Scorpion Engine

[Lineof7s]

Huh, that's interesting. I'm using WinUAE 5.0.0, which otherwise has been working fine.

Now that I know it's Just Me™ I'll have a bit more of a play around and see what I can see.

[Lineof7s]

Where does Scorpion look for WinUAE configs?

I downloaded WinUAE 4.10, stuck it in a folder by itself (just "winuae.exe"), pointed Scorpion at it and it worked. Cool. Did the same thing with WinUAE 5.0, pointed Scorpion at it, and it worked. Cool.

Copied my Configurations folder over from my main WinUAE installation into the folder the new WinUAE 5.0 was - the one Scorpion was pointed at, and using - and selected in Scorpion "Select WinUAE Config", but I still get nothing to choose from (the line up the top is the flashing cursor mid-flash):



So I'm wondering: where does Scorpion look for WinUAE configs?

[earok]

@Lineof7s It looks for WinUAE configs anywhere in your project folder.

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Latest experimental:

Amiga: Sound Test Manager now properly supports WAV/MP3/OGG audio, not just 8SVX. In addition, pressing the key will override the Period (note) value in the code (which is to say, with a single click or keypress on the sound test manager, it'll remember the last note you played so you don't need to manually type this into the period box).

Mega Drive: While neither Mega Drive driver supports playing back PCM samples at different notes, the "test sound" button can now at least be used to listen to the sample as a reminder of what the sample actually is.

[earok]

One more update for the day

Latest experimental brings a new option for the animation event system:

Sounds can be triggered on each frame - in addition, on the Amiga platform they can be played back at different periods, allowing for the possibility to use the animation system to create rudimentary music (might be more useful for something like a big explosion animation where you may want to play explosion samples back at different rates). Sounds are also played back in the animation editor so you can 'hear' what the animation sounds like before doing an actual build.

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The "jump sound" and "attack sound" options in the actor tab are now depreciated as they can both easily be done in the animation editor, but not removed as of yet. The intention to remove them is to (slightly) simplify both the engine and editor, as well as to (slightly) improve performance.

[earok]

Latest experimental is a fairly major change and isn't well tested, so may be buggy.

I've added melee boxes to the animation event system - so you can have multiple melee boxes in a single frame. In addition, regular (non player) actors can also do melee attacks against blocks.

[earok]

Latest experimental update:

- EventTag is set by the animation system for codeblock and melee operations (so if you have multiple melee boxes for example, you can tell which specific melee box is used)
Melee boxes can be set to different colors.
- Fix for bug where CPU Pursuit Direct wouldn't actually move in eight directions if some direction animations were disabled.
- Pressing F5 will re-run the last compile operation (it will open it in the last emulator you used, or if you clicked compile only it will repeat that)
- Various other bug fixes

[earok]

Various fixes into experimental:

- Fixed breaking bug with animation events triggering codeblocks
- All animation events can be made conditional. So for example, if you want to trigger some code, some sounds and some melee boxes conditionally (say play a bigger sound effect if you have a powerup) you can add the condition right into the animation editor without needing to do this in codeblocks.
- Fixes reported bug where all melee attacks were considered to be from the player, not from the actual actor responsible
- Added spawn event to animation frame editor. There's still work to be done in adding the ability to set the direction and speed of the spawned actor.
- Fixed reported bug wherein a melee box could attack on both sides of an actor.
- Fix for reported bug where CPU_Parent_Lock actor with 'match parent direction' flag would take a frame to catch up with the parent
- Fix, under some cases (where it's likely to cause a crash) directions cannot be disabled, particularly on cpu_parent_lock (when match parent direction is set), also on the diagonal directions on a platformer type
- Fix, bug where actor_frame wasn't returning the correct frame number

[earok]

Latest fixes:

- Fix for bug that could cause a crash when a player collides with a block that also has handling for projectile collision
- New animation event type for changing the direction of the actor
- Spawn animation event type now allows you to set the direction of the actor. This will be most useful for spread shot guns (and since each spawn can be made conditional, you could limit spread shots to power ups).

Those last two in particular should make it easier to do things like having spread shot guns, and using the animation system itself to control movement patterns like loops rather than relying on codeblocks to handle it.

[earok]

Latest check ins:

- An option to turn off the automatic fading in of a level after it's loaded.

