Scorpion Engine

[earok]

@UltraNarwhal hmm.. I can't explain that. I'll look at it later today.

---

Latest experimental fixes two issues relating to automatic color lookup:
- Fixed an issue on Amiga where, on a 32 bit PNG, an opaque pixel on a tileset matching the background color would set to something other than index 0.
- Slight tweak for automatic color lookup, when there's multiple matches it prefers a color near the lower end of the palette rather than the higher end.

I need to do a little more testing on a couple of projects, but I'm likely to do a soft launch of 2023.3 tomorrow.

[earok]

Latest check in fixes Mega Drive issue reported by UltraNarwhal (under some conditions, an optimisation to the VDP pattern loader will skip loading all of the patterns it needs).

More broadly, there have been some *major* performance optimisations across the board. I wasn't intending to spend much time on optimisation since I was hoping to get 2023.3 out the door soon, but I got on a roll with it and spent the day doing some of the most intensive optimisations on Scorpion Engine to date.

The performance tester is reporting scores 24% higher on Mega Drive and 15% higher on A500 than the 2023.2 score - *hopefully* I won't need to roll those back too much if any of the optimisations break things.

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

The performance tester is reporting scores 24% higher on Mega Drive and 15% higher on A500 than the 2023.2 score - *hopefully* I won't need to roll those back too much if any of the optimisations break things.

Hooray for more performance, boohoo I found a bug. Flipscreen/Flipscreen smooth on Amiga/MD doesn't go up (only left/right/down).
Also I noticed having 0 as gravity works now .

[earok]

Eeep, checked in a quick fix. Out of screen top events should now work @UltraNarwhal.

[acidbottle]

Bit of a bug occurred on Breakthru, half the time i blow something up the game crashes to menu screen! Not investigated properly but definitely didn't do that before the update

[earok]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

Bit of a bug occurred on Breakthru, half the time i blow something up the game crashes to menu screen! Not investigated properly but definitely didn't do that before the update

I'll need to get a new build demonstrating the issue, the build I have is the one with the teleporter bug. Will take a look at the Wonderboy 3 reports.

[earok]

Latest experimental:

- Fix for issue reported by Acidbottle, automatic color lookup prefers colors above #0 as this is normally transparent (it'll still use #0 if that's the closest match).
- Also attempted fix for issue reported by Acidbottle, likely same bug reported by Lemming880, where the game would restart after certain collisions are triggered. Not fully sure it's actually fixed as I couldn't replicate the bug reliably, but I thought of a theoretical cause (an actor that's already destroyed having another collision triggered on the exact same frame) and patched that - I haven't seen the bug since.

[acidbottle]

So far so good, thanks earok

Had a wave cpu character on wbiii which is not functioning as it should, could be a simple setting that got reset, will check it out later and report back if it is a more terminal issue.

[earok]

Latest experimental is the 2023.3 release candidate 1. Only fix is that 256 color images are supported again (which really means that it was an AGA Amiga only bug). Also all demos have been refreshed, and there were one or two bug fixes on those.

I do want to roll out to public tomorrow so please do let me know if anything is broken still.

[Lemming880]

Today's update is looking good from my end.

[domkid]

it's ok, nothing broken...

[earok]

@lemming880 @domkid great to hear

---

2023.3 has been soft launched. I'll do a more proper announcement in a day or two if there are no breaking bugs reported.

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

Have just added new column scrolling demo, there's separate versions for Mega Drive and Amiga as they're technically very different from each other even though they're visually identical.

Official performance scores for 2023.3:
A500 PAL: 665 (15% improvement)
A1200 PAL: 1031 (13% improvement)
A1200 + Fast PAL: 1546 (10% improvement)
Mega Drive (BlastEM/PAL): 904 (24% improvement)

[flibble42]

Did that on a ZX Spectrum 48k, pish

[earok]

2023.3 has been officially launched now, thanks to BitBeamCannon, Dragonbox and our generous Patreon backers!

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

- Support for the RetroAnimator animation toolkit for creating fluid animations.
- Support for CDTV/CD32 music on Amiga.
- Support for Column Scrolling on Mega Drive.
- Export to CDTV/CD32 ISO on Amiga.
- Exporting to DragonDrive cartridge on Mega Drive.


There is a new brief introduction video as well: [ Show youtube player ]

[earok]

Latest experimental is the initial check in for 2023.4. Licence keys are published to the patreon.

Amiga:
- Part of the copper list is generated by the editor rather than the engine. This doesn't, in of itself, add new functionality - but it is an important step towards offering full developer control over the copperlist (line scrolling, copper rainbow on any palette index etc).
- Uses a beta version of PTPlayer, though this may be the final 6.4 release if no bugs are found. This replacement was made to resolve issues reported by Lemming880.

