Scorpion Engine

[earok]

Hey Bubba N Stix, that's looking really cool.

You're right about the non-repeating pattern, Core seem to have come up with a way of using a single sprite to create a parallax across the whole screen. I might need to investigate their technique to see if I can copy it.

[Bubba'n'Stix 2]

I think that they had to sacrifice all other parallax lines to be able to make one that is screen wide.
I suppose they sort of rounded them all up on just one horizontal line.

Level 01 and 04 are also interesting examples of the trick.


I always wondered why they hadn't used more colors in the background but they probably didn't have a choice, that which sucks because one screen wide three colors parallax would have been awesome, even if limited in height.


I'd be very interested in knowing how they did that because it opens up a few possibilities.
And it's also very interesting.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by earok

Hey Bubba N Stix, that's looking really cool.

You're right about the non-repeating pattern, Core seem to have come up with a way of using a single sprite to create a parallax across the whole screen. I might need to investigate their technique to see if I can copy it.

My guess is that they write to the sprite with the copper. It doesn't use the sprite DMA but limits the parallax layer to one bitplane because that's all the time left between the horizontal sprite mux moving the sprite right every 16 pixels. It also might not have time if a 5th bitplane is active on the display DMA.

[Bubba'n'Stix 2]

New thing made with the Scorpion Engine.
I wanted to try:


- The copper
- Half-Bright Mode
- Projectiles


While remaining on A500 config, even though if I do something serious at some point, I'll probably take the ease of AGA


[ Show youtube player ]

[Bubba'n'Stix 2]

I'm stuck here.

I'd like to have the enemy be "pushed back" when "shot" then "stop moving"
"play death animation" and then get "destroyed actor."

And here's what I get

[ Show youtube player ]

My code is:
Destroy projectile
Push actor by 5x total pixels over 2 frames (prevent normal movement)
Set direction for actor to stop_moving
If actor _var1== 1 then...
Play A_death_g on actor from frame 0
Yield for 70 frames (1,4 frames) (interrupt level on Timer) then continue
End continue
Destroy actor

The enemies pattern of movement is CPU simple movement. I've tried another with similar results.
I've tried to put destroy actor at several places and never managed to get the death animation then the actor destroyed.
I've ticked and unticked (reset animation/movement) in the destroy box.
I've managed to destroy the enemies but without the death animation, they would just pop off. But as soon as I use the animation, they respawn.

If anybody has a clue, it'd be very welcome.

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by Bubba'n'Stix 2

My code is:
Destroy projectile
Push actor by 5x total pixels over 2 frames (prevent normal movement)
Set direction for actor to stop_moving
If actor _var1== 1 then...
Play A_death_g on actor from frame 0
Yield for 70 frames (1,4 frames) (interrupt level on Timer) then continue
End continue
Destroy actor

Try
Destroy projectile
Push actor by 5 x total pixels over 2 frames (prevent normal movement)
Set direction for actor to stop_moving
If actor _var1== 1 then...
Play A_death_g on actor from frame 0
End

Rather than having a yield while playing death anim and destroying, use a destroy actor event in the death anim on finish.

Also your pushing code currently only works from the left side, it'll pull enemy from right. You could put in your projectile on Timer code for it to set projectile_var1 to its current speed every 10 frames.

Then the code would be (if it moves too much you can divide speed with projectile_var1 / )

Push actor by projectile_var1 pixels over 2 frames (prevent normal movement)
Destroy projectile
Set direction for actor to stop_moving
If actor _var1== 1 then...
Play A_death_g on actor from frame 0
End

[Bubba'n'Stix 2]

"Rather than having a yield while playing death anim and destroying, use a destroy actor event in the death anim on finish."
Ho my god ! I could cry ! My main character can now kill his enemies ! Finally.

"Set direction for actor to stop moving" still didn't work but I put "prevent movement" in the death animation and it worked.
My Robot can now shoot the green slugs.

Thank you !!!

[Bubba'n'Stix 2]

I didn't understand this:
"Also your pushing code currently only works from the left side, it'll pull enemy from right. You could put in your projectile on Timer code for it to set projectile_var1 to its current speed every 10 frames."

I haven't gotten into adapting the enemies to left and right attacks.
But your directions improved a lot of things already:
[ Show youtube player ]


Sadly, I'm using too much ram for the A500 1mo now.
I think the two wav sounds use a lot.

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by Bubba'n'Stix 2

Sadly, I'm using too much ram for the A500 1mo now.
I think the two wav sounds use a lot.

For wav sounds I convert them in Audacity by Truncating Silence and resampling them to 11025hz, reduced a 160kb wav to 3kb.

