Scorpion Engine

[earok]

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

Scorpion Engine 2023.2 is soft launched, brought to you by BitBeamCannon, MsMalik681 and the generous support of the Patreon backers.

I'll announce officially in a day or so if no breaking bugs pop up

* New optional sliced blitting mode for Amiga that greatly reduces memory consumption of animations.
* New 8 pixel tall slice parallax mode for Mega Drive.
* Added support for AND/OR conditionals.
* Improvements to stability, compile times and performance.

2023.2 performance test tool scores:

* A500 PAL: 576 (7% improvement)
* A1200 PAL: 914 (5% improvement)
* A1200 + Fast PAL: 1404 (3% improvement)
* Mega Drive (BlastEM/PAL)*: 729 (1% improvement)

The reason why the Mega Drive performance increase was only slight was that the demo has been updated to include sliced scrolling parallax on Mega Drive, the previous version of the demo had a static background.

In other words, even with the significant overhead of a sliced background, the demo still runs better on 2023.2 than it did on 2023.1.

[earok]

Initial experimental update for 2023.3

Amiga:
* Slight optimisation for sliced render mode.

Universal:
* Posted new licence keys to patreon
* Rewrote acceleration in logic, in part to fix a bug reported by MasterLinkeui, but also some future proofing for Sonic type games.
* Rewrote logic for level loading, (hopefully) resolving issue reported by basementApe where code might run out of order when transitioning between levels.
* Slight optimisation (improves performance tester scores by about 1% across the board) for platformer logic.

[earok]

Latest experimental check in:

Removed restriction where animated tiles can't have any other tiles above or below. You can have an animated tile above or below other tiles now.

The restriction where you can't have multiple animated tiles in the same space, and you can't have a foreground tile over an animated tile (or animated foreground for that matter), remains just for now.

[earok]

Latest experimental

(important - may be worthwhile deleting the content of your output folder in projects, now that files are saved in a subfolder corresponding to the platform name. You could otherwise take a backup and restore to the new subfolder if you need to keep whatever's in there)

Amiga:
Fixed bug reported by basementApe where memory saver setting would sometimes not be applied to the startup sequence.
Fixed bug, where if an animated tile was used in multiple places but on different background tiles, it would cause crashes.

Universal:
Output now goes into a subfolder of "output" with the platform name. This makes it easier to keep (for example) OCS, AGA and Mega Drive builds entirely separate from each other. (You may want to delete anything that's currently in your output folder).
Fixed bug with upward movement which was triggering block collisions more than once. This is one of those weird little things that might have been causing unexpected side effects.

[earok]

Latest experimental is an update for all platforms:

- Semi-major new feature: Event Tags! Events can be tagged (the tag can be unique for every event, or shared between multiple events) and this can be read in codeblocks eg "if eventtag == mytag". This saves the need to write a codeblock for every event that does something slightly different.
- Fix for bug reported by Dante Mendes, when an image isn't attached to a block the error message when compiling wasn't clear.
- Rewrote logic for handling acceleration into pure ASM. *hopefully* this hasn't broken anything but ASM is always tricky for me. If anything isn't moving or accelerating as expected, please let me know.
- Optimisation for "out of screen" event checking, replacing Blitz Basic code with what is essentially computer-generated codeblocks (this is going to be part of an ongoing process of rewriting parts of Scorpion Engine in Scorpion Engine).
- If there's an error message pop up at random, it won't display the whole stack trace (eg, it won't stretch outside of the screen).
- Fixed issue where, if startup-sequence was locked by WinUAE, it would tell you the error if you attempt to recompile.

[earok]

Latest experimental:

Quick fixes for BitBeamCannon and basementApe resolving some issues around the autogenerated codeblocks for out of screen events.

It should now compile unless there's a missing codeblock, and if there is it should tell you which codeblock on which actor.

[earok]

Latest experimental:

Amiga:
- Convert dump function has been removed for now, this is essentially redundant as debug mode can be used to display debug information at real time. (In future, I may bring it back in an easier to use and understand form, but I'm probably more likely to see if I can upgrade the real time debugger to display more live data)

Mega Drive:
- Dialogue choice is supported. As such, the "dialogue" simple demo has been updated to demonstrate this.

