Scorpion Engine

[Mixel]

Depends on what you mean by "active" scorpion users.. I'm still at the embryonic stage but it's v rewarding even in the very early stages.. (lol I'm a slow learner).. One of my projects I started by trying to adapt the alex kidd one, but it was giving me too many headaches when i swapped things out, so I'm comparing them side by side while i started from scratch, so hopefully I'll understand everything better as I add it.

One thing I dont quite get is the tilesets.. I'd like to be able to keep drawing tiles in PyxelEdit but I feel like adding this extra step is going to confuse the heck out of Tiled when I want to add to/revise the tileset? Maybe i just need to get better at using Tiled and I won't need Pyxel anymore? I don't really understand the tile editing workflow.

The other project (the VN) - similarly, I couldnt really just insert my assets into Ace Attorney, I'm planning on implenting a lot of things v differently. (main difference being in AA you've got the "levels" with the backdrops and character graphics burnt in.. I'm planning on using actors with a different expression etc mapped to direction facing, as it's going to have too many bg/character combos to bake them all in and im likely to keep changing my mind as to what the bg graphics look like, haha) But I'm on it, just.. very distracted/slow. But I'm not in any rush. I love all these example projects though I'd be totally lost without them.

I'll have some screenshots/video of both games to show soon, I hope.

edit: Hmm.. Im actually thinking.. I could carry on using Pyxel and make the maps literally as complex as I want and use the convert PNG to map feature? then on a level by level basis I could add a lot of one-off details. It's not like i have to worry about storage space..? I guess i'd just have to re-set the tile solid/platform tags each stage?

Edit: I was having issues with my player Bob being huge so I halved him and now he’s freaking adorable (need to finish the shading, but it’s ok!)

[earok]

That's a pretty cool animation! Next update is going to have hardware sprite support for 16 color sprites, so you could have a character up to 64 pixels wide rendered only with sprites (using all available sprite channels), which will save a lot of rendering time since no bob will need to be blitted and no tiles will need to be redrawn.

Regarding editing tiles, I usually use Paint Shop Pro to edit the actual image, I don't think you can edit the image within Tiled. You'll want to make the tileset image large enough so that, if you need to add any more tiles in future, you don't need to resize the image (also - Scorpion only compiles tiles that are actually used, so even if you've got a massive tileset, it'll only save the ones actually used when you compile to disk).

[Mixel]

Sprite support sounds great!

Ahhh, that makes sense! I’ll continue using pyxel on a masssive canvas. and.. I see! The reason I love pyxel is it allows you to draw the tiles in situ and have them all update accordingly, so you can use it like a tile sketchbook testing things out. I’ll make the set in Pyxel and recreate them in tiled.. I’ll export the tile set from pyxel with empty squares still in place.. previously I’d always tell it to remove the empties when outputting the file so I see where I was going wrong now, that was causing them to shuffle about. ??

I’m glad it only includes the used tiles as I already have tons of likely dead-weight ones.

Also is it worth me putting ramps in maps in preparation of ramps one day working or should I steer clear of them entirely? It’s not like turrican could use ramps so it’s not a dealbreaker, haha

Is that sprites that use less than 16 colours? Though my games are in EHB the player is definitely only ~12 colours.

[Mixel]

Ok, a palette question.

I made an EHB palette.. I drew all the graphics in that palette.. and yet, when I run the game in an emulated A500 I have slightly different colours to when I emulate it in an A1200.. is it because some of the image files are non-indexe? Or maybe it’s not running in EHB at all? How can I tell? Ty!

[earok]

Sorry about the delay writing back!

Scorpion Engine uses 24 bit colors (from a base palette of 16 mil~) when on AGA and 12 bit colors (from a base palette of 4096) when on OCS. So, for example:

#A0A0A0 and #AAAAAA should look exactly the same on OCS (since they're both compressed down to #AAA), but they're slightly different colors on AGA.

EHB is supported but may be a little tricky to get to go, if you've got 33-64 colors in your palette, it should compile to EHB mode automatically. The upcoming Unity version has a drop down to force it into any particular graphics mode.

Regarding ramps, that's tentatively planned for future but I haven't got a proper plan for it yet. It would be very nice to have smooth curved ramps with Sonic style acceleration, but it'll be something I'll need to come back to.