[Bubba'n'Stix 2]

Ok, thank you.
I had trimmed the silence in another program but downgrading the quality to 11khz allowed the game to work again on A500 1mo config.

[earok]

The latest experimental update is *hopefully* stable, I've ran through and tested all of the sample and full games and it all seems to be OK.

Notable changes to experimental over the last month:
- Support for NeoGeo CD music
- Tonnes of bug fixes
- Rewrote CPU Patrol code more or less from scratch to handle junctions more intelligently
- "Camera follow" command which can be used to easily transfer what the camera is following from the player to another player or actor
- CPU Ghost actor type (very light weight compared to other kinds of actors but cannot collide with walls)
- Largely rewrote slope code so that it's a lot more flexible, it's no longer "slices" of pixels but every single pixel in a slope block can be set to solid or not solid.
- RetroAnimator (the tool used to make animations for Metro Siege which is also Scorpion compatible now) is now included with Scorpion itself.
- New "attacker" property makes it much easier to add attacking behaviours to enemies
- Ability to prevent spawning of a new actor if there's already too many actors of that type

[acidbottle]

Cool as earok

That's quite a lot of stuff you have packed into the engine over the past month or 2. I must have missed the new actor type as well, as using it has now fixed a small bug I had, awesome!

[earok]

Cheers Acidbottle

Finally soft launched 2024.1 to stable, please let me know if there are any issues and I'll try to patch and fix ASAP.

https://github.com/earok/scorpion-editor-demos

BETA support for the NeoGeo, including the NeoGeo CD.
ALPHA support for the Sega Pico educational console.
New support for Melee "hurt boxes", allowing fine grained control of where an animation is vulnerable to enemy Melee attack.
New "Attacker" class makes it easier to make enemies attack on a repeated cycle.
"Camera Box" map events can be used to easily set the bounds of a camera in an area of a level.
Significantly reworked collision detection to be both smoother and a lot more accurate.
New "Pattern" movement type that allow drawing of smoothly curved patterns.
Bug fixes, minor features and performance enhancements across the board.

Scorpion Engine also now bundles RetroAnimator, an animation tool capable of making smooth and complex animations out of discrete image parts. RetroAnimator has been used for non-Scorpion titles like Metro Siege, and is now available for you to use.

[Cris1997XX]

Woah! I can't believe you're adding support for all those machines, I'm honestly impressed. It would be amazing to make games for the X68000, since it's also a 68000 computer and everything

[earok]

Thanks Cris1997XX

The X68000 would be great, but I'm not sure there's much demand for it given that it's a Japan exclusive machine. In a year or two, Atari Jaguar will probably be the last native 68K platform supported in Scorpion.

[earok]

I'm going to try and do weekly little updates here of what's happening on the experimental build.

Over the past week I've been focusing on improving usability and reducing Scorpion's reliance on first and third party Blitz libraries. The ultimate purpose of the later is gradually working towards being able to complete the long overdue Amiga "trackdisk" version of Scorpion, which would allow Scorpion to run directly from floppy disks without an operating system hovering in the background, saving a lot of precious memory.

A few things of note:
- New "Autoflip" checkbox on the Set Animation command will automatically select the left or right variant of an animation depending on which way the player is facing.
- New "Separate" command which will gracefully separate out two colliding actors from each other, pushing them away in opposite directions on the X axis.
- CPU Parallax Lock type no longer needs to have VAR3 set in order to gracefully wrap around the screen, this is calculated automatically.
- Actor tab features a drop down list for selecting whether the actor is on the background, midground or foreground by default.
- ANIM5 support is temporarily removed. Longer term, I intend to replace ANIM5 support completely with a kind of streaming FMV system like was featured in the ports of TimeGal and Road Avenger to Amiga, but in the short term I can reimplement ANIM5 through an external executable if this is needed for a user project.

One other thing I wanted to mention: The very first full length Scorpion game for Mega Drive is out now, and it's a fantastic playing and brilliant looking title. Fingers crossed, but I'm hoping to take care of an AGA conversion myself.

https://www.indieretronews.com/2024/...spiritual.html

This week I intend to keep continuing with usability improvements, as well as investigating issues with Scorpion's compatibility to the AT Games "Firecore" based Mega Drive consoles.

[Bubba'n'Stix 2]

Hello,
is there a difference between more recent builds and older ? I tried to use the 2024.1 to just take a look at the retro-animator thing but it takes ages to unzip and then there are errors etc...

I'm still using 2023.2 or something.
Thanks for your work.

And thank you for the constant updates. it's really agreable to see the engine evolve so quickly and imagine what can be done with it.