Scorpion Engine

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by Lemming880

Ok I hope it gets fixed. I think using blocks is better. My workaround is using events. But I have to place many events this way. Your offset trick didn't really work for me.

I am curious - you think using blocks is better than map tiles & you're making a platformer? There are a bunch of limitations for blocks that don't apply to normal map tiles.. (though if your platforms are really dynamic and constantly changing or something in game I could see the advantage to using blocks?) - interesting, either way.

Originally Posted by earok

Corel Paint Shop Pro for art. It isn't *free* but it does have a trial and has a one off purchase fee rather than a subscription. It isn't bad for Amiga projects since it supports IFF import and export (though that's not needed for Scorpion) and you've got reasonably good palette tools with it too.

Woah, that's a name I've not heard in a long time. :O
I had no idea it supports IFFs, that's really nice!

On holiday right now, so may not be very reliable with updates. But also being on holiday is sometimes very good for my creativity. So we'll see.

Have a great (well deserved) holiday! (sorry, didn't realise - I wouldn't have been badgering you on Discord if I'd known, haha!)

[malko]

Originally Posted by Mixel

[...] Woah, that's a name I've not heard in a long time. :O
I had no idea it supports IFFs, that's really nice! [...]

GIMP as well can handle IFF with a plugin (my old Photoshop 7 as well was able to handle IFF with a plugin - don't know if more recent versions still handle this format).

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by malko

GIMP as well can handle IFF with a plugin (my old Photoshop 7 as well was able to handle IFF with a plugin - don't know if more recent versions still handle this format).

I used to use GIMP for it in the past.. I hope Photoshop still does.
Irfanview supports IFF (more of a viewer than an editor though) and on the Mac side so does GraphicConvertor..

In terms of dedicated modern pixel art apps that support IFF I’m only aware of Grafx2, there’s an alpha plugin for Pro Motion to use IFFs though.

A lot of the time I think it makes sense to spin up WinUAE, PPaint (and dpaint) have better pallete management when you’re dealing with stuff like OCS EHB.

The fact Scorpion doesn’t use iffs at the user level is one of its best features IMO. That would be a huge pain in a butt. PNGs are so much easier to work with in a modern setting. I’m also really glad it doesn’t force you to use sprite sheets.

[acidbottle]

Originally Posted by Mixel

A lot of the time I think it makes sense to spin up WinUAE, PPaint (and dpaint) have better pallete management when you’re dealing with stuff like OCS EHB.

Absolutely this. There is a really neat feature on PPaint that lets you reduce colours based on the image you have loaded. I'm sure other paint/art packages can do this but I cannot for the life of me find this feature in photoshop. I use PPpaint for all Amiga gfx design, its awesome, if only for that feature alone!

[Lemming880]

Originally Posted by earok

@Lemming880 It is on the todo list to have an actor AND a block on the same tile (as well as multiple actors on the same tile etc).

Great!

Originally Posted by Mixel

I am curious - you think using blocks is better than map tiles..?

No, for what I'm trying to make, I think using blocks is better than events or any other workaround. I only use blocks for tiles that should be interactive of course.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by Lemming880

No, for what I'm trying to make, I think using blocks is better than events or any other workaround. I only use blocks for tiles that should be interactive of course.

Ohhh, that makes way more sense, haha. I get you now. I also prefer blocks to events most of the time as they're so reuseable and they snap right on the grid. (I also use events a lot too)

[acidbottle]

Well after getting the basics off the ground I thought I would make an attempt at getting some gfx up and running properly.

After some faffing about I have actually drawn up quite a blank in terms of how the palette works on scorpion. Noramlly, in the past, I have worked with 16 on OCS. On this ocassion I wanted a few more colours and can probably just about squeeze what I need into 32 colours, though would be pefect with 64.

Sadly for me, whilst I can have the actors/sprites run on 8 or 16 colours no problem, for whatever unfathomable reason, I lose a small bunch of colour on the map tiles, therefore they do not display correctly. Tiled itself is displaying it fine, after compiling though, a few colours go missing. I tried using the exact same palette for sprites and map (32 colour). I have also tried a 16 colour map and 16 colour sprite palette. Closest I got was 16 colour actors on 1 palette and a 32 colour map off another palette. Im happy to go 64 ehb AGA but research didnt lead me to much info that I could follow

I suspose my only question is, how are palettes handled by the Amiga, specifically in scorpion. After a number of hours of expirementing I'm simply too stupid to work this out!

I did see earok's great palette hack thread but I really still cant grasp it!

[earok]

I'm not quite sure what the issue is but - things to consider:

- If you're using sprite parallax at all, you need to sacrifice colors 0, 29, 30 and 31 since the sprite parallax uses the last two hardware sprites specifically (if you attempt to use those colors for something else, you could get some weirdness)

- Anything flagged as "auto sprite" or "only sprite" in the animation editor will normally only use colors 17-31.

- Make sure, on the main project tab, you've got the number of bitplanes you want. (Also make sure that the colors you want are present on that palette)

- EHB is pretty unwieldly mainly because colors 32-63 are fixed as half the brightness of colors 0-31, you can't just set anything you want to the lower 32 colors (Mixel and Czorny have managed it, god knows how!)

[acidbottle]

Thanks earok, hope you are having/had a nice holiday!

Yea, i have re-read back my issue and can barely make sense of it myself haha!

Specifically I should ask, does the actor/sprite and the map tile palette have to be the same and exact or can they be somehow independent. Should this be 32 colour only with the caveats you specified above? Once certain of this can look at workarounds.

