Scorpion Engine

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by Potato7542

Very cool engine!
The problem is the semi-null documentation would be cool If some one makes a tutorial for this

(I Tried to make one test game and, i could not make it)

It is a bit of a problem.. What would you like to make? It’s so flexible that there are a ton of different ways of achieving similar results..

Have you watched all the scorpion videos on Earok’s youtube? https://youtube.com/user/earok/videos - generally a lot of people here are super helpful and will answer direct questions.

[acidbottle]

Welcome to scorpion Potato!

The demo files will help you enormously. Following the "startup" codeblock, run through the sections on a demo to see what is happening. It took me a long while but eventually this thing will click, I promise you. The map editor needs an external program installed on your pc called tiled but it is super easy to use also.

if you get stuck you will 100% get a reply here good luck.

[Potato7542]

One question
How i make sound effects for SE?

[acidbottle]

In your project folder create another folder called "sound". Under audio tab, in SE, any samples you place in the sound directory will appear there, they must be in .8svx format though,

In your codeblock, to trigger the fx, you can select play sound from the audio section.

[Potato7542]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

In your project folder create another folder called "sound". Under audio tab, in SE, any samples you place in the sound directory will appear there, they must be in .8svx format though,

In your codeblock, to trigger the fx, you can select play sound from the audio section.

How i convert wav to .8svx?

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by Potato7542

How i convert wav to .8svx?

What I do: Use audacity and export to Amiga IFF.. then rename the file to have an .8svx extension.

[domkid]

Use Audacity, change the project rate (hz) to 11025 (bottom left)
export / export audio / other uncompressed formats / IFF header (amiga...) / encoding (signed 8 bits ...) and rename to 8svx.

[Mixel]

Adding to the list of feature requests that are probably a bit niche (like gradients+, haha) the ability to draw lines of blocks by setting a start and end point. I want to add and change blocks the entire width of a map, and know this would technically be possible with codeblocks now but I can’t think how I’d do it without it being a convoluted mess.. if I could do simple lines it’d be great. Bonus points if you could set a few different block types and have it randomly choose from them, or you could pass a sequence to it so a pattern would repeat.

Thinking this’d be really useful when you want walls, floors etc to appear.. (or rising water levels) .. if you can already easily do this and I missed it.. ooops.

[ElectricCafe]

Hi guys, I was wondering if someone could help shed some light on what I'm looking at in the build.log - as I assume most are listed in bytes, however some like SFX look like they are listed in kilobytes.

I'm also trying to work out how I can measure exactly how much of the stuff in the log is loaded into chipram?

Thanks in advance for any help!
Mark

=== Build Log ===
Saving the last kuusnepa.mod as 1.mus. Original size: 7580
Actor Count: 8
Actor Data Size: 2272
Block Count: 4
Block Data Size: 208
Anim5 Count: 1
Anim5 Data Size: 4
Sound Count: 4
Sound Data Size: 32
Teleporter Count: 1
Teleporter Data Size: 8
Animations Count: 67
Animations Data Size: 1072
AnimationFrame Count: 164
AnimationFrame Data Size: 11152
Saving Project virtual machine (codeblocks) as project.vm. Original size: 5966
Saving Data for map level1 as 1.map. Original size: 20596
Saving Asset bundle 0 as 0.gfx. Original size: 238720
Saving Asset bundle 1 as 1.gfx. Original size: 47360
Saving Project data as project.dat. Original size: 17728

[ElectricCafe]

As some rough calculations show I should have 200kb still free, so trying to work out what else is going on taking up chipram?

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by ElectricCafe

As some rough calculations show I should have 200kb still free, so trying to work out what else is going on taking up chipram?

The screen buffers?

[earok]

Samurai Crow is right, screen buffers by themselves should burn up ~115,200 bytes on a 5 bitplane screen. (I think I've calculated that right, the buffers are 20x18 tiles and there are two of them)

"Data size" is metadata about the files, that's generally stored in slow ram rather than chipram. I don't seem to be listing SFX sizes there for some reason but these can be inferred from the original files (Scorpion doesn't do anything fancy to reduce the chipram usage of samples, it *used to* automatically strip out all unnecessary information and unused samples from mod files but it's probably best if that's manually done by the musician).

---

Welcome Potato7542! All the best with your Scorpion Engine projects

[earok]

Experimental check in:

* For Lemming 880
- Error thrown if attempting to make level larger than 512 on either axis. (Graphical glitches start around that point, I believe it's because of 16 bit number limitations but I haven't dug too deeply into it)

* For Dante Mendes
- Some fixes with the new attack options.
- Fix where a sudden camera movement could cause a crash if there were a lot of animated tiles or blocks on screen.
- Fix for bug where it was no longer possible to detect collisions between an actor and the actor that spawned it (an actor still cannot, by design, collide with anything that it fired).

