Scorpion Engine

[turrican3]

could scorpion make a 3d game ??

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by turrican3

could scorpion make a 3d game ??

Yay, finally a question I know the answer to!

.. Not in a real sense, no.

Well, I suppose there are certain situations where you could fake some sort of pseudo 3D. You could make something like Myst with pre-rendered scenery, etc..

I’m certain you could make an Eye Of The Beholder/Dungeon Master style dungeon crawler too but it would be a very fiddly thing to do.

[flibble42]

I did start on a dungeon thing in AMOS 30 years ago.


These are my test GFX.



You would use the map to create a top down view, and use these pieces (and many more) to create the 1st person view.

[flibble42]

@Earok


When setting a variable it bothers to tell us that it is 16bit, how come we can't display that 16bit number in a panel. (displaying it in binary would we cool )

I'm guessing that like most things you do there is a good reason.

Is it possible to access two maps at the sametime?

My reason, i realised that my car spawn system is not consistant, the fewer free lanes available the more random guesses it needs to make to find an open lane.

So, i figure precalculate the number sequence and store it in map data. I would rather not clutter my road map (it's not finished yet) with scratch data hence can i access two maps at the same time. I suspect technically yes but will probably have to load and unload maps, not going to help with smooth scrolling i'm sure.

Cheers

EDIT:

Having discovered that you can not use a variable to say which bit you want to set, i think i'm going to have to start from scratch and come up with another idea. Not going to have 15 else if statements for this.

EDIT EDIT:

When you next get chance to stream can you start by explaining the relationship between Animations, Actors and hit boxes in relation to sprite alignment.

For some reason on spawn i have a +8 pixels to make my sprites align to the 16x16 grid, but i don't know why. I'm wondering if i did something wrong with the setup.

[earok]

Apologies for the delays lately, been very busy and distracted. I'll put a feature freeze on 2021.6 so I can focus on getting bugs fixed for the next public release.

Slight aside - Scorpion for Mega Drive is officially in development, though it might take a very long time before it's usable as a viable export target. I've only just verified that I can use Blitz to program the Mega Drive, though I'm not the first person to have done this (Skidmarks on Mega Drive was coded in Blitz).



---

Flibbles suggestion for how to make a dungeon crawler in Scorpion is exactly how I would have approached it. I'm tempted to give it a go sometime.

---

@Flibble42

"When setting a variable it bothers to tell us that it is 16bit, how come we can't display that 16bit number in a panel"

To be clear, it's 16 bit signed, so the maximum possible value on a panel is 32767 (same as in codeblocks).

Not possible to have two maps in memory at the same time, though that might be a potential future feature (it'd solve an issue for games like Street Fighter 2 for example where you'd want to have two completely different sets of graphics in memory at the same time)

"Having discovered that you can not use a variable to say which bit you want to set,"

I don't understand why not, this should work fine.

MyResult = 1 << [MyBitVariable] | MyResult

"For some reason on spawn i have a +8 pixels to make my sprites align to the 16x16 grid"

If you're doing spawn from block, it *should* align with the tile the same way it would if you had it in the map. If you're spawning from another actor, then that doesn't take into account the "nudge" from the tile on the actor tab, so you'd need to do offsets manually to put it on the tile.

[flibble42]

@Earok


RE. Bitshift



Always possible i'm "doing it wrong".

Set used_numbers to 1<<random_number|used_numbers wont compile,

Set used_numbers to 1<<5|used_numbers will.

Am i supposed to be using something other than BASE/SET VARIABLE?


I can only display upto "9999" as digits on a panel.

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

Slight aside - Scorpion for Mega Drive is officially in development, though it might take a very long time before it's usable as a viable export target. I've only just verified that I can use Blitz to program the Mega Drive, though I'm not the first person to have done this (Skidmarks on Mega Drive was coded in Blitz).

Wooooohoooooooooo.

[merman]

Retro Gamer Issue 236 is in UK shops now, Street Fighter II on the cover.

