Scorpion Engine

[earok]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Hopefully one or two people will make crazy adult games with this engine.

Well, the engine could already handle any number of ports of DOS H games.

I did not say this. I am not here.

[saimon69]

Wonder if [op] is thinking about Succubus or some other of those zombi-tentacle platformers that are appearing in youtube :P

[xboxown]

earok, would you be announcing in this forum the link to download the scropion engine (like release the engine) so people can start making games on their Amiga 68k?

Thanks in advance.

[earok]

Originally Posted by xboxown

earok, would you be announcing in this forum the link to download the scropion engine (like release the engine) so people can start making games on their Amiga 68k?

Thanks in advance.

The current version of the compiler is in the demo pack, so it can already be used for making games.

To be clear, the compiler (scorpion.exe) is for Windows only, the engine (game.exe) is for 68K Amiga only.

https://github.com/earok/scorpion-engine-demos

[xboxown]

Originally Posted by earok

The current version of the compiler is in the demo pack, so it can already be used for making games.

To be clear, the compiler (scorpion.exe) is for Windows only, the engine (game.exe) is for 68K Amiga only.

https://github.com/earok/scorpion-engine-demos

Perfect! I would not want to change it any other way! This means we can use WinUAE for the engine sad to test things and windows side to develop the game..making WinUAE again the most powerfulist tool for the Amiga developer ever!! THANK YOU ...I will work on this immediately!

[attle]

This looks great!

[UltraNarwhal]

Out of curiosity I changed the framewait setting to 2/3, but noticed game sped up (tested Zelda/AlexKidd). So a bird that took 5 seconds to travel at 50fps now took 2.5 seconds on 25fps, but 3 seconds on 12.5fps.

Just thought I'd report what may be bug, unless it's not supposed to work yet in this early version.

[malko]

As this setting is already in the online manual, I suppose it should work.
I am a real noodle here, but since there are less frames to display, I would think it's normal that it goes faster, no ?

[earok]

Cheers guys

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

Out of curiosity I changed the framewait setting to 2/3, but noticed game sped up (tested Zelda/AlexKidd). So a bird that took 5 seconds to travel at 50fps now took 2.5 seconds on 25fps, but 3 seconds on 12.5fps.

Just thought I'd report what may be bug, unless it's not supposed to work yet in this early version.

That's certainly a bug, I'll need to come back to that. In general, the intention for frameskip is to not just decrease the framerate, but increase movement speeds to compensate (so you could theoretically make a 50HZ version of the game for high end Amigas, and just change that one line to output a 25HZ version for low end Amigas)

But it's a feature I use so infrequently (none of the samples are designed to be 25HZ games) that I haven't tested it in a long while.

[earok]

I set aside one weekend a month to cram on personal projects, it's now that weekend so I'm going to be cramming on a major feature that I've largely kept quiet about - the backbone importer.

It's not something that takes a Backbone project and spits out a compiled Scorpion project, it'll instead take a Backbone project and convert it to something that the Scorpion compiler can use (eg, convert the maps to Tiled maps, convert the scenes and menus to Scorpion ink script). It may not ever be 100% capable of converting every single thing in a Backbone project, but it'll reduce the time to convert a Backbone project down a great deal.

In any case, if you've got a Backbone project you'd like to see in Scorpion, send me the source project (it can't import an already compiled Backbone game) and -maybe- I could take a look at doing a rudimentary conversion for you this weekend. Just be aware it's likely to be very buggy and not very feature complete, but it'll certainly run a great deal smoother than the original game did.

[Clydos]

Originally Posted by earok

I set aside one weekend a month to cram on personal projects, it's now that weekend so I'm going to be cramming on a major feature that I've largely kept quiet about - the backbone importer.

[Tigerskunk]

Haha, you really want to kill off backbone, don't you?
You are doing gods work, Earok...

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Haha, you really want to kill off backbone, don't you?

Wish someone would

[earok]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Haha, you really want to kill off backbone, don't you?
You are doing gods work, Earok...

Haha, cheers guys.

You know the story Steril, Scorpion evolved out of the earlier project 'Subzero' that was simply a backbone ripper. Of course, Scorpion was always intended to be far more than just a cookie cutter toolkit, but a means of developing fully realised games.

Originally Posted by DamienD

Wish someone would

Well, that was the intention at first. But unfortunately, there's one backbone dev in particular that was rude to me and blocked me on Facebook so I'd prefer that he doesn't benefit from the engine in any way. Every single other backbone dev is welcome to use it.

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by earok

Well, that was the intention at first. But unfortunately, there's one backbone dev in particular that was rude to me and blocked me on Facebook so I'd prefer that he doesn't benefit from the engine in any way. Every single other backbone dev is welcome to use it.

I wonder who that could be

[attle]

Would you consider supporting additional sprite formats? Either something like a plain .PNG with a grid of frames for sprite animations, or AseSprite / LibreSprite formats.

I tried mucking around in SpriterPro but I found it really confusing to be honest.

[earok]

Originally Posted by attle

Would you consider supporting additional sprite formats? Either something like a plain .PNG with a grid of frames for sprite animations, or AseSprite / LibreSprite formats.

I tried mucking around in SpriterPro but I found it really confusing to be honest.

If there's a simple format (preferably not-binary) that could be used instead, I'd consider it. It'd need to have at least these features:

- Variable framerate per frame (or at least, the ability to set the framerate per animation)
- Ability to set the X/Y "handle" (eg, the relative position of the frame)
- Ability to set a collision rectangle (currently only really used for games with Melee combat, eg it's used to set the hit rectangle for Alex's fist and Link's sword)

To be clear, SpriterPro isn't supported - only the Spriter beta (included in the gitrepo) is supported. It's very buggy and we're aware of that - the main reason we're running with support for that rather than Spriter Pro is that it's more suitable for use with old engines.

The Spriter Beta -does- have an extremely simple text output, so it's possible to manually create sprite sheets (I've done that on occasion)

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by DamienD

I wonder who that could be

Me.

Earok hates my guts.

[earok]

@steril707 haha yup. Totally jealous of your "backbone" games.

Here's the progress to date on the backbone converter.

[ Show youtube player ]

[malko]

Cooooool