Scorpion Engine

[earok]

thanks @reido!

Check in for today, and it's a fairly substantial one. With their blessing, I've adapted Bit Beam Cannon's brilliant translucency demo from AMOS into Scorpion, and updated the editor to make this possible. Now it's possible (with careful palette planning) for translucency effects.



From a technical point of view, what's now possible is custom exclusion of bitplanes from the mask. We can see here, for this particular image, we've set the new bitplane settings in editor to match the requirements of the demo.



The demo is included with latest experimental. As a side note, the demo also includes the CPU Path movement type, this is the only working example of this movement type in a demo.

[Mixel]

I absolutely love this and I don’t really understand it yet, haha. This might take a little while to figure out. Great update!

TY for the CPU_Path example.

[earok]

No worries!

Michael from Bit Beam Cannon sent me a video to explain the concept.

[ Show youtube player ]

[Mixel]

Ah! Great video! I think I get it now.. I’m going to make bobs of my entire palette in different combinations of bitplane usage and have the player control them on the world map. I don’t think I can probably rearrange my palette to take full advantage of all The possible effects here without reworking a lot of stuff but I bet I can partially! Combined with the other weird colours who knows what’ll happen. This is going to be really fun, thanks Michael too!

I understand what my problem with cpu_path and tiled was now too.. It’s beyond stupid but I couldn’t find the polygon tool because I saw rectangle, circle, point, and triangle without realising triangle = free draw polygon.. I think I tried one of the other shapes and deleting points, so wow .. duh.

[earok]

Heh, it's totally fine. I realize I really should have had the path function in an actual demo way before now. (I may need to add a cpu_path_direct option too for any objects that need to have pixel-perfect path following rather than by-tile)

Minor fix checked in, Michael pointed out that the "not transparent" bob is supposed to be underneath the others, not on top.

[Mixel]

As well as a pixel perfect path follow, what could be pretty cool is a direct mode where it uses the player pursuit code from cpu_direct but uses them on the points of the polygon (with a timer for how long it takes between points) then you could do pretty much every Bézier curve attack wave imaginable? Unless the polygon tool already supports curves anyway. That’d be killer for scrolling shooters, particularly.

[acidbottle]

Originally Posted by Mixel

As well as a pixel perfect follow, what could be pretty cool is a direct mode where it uses the player pursuit code from cpu_direct but uses them on the points of the polygon (with a timer for how long it takes between points) then you could do pretty much every Bézier curve attack wave imaginable? Unless the polygon tool already supports curves anyway. That’d be killer for scrolling shooters, particularly.

It certainly would be a game changer for my particular project If you do add cpu_path_direct I will be able to test it extensively!

The transparency effect looks amazing, cant wait to see some real use of that.

[Kaizen35]

Beautiful Earok !
Not too much time for Scorpio lately. But I would like to know where to find the latest version.
It seems to me 2 or 3 weeks ago that it was in the "scorpion-editor-experimental" section on github, that I had retrieved version 2021.5.2 and the same slightly more advanced version with the same numbers. Is it always there that you have to get the experimental versions, or is it somewhere else?
Or is it just advisable to only use the latest 2021.5.1 official release from May 21, until the new official release?
Thank you

[domkid]

@Kaizen35, Yes, the experimental versions are still in the same place,
and if you want to try the latest features, use them...

[Mixel]

I’d install GitHub desktop and sub to the repositories so it’s just a case of one click to update scorpion. It’ll tell you when he’s updated both experimental and official releases.

If you have regular backups there isn’t really a risk in using the experimental versions. I always use the experimental ones because I want to try out all the new stuff.

[Kaizen35]

thanks guys !
i see now that by going to the "Overview" page of Eorok, I finally saw its latest experimental versions under "contribution activity".
I've only been going on Gitub since I started with Scorpion, so I'm still a bit confused, sorry thank you again! ^^
yes, Mixel, I also do backups now.