My homebrew column includes a feature on Scorpion Engine for Amiga, including earok and mixel.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by merman

Retro Gamer Issue 236 is in UK shops now, Street Fighter II on the cover.

My homebrew column includes a feature on Scorpion Engine for Amiga, including earok and mixel.

Thanks so much for that, I loved the whole homebrew section!

[earok]

Thanks Merman! Do you have any recommendations for a website that I could order it here in NZ..?

---

Haven't been very productive with Scorpion this weekend (though I have been reasonably productive with Mega Drive stuff - a Scorpion prototype might be coming in months rather than years as I had originally expected) but I did fix one thing - Flibble42 was right about variables not working for bitshifts, that should now be fixed (on top of that, using variables allows you to shift more than 8 bits at a time).

@Flibble42 I had forgotten that the digits display was limited to 9999, I think the reason I did that was so that there was no confusion about having five digits but not being able to set them all the way up to 99999. But I haven't set my mind in stone about that, I could bump that limit to 32767.

[invent]

Exciting to have a project to work on in Scorpion, my last game (Mig n Ziggy) far too ambitious, whereas porting a C64 game "Killa Watt" is far more achievable.

[ Show youtube player ]

I'm sure I will be asking various experts to help fine tune it once I have the basics.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by invent

Exciting to have a project to work on in Scorpion, my last game (Mig n Ziggy) far too ambitious, whereas porting a C64 game "Killa Watt" is far more achievable.

[ Show youtube player ]

Wow, I remember playing that game for a whole afternoon at a friend's place and when I wanted to know the name the next time I visited he had used that disk for... backup purposes Looking forward to play this

[merman]

Originally Posted by earok

Thanks Merman! Do you have any recommendations for a website that I could order it here in NZ..?

.

Thanks Mixel.

Earok, official orders through here:

https://www.magazinesdirect.com/az-s...le-issue.thtml

[flibble42]

@Earok @Mixel

Congrats on your article.


@Earok

Looking forward to the Megadrive version of Scorpion, should be interesting to see what performance and capability differences arise.

Also thanks for the bitshift fix, i checked and it does indeed compile now, i'll test it more fully soon.

Panel wise "I" would increase the value to 32767 (even 65535 if we could turn off the signed bit), i think most people using Scorpion understand whats going on. You could even add a couple of custom 32bit registers, maybe thats pushing it to far.


Bob

[Mixel]

I'm still having serious flickery weirdness around the framebuffer seams in the latest update.. It's maybe not as bad as it was at it's worst, but it's still quite difficult to take screenshots of some levels..

Here's codeblock Start_Mansion


extra flashing glitch actors, various things getting rendered at the left side of the screen instead of where they're supposed to be.

[flibble42]

@Mixel

Just the man i wanted to see

Sorry for butchering your GFX i tried my best. This is a response to the gut feeling i got watching you set-up your shops using panels.

Mixel-MelodyShopTest.rar

Do pay attention though, i tried to add a bit of life. I hope this system could replace your panel system, or something you could use in the future.

Bob

[earok]

Latest experimental update:

* Fixed more of the graphical glitches on the copper split wraparound reported by Flibble42 and Mixel
* Fixed issue reported by NEESO in that actors at the top left of the level would be spawned even if the player was on the opposite side of the map

[flibble42]

@Earok

Here is a weird one, you have already done the coding for this i would imagine. How about rendering a panel element to an anim? You could then blit this onto the screen, scores, counters etc, all work you have already done just put it in an Anim.

Just another thought

Bob

[Flimbo]

Originally Posted by merman

Retro Gamer Issue 236 is in UK shops now, Street Fighter II on the cover.

My homebrew column includes a feature on Scorpion Engine for Amiga, including earok and mixel.

Just received my copy. Looking forward to reading this.

[flibble42]

@Earok


I just bumped into a little issue, i imported 114 frames of animation and need to alter the delay of each individually, i think you can see the issue. Maybe a select all option.


Bob