Mega Drive:
- Reworked some of the DMA transfers. Again this does not, by itself, add any new functionality, but it is progress towards giving the developer more control over horizontal scrolling in the VDP.

[lionagony]

Just played a really slick new demo of a Scorpion Game called Super Delivery Boy. https://neesogames.itch.io/super-delivery-boy Great parallax, great graphics (64 colors with the rarely used EHB mode) and great fun so far.

[earok]

@lionagony I was really pleased to see a new update for Super Delivery Boy! It was one of the very first major Scorpion games alongside Creeping Me Out and Duckstroma, so it was a nice surprise to see a new update.

---

Latest experimental is a bit overdue but brings some significant new changes:

Amiga has the latest version of PTPlayer 6.4 beta and the ability to set the copperline for any color of the regular 0-31 palette for any line. A few notes here:

- Use "edit copper colors" to generate a template image, which will be 16 pixels wide for each color you want to manipulate.
- You can't change color 0 with this feature, you can already do that through the copper sky function.
- If you change 29-31 on a level with a parallax background, these colors will overwrite those ones.
- The copperlist generation is optimised so, if you have the same color change on multiple lines, it'll only add one copper operation to the copper list. You may decide that you want to space out color changes over multiple lines to avoid issues with running out of copper moves.
- No support for AGA colors (32-255) or 24 bit color (12 bit only) yet. Changing those significantly increases the complexity and number of copper changes needed, though support for those may come in future (either automatically or possibly a feature to manually edit a copper list)
- The colors in the image are consecutive lines, but if you really wanted to (for example) change colors 8 and 10 without changing color 9, just leave color 9's column empty in the image.

The barrels demo has been updated on Amiga as a simple example of this in action.

Mega Drive has an initial experimental not-officially-supported 32X platform. There's a temporary sample for it. Again a few notes.

- This is not offically supported, I really can't guarantee it'll work on real hardware for reasons outlined at the bottom. Though I assume it's not possible to damage a 32X with code that's broken, it is very much at your own risk.
- Nothing fancy yet, no blitting or 3D stuff, just literally displaying a static image in front of or behind (or both) the regular game display.
- I've attempted to code it so both SH2 processors are set to do an infinite loop instead of actually doing anything useful, so the 68000 does all of the actual work. I haven't currently worked out an SH2 compiler workflow so I've pretty much just been patching bytes in the ROM.
- There's a new 32X panel type, all this does is display an image on the 32X frame buffers.
- There's no codeblocks support for that panel, you need to manually set the variable of "panel_special" before loading a level to have the image displayed on the frame buffer.
- The image is 15 bit (32,767 colors) only.
- On your source PNG, use full alpha for anything in front of the regular display, and less than full alpha for anything behind the display. You may want to use photoshop layers to construct your image, with the bottom layer as an alpha of say 50%, before exporting to PNG.
- Audio may not be working, in particular loading a song seems to crash. According to the MDSDRV team, 32X has not yet been tested.
- When on the 32X platform, it will apply the header. On at least some emulators, the 32X panel type also works on the regular Mega Drive platform. Whether that works at all on real Mega Drive is unknown as of today.
- There's a temporary demo "TEMP_32X_MARS_TEST" for this.

The 32X is tricky to code for, not helped by the fact that 1) I don't own one and 2) there's no emulator with "BlastEm" levels of accuracy of the 32X, I hope both of those issues will be overcome in future.

[Pyromania]

Very nice updates to SE!

[earok]

Thank you Pyromania

---

Latest experimental is some minor fixes for Amiga:

- Latest beta version of PTPlayer 6.4.
- Improvement for Edit Copper Colors, you can target all 256 colors in an AGA machine (bearing in mind that the copper list could be substantially larger, targeting colors from 32-255 uses max three operations whereas colors 0-31 uses one operation).
- Added a button for deleting the Copper Colors, if you no longer want them or if you want to regenerate the template.

Edit: emergency fix for sfx bug reported by Lemming880

[earok]

Mega Drive:
- Replaced Implode with ZX0 (salvador compressor), for smaller compressed data that (I assume) unpacks faster as well. I do intend to add this as an option for Amigas as well once I've worked out how to handle delta bytes in ZX0.
- Packing of the ROM is more intelligent. For example, the sample data needs to be packed at an alignment of 32KB, so as much other data is possible is packed in the padding needed to put that data at the alignment.
- Some general tidy up of scroll functions in preparation for more optimal code.

Universal:
- Added "absolute" command to math functions. Essentially it converts any negative expression into a positive one, mostly useful for calculating distances (eg, using absolute on actor_x - player_x will tell you the distance in pixels regardless of which is on the left or right)