[Retro1234]

Love that Amos demo in the tunnel he did.
Strangely I have had transparent sprites without any extra commands,like by mistake ill have to take a look sometime.

but yeah some great effects can be archived with that effect

can you upload the demo in the tunnel done in scorpion engine read to run.

[earok]

I can't upload the tunnel demo because I deleted most of it. In any case all it was was this parallax image



Set to run at something like 0.1 pixels per frame on left, right and idle.

--

I might wrap up 2021.5.2 soon and do that as a public release since the translucency counts as a major new feature, there may be some backbone importer bugs to fix, also regarding the reported line on the left - it that actually a regression since 2021.5.1, or is it the same since 2021.5.1 ?

[Retro1234]

I mean this one
the original transparency demo he did, I have it in Amos but it's very slow.

[earok]

Ah, I don't know anything about that one. I'll ask

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

I might wrap up 2021.5.2 soon and do that as a public release since the translucency counts as a major new feature, there may be some backbone importer bugs to fix, also regarding the reported line on the left - it that actually a regression since 2021.5.1, or is it the same since 2021.5.1 ?

There has always been a line i think? But the quality of the line is a regression I’m pretty sure, I’ll try both versions tomorrow. On the world map in cmo it’s a weird evenly spaced dotted line even though that bg is just a copper gradient, it definitely wasn’t like that before.

Transparency stuff is a great update. Makes sense.

[earok]

No worries! A pair of screenshots showing the difference should make it apparent what the issue is.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

No worries! A pair of screenshots showing the difference should make it apparent what the issue is.

It's slightly different on each level but here's 5.1 (the ones on the left) vs 5.2 .. Sorry for the blurriness! It's pretty strange, good luck figuring it out. The world map is just a gradient, the Kershaw house is the most "noisy" place in the game.. Which i don't fully understand - it's not visibly that noisy on Tunnels1a, which uses the same parallax backdrop.


One thing I notice as well is although it's 100% present at the left physical side of the map, it also flashes occasionally when scrolling, though it's pretty subtle.. http://mixelslab.com/leftflicker.gif A gif of a small section of the left hand side of the screen. (this might be necessary, and it's not very noticable)

[UltraNarwhal]

Now that my game is more functional I've noticed a bug and some quirks.

The bug is for actors that have different speeds for direction. Using bounce collision or stayonplatform the speed never changes back, works fine if I use my own block method though.

Using disk compression (doesn't happen with uncompressed version) appears to make the disk drive stay powered on with some shorter codeblocks containing a wait for fire loop. Unsure if emulator issue, noticed it after getting game over and going back to my title screen (it was quiet on initial boot). Fixed issue by duplicating another codeblock to boot back to.

This is probably what you shouldn't do in game
Switching the panel in a level breaks sound or corrupts graphics. I was changing bottom panel to a pause panel when paused, then reverting back to original. Worked fine if the panel I swapped between was the defined talkpad, probably because it'd been allocated in memory.

[Lemming880]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

This is probably what you shouldn't do in game
Switching the panel in a level breaks sound or corrupts graphics. I was changing bottom panel to a pause panel when paused, then reverting back to original. Worked fine if the panel I swapped between was the defined talkpad, probably because it'd been allocated in memory.

I also change the panel when the game is paused but nothing seems to break (yet). I made it so that when you press esc, the game is paused, the panel is changed and gives the option Exit game: Yes or No. When you select No, the game unpauses and the panel changes back to original. And nothing breaks.

One thing I did notice is that when you select Yes and go back to the main menu and start a new game that the pause panel is briefly shown while loading level 1. Even though I told it to unload the panel. So it's not properly removed from the memory or something. So I let the pause panel switch back to the original panel before exiting to the main menu. But now you see the panel switch when exiting the game. But the last method is less ugly. I'm using the top panel btw.

And I also have the, how I call it: "Floppy light on" issue. It also happens with uncompressed version. And on real hardware. I though it was just a problem with scorpion. Redpill had it too and and some point Zener fixed it. But it might happen because of some "wait for press fire" code so I need to review my codeblocks.