[Mixel]

Thanks Earok, no worries! I figured out what my EHB problem was.. One of the apps in my workflow (PPaint maybe?) didn't differentiate between EHB+ (if thats what its called?) and EHB in the OCS sense so it was using a bunch of shades OCS couldnt display.. So my idea of using the real A1200 actually set me back a bit there.. Emulating an OCS amiga in WinUAE has allowed me to tweak the palette so it's the same across both. Some things need redrawing.. I think I'll target OCS from the offset and then I guess I could make a seperate AGA version by just swapping out the tilesets..

I've got ramps in my tileset just in case they'll help in future. If not they make for good background detail.

[earok]

Originally Posted by Mixel

I've got ramps in my tileset just in case they'll help in future. If not they make for good background detail.

Funny story there - Doodlebug was intended to have ramps but the developer ended up using steps with ramps underneath them as decorations.

ARC gave me some advice on how he later implemented ramps in Tin Toy Adventure and Wiz, I may use that advice for eventually adding them to Scorpion.

[Mixel]

Aha, that’s neat and I may do the same. I love how close knit the Amiga dev community seems to be. I had a lot of fun with Wiz.

Is there a performance hit from extremely liberal use of the background and middle layer? See attachment.. Experimenting with dithered tiles and those bumpy shadows by the pillar on the middle layer.. is scorpion making the combination into a tile and loading that into memory or is it literally overlaying them in real-time and if I fill a level with stuff like that it’ll slow down?

Edit: had to replace photo, was Bigfoot sighting blurry.

Edit again:

Two possible feature requests (maybe they’re in already).. Text scrollers (for start screens, possibly even an option in dialogue boxes?)

Screen shake as a display action? Might already be in there, I know it was really handy in PGF for scripted events and boss fights.. if it’s not already in there I guess it’s achievable manually with rapid scroll commands maybe?

[earok]

Hope this helps!

- all tile layers are "baked" into a single layer, no matter how many layers you have. If you have 100 layers, it'll combine all those layers to add 1 tile to the tile set (and there's no redundancy so there's no duplicate tiles), so it's no faster or slower.
- except, the foreground. Foreground tiles are blitted with masks so they're reasonably slow and probably should be used carefully. Next version has sprite support so you could look at using sprites for foreground elements.
- screen shake could probably be done within codeblocks already, may be some issues to consider though (will disable camera tracking if you manually move the camera, but you can re-enable it again)
- I'll need to dwell on scrolling text

[Mixel]

TY!! That's exactly what I needed to hear.. When TileEd set up the map with those 3 layers i literally thought that'd be all I could work with.. I can add tons more too though? This is going to get crazy! This doesnt make much difference for the interior stages but the swamp/forest will really benefit from layer overload.

That makes sense about the foreground. I won't do dumb things like putting grass on that layer then, haha.

I mostly wanted the shake for cutscenes so losing camera control is fine. Sweet!

Text scrolling is entirely a bonus thing.. Start screens with text doing weird stuff for no discernable reason is one of the most Amiga things I can think of, haha.. (Z-Out's intro is taking it too far, but Turrican's fading in/out text is great.) Totally not important though.

[Tsak]

Just keep in mind that RAM is generally one important limiting factor, depending on your target platform. Even if you go for a1200 with 2mb chip it's possible for this ram to dissappear pretty quickly, especially when you add into the mix sfx and music as well. Therefore it is highly advised to show restrain in regards to tile combinations, since these tend to bloat up your tileset pretty fast.

[Reynolds]

I think nowadays having no ram space for music could be no issue since any Amigas could do replay from hdd with stereo samples... or mono if 3 other hw audio channels are needed for sound fx. So most of the chipram could be used to store gfx instead which couldn't be exchanged so easily during the action... or asynchronous loading of gfx datas can be made with or without palette change?

[Tsak]

I'm pretty positive whatever you hear and see has to be loaded in chip ram regardless. Only exception would be a CD-Rom which can output music playback directly to your speakers without passing the signal through paula, hense it's the only case where you don't need extra chip ram.

[earok]

Scorpion is designed to be efficient with combining numerous different layers down to a single "flat" tileset.

