sloped, was no real need to I guess. However, there are a few slopes in game so had to be used!

Incidentally, if you have ever watched or played wonderboy in the arcade, the screen scrolls different to camera follow. It pushes the screen instead of 2 axis scroll, is this possible in the future of scorpion?

Ah, I did notice that - for performance reasons, it could be beneficial to use solid blocks rather than slopes for flat ground. Having said that, it can glitch a little bit at the edge between solid blocks and slopes, so if you have slopes at all it might be best to use slopes for everything, or at least every block that connects to a slope.


Not totally 100% sure what you mean by the camera push - you can currently change how the camera follows (eg with the Monkey Lad demo, it only scrolls downwards and then only scrolls rightwards in the sea, and on the next level it only scrolls rightwards). If you want Wonderboy to not be in the dead center and have an area he can walk around without causing a scroll, the camera box function will help with that. Otherwise you could script exactly how you want the camera to work in a custom codeblocks function that runs on timer expired.

[Mixel]

You fixed everything to do with platforms for CMO now. TY!

I do have a weird issue in CMO which I'm trying to unravel, It seems to be new behaviour. You don't seem to be able to do camera movements etc while faded out anymore.

When I die, the game freezes up completely. I've had that before when I've created some sort of infinite loop by mistake, but dying worked recently and doesn't now.. I found another place in the game where the codeblocks control the camera while the screen is faded black and the same thing happens (in the sewer boss level after the "throwing the box down the pipe" cutscene.)

Attachment 73253

In both cases if I enable these Fade out/Fade ins then the game Fades out, then fades in (in the original, non camera-moved position), then freezes the game up entirely. Hopefully useful info. - (with the fades disabled it does work, but you can see the stuff that's supposed to be behind the curtain.)

edit: Oh! It also happens at the bottom of the intro sequence scroller when it's supposed to start back at the top again.

[acidbottle]

No worries on the slope issues, anything to get some performance gains is great news!

As for the screen push effect, it is difficult (for me anyway ha!) to describe but totally get that this can be achieved, perhaps, via codeblocks. On reflection it may break some other routines that rely on specific code, such as moving skateboard scroll, therefore will experiment another time. Awesome what can be achieved with this engine though, never ceases to amaze me actually!

[Z-TEAM]

Hello to all,
I'm doing some tests on the engine and I find the loading time between 2 maps a bit long (15s in real Amiga 600 to unload the current level and load next level). Does the loading time of the map depend on the number of tiles or other parameters like sprites,block,etc.. ?
I really like the spirit of the Scorpion Engine Tool and its integration with tiled

[Lemming880]

Does anyone else experience weird bugs after copy pasting stuff between levels in Tiled? I had copied a part of a map to another map and suddenly levers and hatches spawned at places they shouldn't. So I went back a backup. Some time later I tried copying a boss arena to another map and this time the levers kept working but it seems it caused that triggers respond slower. So often a lever isn't activated when you walk over it. Or teleporting has a delay. I also switched two levels. So I renamed level 2 to level 3 and vise versa. And of course I've changed all codeblocks that involve anything with "level=x". But now none of the events work anymore in both level 2 and 3. So my note to self is to not copy paste things between levels but I'm wondering if anyone else has this problem and possibly has a solution.