You generally want this on by default, but there are some edge cases (like if you're loading other media, such as backgrounds or panels or music etc etc) where you don't want it to fade in until after all of that is done.

- Fix for instability that could happen if

A) An actor spawns a child actor, and
B) The first frame of the child actor's animation has an event (such as a melee attack)

- Also

Talkpad setting has been removed from project tab. In it's place, you can load a talkpad through codeblocks (Display->Talkpad).

The advantage here is you can swap a talkpad at real time (nearly instantaneous on MD, but with a second or two delay on Amiga)

This isn't an automatic upgrade, you'll need to do that manually on your project if you use a Talkpad.

[Retro1234]

Do you think it could do something like Batman Returns SNES? -
A few quite large sprites but not a huge amount going on.

[earok]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Do you think it could do something like Batman Returns SNES? -
A few quite large sprites but not a huge amount going on.

I feel, yes, but there would need to be tradeoffs. Some things may need to be removed or reduced to make it run acceptably on lower end Amigas, or support for lower end Amigas may need to dropped in order for it to look closer to the SNES version.

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Been a few updates lately, most are minor but one or two are very significant. I'll post the update notes individually below:

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Latest check in attempts to fix issues where some text boxes (for expressions etc) could have their text pushed up or down out of the box

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Latest fix is stability for Mega Drive - crash that can happen when SFX triggered on the XGM driver conflict with the XGM driver running in the vblank has been fixed

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Latest updates:

* Amiga: Fix for bug where copper skies wouldn't be correctly aligned on 256 color displays
* New bundled codeblock "destroy_child_actors". This finds and destroys all children of a parent actor, and can be used as an example of how a parent actor can run code on all of it's children.

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Quick fix, attempt to fix retro animator melee box bug

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Latest update adds a new checkbox to the actor tab - 'block collider'.

This is on by default for players and projectiles, but can be turned off. It's to give a little bit more flexibility so these scenarios are now possible:

* Players that don't trigger block collision events
* Projectiles that don't trigger block collision events
* Non player, non projectile actors that do trigger block collision events

For performance reasons, you'd want to have this turned off unless you actually need it. Say you had a top down shooter where static enemies on the ground were represented with blocks - you might want to configure your air to air missiles to not have that block collider tickbox, only your air to ground missiles.

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Latest update changes the block collision model to be much more flexible, but existing games may require changes here and there.

There's a new "block_collision" variable, which is set to whether the block is solid when a player or actor collides with a block and has a collision event.

You can turn that to true or false as needed. For example, if you have a water blocks which usually prevent movement and you can only walk across that if your player has floating boots, you could do some logic in the block collision event like so

if has_waterboots
block_collision = false
endif

The potentially breaking change is that, previously whether there was a block collision or not would change if the block was changed. So if you had a solid block that would be destroyed by a collision, the actor would not be stopped by the collision. Now it will be - so you may need to add some logic for handling that, which should hopefully be as easy as setting the block_collision to true or false depending whether or not you want the actor to stop.

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Minor change - if an invalid codeblock reference is used somewhere in your poject, it should tell you what needs to be fixed if compilation fails.

[Retro1234]

Just playing it the other day, has a kind of Xmas Feel.

[earok]

Batman Returns is a Christmas movie

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Various experimental fixes from today:

- Fix for bug where editor would crash if attempting to use the test sound button in the animation tab

- New feature: Actor Freeze and Unfreeze codeblocks command

Freezing an actor disables an actor's movement, animation and collision - but not their rendering. As such, it could be useful for short cutscenes, and because actors are extremely lightweight in that mode it may be useful to squeeze a few cycles out when you've got static background objects.

- Fix for Mega Drive tile corruption on first level load.

- Mega Drive export to web, this exports with the Emulator.Js project configured for Itch or pretty much any other web server. (Note that I tried to get this going with the Amiga core but couldn't get around issues with getting the AROS ROM to load the game, I may come back to that in future).

- Minor optimisations and tidy up

[Aladin]

New video of Kenseiden by Master Linkuei for Megadrive under Scorpion Engine.

Video megadrive WIP 3 (04/11/2023)
[ Show youtube player ]

Video megadrive WIP 4 (18/11/2023)
[ Show youtube player ]

Message of Master Linkuei (21/12/2023)
"I had plans to release it on Christmas, but due to some random crashes, i will delay it a bit so i can improve it more!!"