Universal:
- Not well tested, dialogue choice selection should work with any button (not just Mega Drive B or Amiga fire 1)

[earok]

Latest experimental:

Amiga:
- New platforms for ECS and A500 Mini. These extends from OCS and AGA respectively, they don't differ from those two other than giving another option for separating out content (if you wanted to make an ECS specific build or an A500 mini specific build)
- Fixed bug reported by Dante Mendes where opaque colors on a 32 bit tileset were being mapped to zero (transparent) instead of the closest opaque color in the palette.

Universal:
- Fixed issue reported by BitBeamCannon where platform overrides for animation images wasn't working as expected (previously, you needed a copy of the entire animation if you wanted to override specific frames for AGA for example, now you can just make a copy of the image without duplicating the animation data)
- Finally fixed issue where 16 color PNGs weren't officially supported for palettes

[earok]

Latest experimental:

Amiga:
Fixed bug reported by Flibble where, if a 0 indexed color on a tileset is not transparent, it would throw an error (this was just for diagnosing a different fault, I forgot to remove that check)

Universal:
Fix for issue where you couldn't make an override tileset image in platform_assets without copying the tileset file as well

[earok]

Important: latest check in has BREAKING change for AGA sprite screen wrap function. If you use this, please check the notes:


Amiga:
Rather than being set on the project tab, "AGA sprite screen wrap" is set through display->configure screen. This means that not only can the setting for sprite screen wrap be changed throughout a game, but it can be changed at realtime in the middle of a level.

As such, the Gothicvania and Vertical Parallax demos have been updated.

Mega Drive:
Simplified streaming of patterns to VDP. This is mostly to fix an issue reported by BitBeamCannon where sprites would glitch if the number of patterns available for sprite use was changed (eg, by the loading or unloading of a talkpad).

Universal:
Fixed bug reported by BitBeamCannon where manually setting Actor_IsOnPlatform could result in an actor hovering above the ground.

[earok]

Latest experimental check in:

Amiga:
Fix for bug reported by Dante Mendes, foreground tiles still had issue where opaque colors were being mapped to 0 / transparent.

Mega Drive:
Implemented teleporters (to be honest I thought this was done already, I completely forgot lol)

Universal:
Found and resolved some stability bugs, primarily to do with map events on Mega Drive but the changes I made should prevent similar issues on Amiga and Mega Drive popping up in future.

---

Update: Fixed two issues reported by Master Linkuei - sometimes animated tiles weren't working, also the ability to fall through a platform (pressing down on a non-solid platform) was broken.

[Capcomman]

Hi,

Making some Amiga platformer.
No code, just adding projectile to player, but the projectile does not offsets correctly on Y for player facing left direction, while it works as intended on player right direction.

Is this a bug ?
( i'm using latest free version )



I also noticed when jumping by default the characters plays the move animation while it would have been better to display only one frame instead of move animation when jumping.

[earok]

Hey Capcomman, that's looking really cool. Welcome!

With the actor tab, at the top left, there's green and white direction pointers for previewing each direction. Since you can manually set the offset for each direction, you'd need to click the left facing arrow (turn it from white to green) to set the position for the projectile offset.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the move animation - have you made a custom jump animation to set on the up left and up right directions?

[Capcomman]

Thanks.

I could fix the left offset for projectile (i might have missed that on video tutorials).


For jumping, using the control platformer classic, when jumping to left or right the character plays the run animation, that looks strange.
It is possible to display only one frame or different animation for jump without adding code ?

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by Capcomman

For jumping, using the control platformer classic, when jumping to left or right the character plays the run animation, that looks strange.
It is possible to display only one frame or different animation for jump without adding code ?

Seems fine for me using classic jump, jump anim on each diagonal direction.

[earok]

Latest experimental:

Amiga:
* Fixed issue reported by Toolkitman. Because of the way Scorpion packs data, more than 16mb of ChipRAM total isn't supported. Scorpion will now show quit with an error on such setups.

Mega Drive:
* Cartridge sizes are rounded upwards to 128kb boundaries. This apparently improves emulator compatibility with older emulators.