Appreciate your advice though and shall take all these considerations on board and keep bashing away at it.

[earok]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

Thanks earok, hope you are having/had a nice holiday!

Yea, i have re-read back my issue and can barely make sense of it myself haha!

Specifically I should ask, does the actor/sprite and the map tile palette have to be the same and exact or can they be somehow independent. Once certain of this can look at workarounds.

Appreciate your advice though and shall take all these considerations on board and keep bashing away at it.

The short answer is they're not independent, the same 32 colors used for generating bobs/sprites should be the same 32 colors for generating levels. This restriction does NOT apply to panels.



The longer answer is, if you're especially careful, you can set an override palette per level. But this doesn't change the palette order for objects. As an example, if you have color #1 as red on your main palette, and color #1 as green on your level override palette, whatever was red before is now green.

If you're extremely careful you could do things like have day/night scenes, or have characters wearing a different color uniform to normal, but this is very difficult to manage.

[acidbottle]

Perfectly answers the query, thanks for that.

The override palette will also be especially useful, once I figured the basics out of course.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

- EHB is pretty unwieldly mainly because colors 32-63 are fixed as half the brightness of colors 0-31, you can't just set anything you want to the lower 32 colors (Mixel and Czorny have managed it, god knows how!)

Hehe! That’s largely PPaint/DPaint and the fact I’ve been trying to make an EHB palette “house style” since before I was even making any games. It’s the same palette (other than the parallax adjustments) I used for Amiga Art Contest.. I genuinely never thought I’d be using it to make real Amiga games though. (Thanks again, haha!) I don’t know if I’d like using EHB if I had to keep making different palettes, unwieldy is probably an understatement!

I set my EHB palette as the default in Aseprite, so it’s really easy to remap everything to the correct places.

Those last 3 (+3 in EHB) colours are an absolute goldmine for weird effects, I love them!

Here’s my palette, I’m not sure if it’s organised the absolute optimal way, but slot 0 and 32 = no go zone, any attempt at using pure black will result in transparency in my set up.. Pink box = my sprite colours.. Which overlaps slightly with green, the glitch cols. in interiors where theres no background parallax I can use the weird colours freely, so I made sure to pick the ones I need least.

I’m not sure how much, if any is useful to non EHB games, those last 3 half-bright glitch colours are so damn fun to mess with though. Makes me wish there was a 32colour HB mode that halves the first 16 to make the second 16.

[Lemming880]

I don't know if this has been reported before but when I set up an element under panels and then change the variable or the numberfont again, I get a long error code and the element becomes unusable.

And my current project now crashes on A500. Memory problem. It says it can't load data/1.img. It still works on A1200.

[earok]

Originally Posted by Lemming880

I don't know if this has been reported before but when I set up an element under panels and then change the variable or the numberfont again, I get a long error code and the element becomes unusable.

And my current project now crashes on A500. Memory problem. It says it can't load data/1.img. It still works on A1200.

It hasn't been reported so far as I know. If you can give me a copy of your project, I can take a look sometime.

Re: memory, check the size of your snd files, music files etc to work out why it's no longer fitting in memory. Sometimes it's something as simple as a large music file, or a large 8svx that can put memory over what you expect. It might also depend on the size, number and bitplane depth of your animation frames.

[Lemming880]

Originally Posted by earok

It hasn't been reported so far as I know. If you can give me a copy of your project, I can take a look sometime.

Re: memory, check the size of your snd files, music files etc to work out why it's no longer fitting in memory. Sometimes it's something as simple as a large music file, or a large 8svx that can put memory over what you expect. It might also depend on the size, number and bitplane depth of your animation frames.

Then I think there might be an issue with an actor that is 48x48px and has 18 frames animation. Ok, I'll send you my project thanks.

[earok]

Had a look at Lemming's project, very cool indeed what I did to get the game running under A500 1MB settings were:

- Reduce the HZ of all samples from 22KHZ down to 11KHZ in Audacity, this shaved off about 80KB of chipram usage.
- Configured that specific 48x48 animation as an "Only Sprite". On 16 color mode, sprites use exactly half the memory of bobs (since sprites are unmasked, but masks on bobs are the same size as bobs due to the use of interleaved graphics for performance reasons).

It happens that 48x wide is exactly how large a sprite can be under parallax settings (without parallax, 64 wide is possible).

---

Did a couple of minor check ins to the main project repository, there were some bugs in Amigo and Super Go Down the Hole that I've fixed.

[Lemming880]

Cheers earok!

[breech]

A top down racer, also from KAIZEN35

[ Show youtube player ]

[Mixel]

I've figured out a couple of things over the last two days fixing bugs that might be relevent to other scorpion users?

If you're getting nasty glitch flashing at certain heights/locations on your map - it's caused by the parallax backgrounds - I fixed that by editing all the values in the CSV to be even numbers (other than the first line which is line 1, not 0), but it might not have been the evenness that fixed it, it's hard for me to know exactly which number/s it objected to - so .. just tinker with the numbers until it stops? Haha.

Ramps are absolutely wild.. Actors set to "bounce" on them don't in the same way they do on solids/platforms, but they do.. a bit? eg something I have set to bounce on a solid surface will bounce once on a "flat ramp" surface then settle flat. This is potentially useful for some things (i use it to make part of a scripted cutscene behave how I like)

You want to "unload panel" inside the option code in menus, or the fade in/out behaviour sometimes goes weird.

Absolutely loving working on it at the moment.

[domkid]

@Mixel, thank you for this information.