* For AcidBottle
- Fix for bug where manually triggered animations can be overridden by an actor's normal walk, jump etc animations.

* For myself
Started working on the ability to set the width and center alignment of the screen, this is highly experimental and making the screen wider -will- cause graphical glitches. There's currently no dropdown options for these so you'd need to use Set Variable. Feel free to play with the values but do expect to get oddities.

DEFAULTS (Current)
XWidthAdjust = -8
XCenterAdjust = 4

RIGHT ADJUSTED (Try this if you want to see if it fixes copper jankiness on tall levels, but FMODE1 must be off)
XWidthAdjust = -8
XCenterAdjust = 6

NARROW SCREEN (224 wide, for vertical shooters like gun.smoke)
XWidthAdjust = -12
XCenterAdjust = 6

[ElectricCafe]

Thank for the info you Earok, yes this makes sense.

In that case I'd like to suggest a couple of features:


1) Ability to load/unload actors + their attached images. With options for swapping into slow ram or complete removal. Could be done as a command in code (which would be triggered at points in the level):

eg.

Category: Actor
Type: Load actor from slow ram / Unload actor from memory etc..

And then it would be upto the game maker to ensure actors are loaded in before they are spawned on the map.

I think this feature would add great flexibility to the engine while providing the ability to handle larger sets of data.


2) Color Index Swapping
I mentioned this in DM already but to reiterate, the ability to reassign the color indexes after an actor is spawned. So I would do the following in their "Init" code:

eg.

Category: Actor
Type: Set Color Index
Index: 0
New Index: 14

The game maker would obviously have to take into account any level based palette changes.

Selfishly these features would benefit Double Dragon massively gaining the ability to first load/unload Linda on Level 1 but also provide a variety of palette swapped enemies.

Thanks for your hard work so far!

[earok]

I'll keep it in mind.

There currently is the ability to assign animations to levels (the "linked level" function in the drop down in the animation tab) though it's not very flexible - it'd be useful for animations that are only in one level (boss characters for that level for example), but not so much for animations that are on more than one level.

[Mixel]

Ah that's great! That is a solution to the poking in from the left hand line jankiness (when using parallax) but not the "it appears when in motion, at the full width of the screen" style jank.. (see here: https://s10.gifyu.com/images/seamjank.gif So It's probably a solution for some people's games as it likely depends on the map design, but I'll probably have to keep using my seam-filling tiles and copper-parallax hybrid thing.

When I use it on the simple copper backdrop in the right adjusted config you mentioned I get this:
- with the copper slightly off to the left and the left black line always present at the 18 marks.. while that left line is gone entirely with parallax on.

One neat thing I'm guessing applies now is we can do entire screen shake effects? Is that a really bad idea? It sounds like it might be a bad idea.

[amigaosx]

quick noob question:
I need exe2adf program to create an adf right? I can't find it anywhere!

[earok]

@Mixel I'll keep dabbling with it. I hadn't really thought about using the effect for screen shaking, it might be possible to (eventually) do a kind of effect where instead of fading, the screen closes in or out from the sides, but I'd need to expose a few more variables to codeblocks before I can do that.

@amigaosx huh, that's odd - it was at http://www.exe2adf.com/ but it looks like it's gone.

I should seek permission to include exe2adf as part of the Scorpion Engine download bundle, though I don't know who to ask.

[amigaosx]

@earok
I was able to get the program with thewaybackmachine (https://web.archive.org/web/20211018...//exe2adf.com/)

Your engine is awesome, I just did a test of loading a static image with a .mod and loaded it into a real A500 via floppy and it works!

About the exe2adf, in the footer of the website it says Bonefish/Reality, I think they're demosceners, a quick search led me to this facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/nahkolor

[earok]

@amigaosx Cheers! I'll see if they respond.



Updates for the day:

- Fixed bug where the new pointer (eg, new_x to get the x position of the newest actor) wasn't working correctly in expressions.

- Can use panel images that are narrower than 320x wide, so long as they're multiples of 16x wide they should be OK. This should save a little bit of chipram if you make your panels narrower.

- Can also shift the image so that, if you've got an image narrower than 320x wide, you can center it where you want in the screen. Again the adjustment needs to be in multiples of 16 pixels.

There's still the 1px alignment issue between the panel and the game display but I haven't been able to work out a solution yet.