Universal:
* Feature sponsored by BitBeamCannon - Set Animation now has a tickbox to have an animation loop indefinitely (until a "cancel animation" is triggered from Set Animation)
* Fixed issue reported by Master Linkuei where, if index 0 of an image wasn't flagged as transparent in the PNG palette, the compiler wouldn't treat index 0 as transparent and so it wouldn't cut the image to edges. This caused glitches on Mega Drive that I could not explain (quite possibly Mega Drive doesn't like having sprites with completely transparent patterns), but more broadly this would have degraded performance by loading more patterns into the VDP than necessary.

---

@capcomman yes, as in @UltraNarwhal's message, you can set jump animations in the animation tab (the Up Left and Up Right directions). You can also set fall animations (the Down Left and Down Right directions).

[earok]

Latest experimental update:

Amiga:
Dropped restriction where you couldn't use the traditional OCS style parallax system on a project with AGA 32/64 pixel wide sprites. This does allow you to mix-and-match levels on an AGA project that have the traditional 32x wide parallax patterns and the newer 256 wide parallax patterns.

This does burn up a bunch of chip ram, which was the point of the restriction in the first place, but the higher chip ram availability should counterbalance that. (eg, it uses 4x the amount of chipram in 64 pixel wide mode, but an A1200 has 4x the chipram of an A500 in any case).

Mega Drive:
Reworked animation system so the logic happens in the same order as on the Amiga engine (eg, the sprites are processed back-to-front) in order to keep logic more consistent between the two platforms. I was a little worried that this might cause glitches, but at a glance, it seems okay. Please let me know if it doesn't work.

[earok]

Amiga:
* Fixes for the memory saver option. It may have been applying the memory saver setting in some builds where it wasn't necessary, and it's also entirely removed from AGA targets (since memorysaver only has an effect on kickstart 1.3).

Mega Drive:
* Cartridge size optimisation. Previously the entire nametable for each level would be stored in ROM (8 bytes per 16x16 metatile), now there's only a 16 bit pointer (2 bytes per 16x16 metatile) to an entry in a metatile table.
* Fix for bug where sprite sizes would be incorrect in the sprite table.

Universal:
* X/Y/Z position boxes in codeblocks are larger.
* Animation box in codeblocks is larger.

[earok]

Latest experimental

Amiga:
* Minor tweaks to comment text for SetMusicChannels command. I was going to remove this command completely (and make it so that you could assign this against each song in the Audio tab), but I figured it was worthwhile keeping just incase (for example) someone needed the flexibility to change which channels were reserved for music in the middle of a song.

Mega Drive:
* On a level with no parallax layer, layers A and B will be used for foreground and background tiles rather than these being flattened into the same plane (if there's a block underneath a foreground tile, the foreground overwrites the block)
* Minor fixes for choice indicator

Universal:
* Fixes issue reported by msmalik681, if there's a corrupted PNG it will display a clearer error message reporting exactly which file is corrupt.


---

Quick update for @Master Linkuei that fixes DMA transfer bug.

This bug seemed astronomically rare. The DMA transfer code had handling in so that, if opposite ends of a DMA transfer were on different sides of a 128kb boundary, the DMA transfer would be split into two separate operations.

But I hadn't taken into account if the DMA transfer ended perfectly on a 128kb boundary, it would mean that the second operation would have a size of "zero" and thus corrupt the display.

Again, to me that seems astronomically unlikely, but it happened on Master Linkeui's game in any case, so I've put in a permanent fix for that bug.


---

Another quick update for flibble, issue where a tile animation wouldn't play if there was a mismatch between the tile and the first frame has been resolved

[earok]

Hi all,

I was away this weekend working on a 48 hour gamejam project, it gave me some time to experiment with multiple layers of vertical parallax. The result is at https://earok.itch.io/jack-in-the-pit.

[ Show youtube player ]


latest experimental:

Amiga:
- Overwrites address 0 with 0 (and restores the initial value on quit). To resolve issues with high pitch on some machines particularly with 040 processors, reported by Lemming880 and Basement Ape
- Undone previous change to FS-UAE win/mac export that were related to the previous bug.

Mega Drive:
- Some control options may have been missing from the Mega Drive project tab, they should be there now.

Universal:
- "Jump to drop down" option allows you to drop down through non-solid platforms if you press jump and down at the same time.

Obviously this should only be used when "up to jump" is not set, but there's no enforcement for mutual exclusivity yet. Having this option set also means that you can't jump at all while you're pressing direction down on the joystick.