[earok]

Originally Posted by Aladin

New video of Kenseiden by Master Linkuei for Megadrive under Scorpion Engine.

Video megadrive WIP 3 (04/11/2023)
[ Show youtube player ]

Video megadrive WIP 4 (18/11/2023)
[ Show youtube player ]

Message of Master Linkuei (21/12/2023)
"I had plans to release it on Christmas, but due to some random crashes, i will delay it a bit so i can improve it more!!"

I think I've resolved all of those crashes, but there's other updates he's working on too.

This is the first major Scorpion title made with the Mega Drive in mind, but I'm hoping I can do an AGA conversion once the Mega Drive version is done and dusted.

[earok]

Latest experimental has a fairly major new feature (that I thought of in the shower last night, lol).

The intellibox is a box at the bottom of the codeblock command window where you can just type in a similar syntax to traditional programming and it'll add a new command to the codeblock. Some examples:

X++, X+1, X+=1 and X = X + 1 all increase the variable of X by 1
[mapname] and load [mapname] will load a map of name [mapname]
[actortype] and actor [actortype] will set the current actor to [actortype]. You can also substitute actor here for new, projectile and player

If it doesn't recognise the command, it'll just add it as a comment.

This is going to be improved to support more commands and syntax over time. Do feel free to suggest something like "if I enter X, it should produce command Y with settings Z"

All supported commands are in intellibox.txt

[earok]

Experimental updates for the day:

* Codeblocks has a "platform" drop down allowing you to define a specific platform for a line of code.

What this basically does is it ensures that the line of code is only added to compatible platforms (for example, if you set "amiga_all", it'll add the code to A500 Mini/OCS/AGA/CD32 builds but not Mega Drive ones). This is easier to manage than having separate codeblocks in platform_assets, and it also ensures that your disk/cartridge/CD doesn't contain code intended for other platforms.

* Minor fix - Talkpads on Amiga honor the "fade in" setting.

Note that they do not honor the fade out setting, and Mega Drive does neither (yet)

* Fixes for pattern management on Mega Drive.

* Fix for recursive melee crash

Eg, if a melee attack triggered an animation that in itself had a melee attack, that melee attack would immediately register a hit, repeating the process until memory was exhausted.

* Fix for Retro Animator bug on Mega Drive builds

* Fix for Amiga - execute command uninstalls and reinstalls the PHX sound driver, in order to ensure sound works once you've returned to the game.

[earok]

Daily experimental round up:

* Added "dynamic tile" feature for streaming tiles directly into the VRAM, allowing for essentially unlimited tilesets on Mega Drive.

* Because of the above, all of the rest of the Scorpion sample games (RepairWare and Liminalia) are now Mega Drive supported.

* Various fixes, in particular a crash caused by teleporting across levels, sound effects not playing correctly on Mega Drive.

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I've got one or two more major features to add but I want to wrap up Scorpion 2023.5 early in the new year.

In other news - NeoGeo support is officially the Scorpion goal for 2024, as such I've already started the ground work. MAME will be the target emulator, and the intent is that Scorpion will generate all the ROM and XML files that MAME requires.

[earok]

Latest fixes:
* For Amiga, flashes and artifacts at the start of levels
* For Mega Drive, improved error message handling
* Triggering dialogue is delayed until after a level is fully faded in
* Added ability to set actor or child actor's speed to the animation tab. This includes an arrow indicator to show you exactly where the actor is going to head (might be useful for actors that shoot in very exact angles)

[earok]

Latest experimental:

Melee attacks can be manually triggered from codeblocks. This may or may not be useful to anyone (but was easy to add as the engine already supported, there just wasn't any way to access it in the editor).

Essentially it would allow things like melee boxes of varying sizes (melee box in the animation editor is hard coded size) as well as being able to attack anywhere in the level regardless of where the attacking actor is, as well as being able to trigger a melee attack regardless of what frame of animation is playing.

It might be useful for something like Operation Wolf where you want to hit whatever is under the cursor on screen, it could also potentially be useful for point and click adventures for detecting whatever you've clicked on.

Also fix for Mega Drive: Tiles corrupted if loading a fullscreen panel in the middle of a level without unloading the level.