Scorpion Engine

[acidbottle]

Not going to pretend I understand the real technical issues with dual playfield, though was aware of the colour reductions.

Can understand the technical difficulty of implementing this feature though so no worries.

[earok]

Latest experimental is up, quite a few changes, many of them relating to issues reported by Bit Beam Cannon. Unfortunately with this build, the settings for Color Depth, Add21K and Output Speed may need to be manually reset to what they were before.

* New "CDTV" and "CD32" output targets. Neither of these actually feature any specific features for those systems, yet, but they're placeholders for when they do (at the very least, CD32 will receive music and NVRAM save support eventually).

* Maps are automatically repaired so that, if they're moved to a different folder, the actor.tsx and block.tsx links point to the correct files.

* Color Depth, Add21K and Output Speed can be set different for each target (eg, you probably don't want Add21K ticked on the AGA target, but you can if you really want).

Note that Output Speed is set per platform, but Logic Speed is not. Logic Speed should be the same on every platform, but you may decide the actual smoothness (Output Speed) should be higher on AGA for example.

* The default recycle mode for camera_locked and parallax_locked is "never". This is because those actors, since they're part of the screen or scenery, presumably should never be made inactive if they go out of view.

[Lemming880]

I have a question about music mods. When changing music the game freezes for a second. Is it possible to load two songs in the memory in a level so the change is instant? Or maybe another way?

I had my game running on A500 HDD again but since a recent Scorpion version it crashes to WB again whining about that 0.gfx file.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Lemming880

I have a question about music mods. When changing music the game freezes for a second. Is it possible to load two songs in the memory in a level so the change is instant? Or maybe another way?

I had my game running on A500 HDD again but since a recent Scorpion version it crashes to WB again whining about that 0.gfx file.

You can have all songs in a single mod and then change the pattern pointer, is been done but since am not using scorpion engine yet don't know the procedure - of course then the sample bank need to be the same for all songs

[saimon69]

In example Neeso used the same method for Jackal soundtrack

[Lemming880]

Interesting to know. I have songs with different samples so it's not going work then. I guess you could merge sample banks but I was hoping for a simpler solution.

[earok]

Had a nasty HDD crash recently so this is a bit late!

Latest experimental check in:

* Up-to-date licence keys are finally on Patreon

* Most project settings can be set per platform (including emulation settings, aga sprite settings, buffer size, memory allocation etc), to make it easier to do things like (for example) have a wider display area on AGA Amigas. Unfortunately this also means these settings will be set back to the default - might be worth taking a screenshot of the project tab before upgrading.

Fixes for issues reported by Bit Beam Cannon

* Sprites disappear during dialogue

* "Rotation Speed" works better on the CPU Parallax Lock type when performance scaling.

* Slight reworking of OnTimer expire time. "0" means every single frame ignoring performance scaling, "1" means every frame but with performance scaling (eg, if you scale up from 25hz to 50hz, 1 frame becomes 2 frames).


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@Lemming at some stage I plan to be able to cache most kinds of assets (eg, being able to cache music in slowram and restore to chipram when needed).

[Lemming880]

Originally Posted by earok

at some stage I plan to be able to cache most kinds of assets (eg, being able to cache music in slowram and restore to chipram when needed).

Great just what I need.

[earok]

Did a quick check in to experimental to resolve the issues reported by BitBeamCannon and DomKid That the display width and sprite width settings weren't being saved

[earok]

Latest experimental check in is a demo only - I've updated the GothicVania demo to also support WASD+Space controls as a demo of how keyboard support can be implemented*. This is fully functional including jump drop-off and attack.

*This isn't 100% perfect because keyboard handling isn't 100% perfect in Scorpion yet, if there are multiple key presses or releases within 1/50th of a second, one will overwrite the other. This is because it currently only checks for a keypress on a frame rather than using an interrupt handler.

@Lemming880 I hope that is useful

[Cobe]

Originally Posted by earok

* New "CDTV" and "CD32" output targets. Neither of these actually feature any specific features for those systems, yet, but they're placeholders for when they do (at the very least, CD32 will receive music and NVRAM save support eventually).

You can skip adding music just for cd32 and add the music for cdtv. That automatically plays on cd32 too cause it has backward support in rom for cdtv. Just engage cdtv.device for playing cdda. Example is on one of the Bums... I dont remember on which one... or I could dig out some of my source codes where I copy/pasted that example...

[earok]

Ahh, that's interesting @cobe thanks for that! It would be cool to not have to separately implement CD audio for CDTV and CD32. I'll keep it in mind

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[ Show youtube player ]

New experimental build brings a fairly substantial new feature - integration with Tiled's "template" system for exact X/Y positioning of actors, as well as some cool possibilities for overriding actor variables, events and controllers.

Since it is reasonably complex, I've done a video explaining the ins-and-outs of it.

[acidbottle]

Wow! Great new feature earok, that is another game changer indeed and nice video telling us how it all works. Will test this out later and if relatively bug free, will have a bit of map editing to get on with!

[acidbottle]

Okay well went and tested this, works really nice, for the most part

Is it still possible, however, to have the object's on spawn and on expired timer active? The on collide with player works great. As an experiment I added a custom property, but it removed it after compile.

[earok]

Did a check in that should fix some bugs with template system (also there was a minor bug with speed scaling). @AcidBottle are you still having issues with OnSpawn and OnTimerExpired?

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Did a little more work on my own personal Scorpion project, the conversion of fangame Robocop 2D to Scorpion Engine.

[malko]

[acidbottle]

Hey earok, the onspawn and ontimer both work as intended now

However, for whatever reason, the blocks on my project are scrambled up (objects not affected), worse still I accidently opened up the new Scorpion build with my current project build and didn't back up .. sigh lol

Seems to affect about quarter of the levels, others are fine. Bit of work to do now!

[earok]

Latest experimental

* Fix requested by AcidBottle - Bug caused by there being more than 256 blocks or actors on those tilesets (it now prevents compilation until that issue is resolved)
* Fix requested by AcidBottle - Block tiles shouldn't be scaled to edges (makes slopes look incorrect in editor)
* New control type requested by Lemming880 - The "autonavigate" property (that allows a "control" type actor to automatically move around walls rather than get stuck against them) is now in a separate "control_autonavigate" type.

[acidbottle]

Great again earok!

Your fixes are faster than a whippet on redbull! Working like a charm.

[earok]

No worries, glad it's working! I still couldn't see the latest check in for Wonderboy but I worked out what the issue is when I thought about it a bit more.

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Found the time to do another major update:

The latest experimental allows maps to link to each other - a "child" map linking to a "parent" map - so two or maps can share the same tiles, sound effects and animations.

Here are two reasons why you would want to do this:

1. A game like Mario Bros has many levels where the tiles are virtually the same. By linking levels together, it ensures that they share identical tiles rather than having the same tiles in their own separate level tilesets (linking every level in Amigo the Fox reduced the total disk space size ~10%, at an unknown cost of extra memory)

2. A game like Sonic the Hedgehog has "zones", or a themed group of levels with their own tiles, animations and sounds. You could link all of your unique animations and sounds for a zone to the first level of that zone, and then link all of the other levels to that first level in the zone, so all of those animations can be used by any level in that zone.

Note that since this is a new feature, it could well be bugged, also there's still some major planned improvements to come to this feature.