As an example, the first level of Amigo the Fox has five different tile layers (sky, water, background, midground, foreground), but the resulting tileset is only around 35kb. It does this by not only excluding tiles that aren't used, but only storing visually unique tiles once.

Basically the compilation process works like this:
- For each tile, combine every layer down into a single 16x16 graphic.
- Scan the existing tileset to see if that graphic is already there. If so, reuse that tile. If not, add it to the tileset.
- Repeat.

Having said all of that, it'd be prudent to keep an eye on tileset sizes (1.gfx is the tileset for level 1 for example) as part of an overall budget for both storage space and chipram.

[Mixel]

This is all great info. I’ll keep an eye on the size. What will happen in WinUAE when it runs out of RAM? Will Scorpion just.. crash? Or give some info?

Hmm, elaborating on Tsak and reynold’s comments.. If sound effects did all have to be loaded into ram I guess that rules out voice acting? (Lol not seriously considering it but.. it’s an interesting thought for my other project?)

Does EHB use up less chip ram/resources than 64col AGA..? if I just motor past the 1MB chip of ECS machines I might find myself wondering why I’m even using EHB, haha. How many OCS/ECS Amiga owners have 2MB chip?

[Tsak]

Depends on how much amount of voice acting you need. For a fully voice acted game and for the best quality and ease of use (in general) your best bet would be to make this game a CD based one. If it's just a few lines you're after then you could perhaps crop and fit these to ram.

[earok]

At the moment, it'll just crash if there's not enough RAM. I'm having some thoughts about making it so that all needed RAM is allocated up front and have it so that it gracefully quits in such a scenario.

Shouldn't be a difference between EHB and AGA 6BP so far as RAM consumption goes.

Also, with how the engine is currently, samples are all loaded at the start and kept in memory, so you'd run out of memory pretty quickly if you had a lot of speech.

ProTracker MOD files are only loaded one at a time though so you could theoretically divide speech in the game into several MOD files, and you could put the samples in individual 'patterns' to trigger at random. Though as Tsak points out, CD quality would definitely be the best (16bit vs 8bit) and have zero memory overhead, but the engine doesn't yet support CD playback.

[Mixel]

That's really interesting about the protracker patterns.. hmm! I'll file this info away for when/if it's useful.

I think I've found a bug? Most of the time (maybe all the time, other than the first map) if I select New Map, tell it where to save it, etc.. then press Edit in the main window - when it should load the map in TileEd, TileEd gives me this error:

Error opening 'K:/Dropbox/Game Dev/CMOTAG/levels/Sewer1.tmx':
Unsupported map orientation: ""

Line 2, column 220

To get around it ive just been duplicating my map that does work. Wondering if it's something unique to my setup?

[earok]

Originally Posted by Mixel

That's really interesting about the protracker patterns.. hmm! I'll file this info away for when/if it's useful.

I think I've found a bug? Most of the time (maybe all the time, other than the first map) if I select New Map, tell it where to save it, etc.. then press Edit in the main window - when it should load the map in TileEd, TileEd gives me this error:

Error opening 'K:/Dropbox/Game Dev/CMOTAG/levels/Sewer1.tmx':
Unsupported map orientation: ""

Line 2, column 220

To get around it ive just been duplicating my map that does work. Wondering if it's something unique to my setup?

Oops.

It's probably to do with the version of tiled - which version do you have? If you've got a more recent version than me, I should update at my end and see if I run into that issue.

Slight aside, I'm reasonably happy with the Unity build of the editor, I still need to finish my test game but I'm most of the way there.

I was wondering if you (and you too, UltraNarwall?) wanted a test copy before a public release? Also so that, if there's any compatibility issues with the games that you're already working on, we can work through them sooner rather than later.

[Mixel]

I’m running the latest TileEd, I can remember to keep in lockstep with you and Scorpion though in future. (considering this is the only thing I’m likely to be using it for.)

I would absolutely love to give the unity build a test run! Excited at the prospect of hardware sprites. My game hardly has any logic in it yet so i can’t imagine it’ll break, but it’ll be interesting to see. TY for the offer!

..
Oh I have another feature request.. (again, possibly already in there and I’m being dense) transitional frames so when you, say turn left from right there are a few frames of turning (like in GODS) - it’s fine without, as so many games don’t use them, but they can look slick.