Scorpion Engine

[flibble42]

I'm trying to add the text instructions in Spy Hunter using H/W sprites. I have split the text into 11 16 wide columns and added them to an animation. I can get column 1 to appear as a H/W sprite, but not 2 to 11, is their a way to select which frame the animation starts with when spawning an actor? If no, can we have one please?


Would a visible bounding box in the animation and actor editor be possible? The text strips where tricky to align because not alot of pixels to go on.


The road tiles in my Spy Hunter game use the lower 16 colours/4bpl but the cars and buildings use the 5th plane, does Scorpion render the map as 4bpl or 5bpl?


Anyone else miss and/or conditionals?


Also i was wondering, can you not have a palettes section in the Maps tab ( on the left with maps and tilesets) where you can add PNG palette files which you could quickly switch between in a codeblock.


I also noticed that the Maps tab reloads the map everytime you want to interact with a drop down, bit of an issue when your map is 512x512, can take a while.


Sorry this keeps going on, been away for 2 weeks and these things came to mind..

[Girolamo85]

I played all the levels of you demo Domkid
Very promising game, I really appreciated it
Keep going

[Potato7542]

Hi!
i know that i had to use tiled for making maps
but how i export for the .tileset.tsx format?

[domkid]

Originally Posted by Girolamo85

I played all the levels of you demo Domkid
Very promising game, I really appreciated it
Keep going

Congratulations, thank's

[earok]

Latest experimental check in:

* Fixes issue reported by @czorny where music wouldn't properly stop when stopping or changing music
* Fixes issue with system that prevents a sound from being played while it's already being played. There were two potential places where a sound could overlap itself (if the sound wasn't an exact fraction of the length of a frame, and if the game was being played in NTSC mode). The latest check in should fix both of them.
* Upward movement wasn't working correctly for things like bouncing (so enemies that were meant to bounce off the ceiling were not doing so)

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@flibble42, apologies I thought I had replied already, I've been having some issues with EAB so it might have lost the post I did.

The Amiga only has 8 sprite channels, so (assuming OCS) at best a hardware sprite in Scorpion can be 64 pixels wide if in 16 color mode, or 128 pixels wide if in 4 color mode.

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Hi @Potato7542, I'm not quite sure what you mean. You should create the tilesets in Scorpion itself (click the + button next to tileset in the Map tab), which will also prompt you to link the tileset to an image, after that you can edit the tileset's properties with tiled.

[flibble42]

So no tricks to reuse sprites, OK.


But you really need to look at your map tab, every menu event seems to call a map reload. That can't be needed. I only noticed this because i am trying to reconstruct all the Spy Hunter road sections and i need a large map.

[domkid]

Originally Posted by earok

Latest experimental

I tried the last experimental version and everything works fine for Maria and Rick...

[earok]

@flibble42 got the slow map rendering on my list to look at

@domkid great to hear!

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Latest experimental update:

* ForEach command is fixed
* Multiplex sprites are fixed
* Minor bugs and optimizations

I've tested each of the sample games and demos, and I haven't heard any other reports of things breaking recently, so I'm pretty well satisfied that it's ready for release. Tomorrow (approx ~22 hours from now) I'll stream making a new demo for some of the new rendermode and palette manipulation stuff, and then I'll release it to public maybe the day after.

[acidbottle]

SE updates as awesome as ever ..

However, possible issue still with foreach command. Not entirely sure when this started but was working on bosses and now they all spawn a second head on death and the second one floats until shot once .. all using a codeblock with the foreach actor type ...

[earok]

@acidbottle cheers.

Foreach seems to be working fine on my side after yesterday's check in. Are you able to give me a demo of the issue?

[acidbottle]

Thanks for your time earok

Have checked in a new demo build. Starts off on level 4 boss .. axe him 8 times in the head to see the issue. Have no idea why it doubles up, does this for all bosses!

Aside from adding the level 16 boss, this part of the code remains unchanged since it last worked fine.

[earok]

@Acidbottle no worries! Thanks for giving me something I could use to replicate the bug.

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Latest experimental update:

* Fixes issues reported by @Acidbottle where ForEach was still broken under some circumstances. It should be a lot more solid now, and it should even be possible to use it recursively (not quite sure if anyone would ever need to do that though!).

I'll skip the stream tonight, will do one around this time tomorrow night.

[acidbottle]

Excellent, all sorted now. Appreciate the swift fixes

[earok]

Scorpion Engine 2022.4 has been soft launched!

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

* New sample: AlarCity title screen
* New sample: Vertical Parallax AGA
* New sample: Render modes and palettes
* Rendermodes for making actors blink, flash etc
* "NoClear" option for effects requiring that BOBs aren't cleared after being blitted
* Vastly improved real time palette manipulation
* "Parallax locked" movement type for creating objects that are tied to the parallax background
* Ability to link sounds to levels (so they're loaded and unloaded with those specific levels)
* Rewrite of the codeblocks virtual machine for improved performance
* Lots of bug fixes and other minor improvements

I'll leave it for a day or so and announce it officially if there's no reported breaking bugs

[earok]

Latest experimental update:

* 2022.5 initial release (new licence keys for supporter/gold/ultimate editions are on patreon)
* Fix for Mixel - keys should work correctly on AROS roms. Note that the keyboard reading code still isn't perfect, but it shouldn't be an issue so long as you're not bashing keys more than every 1/50th of a frame.
* Fix for Flibble - y resolution can be set to 256 tall (default is still 224 tall). Note that the buffer size (on the main project tab) will need to also be increased for a 256 tall game to display correctly.

[flibble42]

Thanks for the 256y mode, makes a nice difference in appearance to Spy Hunter.


This might seem like an odd question, How fast are the Block Get and Block Set commands? Given that we don't yet have data arrays, could an area of the map be used as a stand-in?

[earok]

@flibble42

No worries!

It is possible to use map blocks to create an array, which is how the Bad Apple demo works (nearly all of the level itself is the animation in an RLE encoded format). It's not very fast but array support will probably be coming at some stage in the future.

[earok]

Latest experimental update, some minor fixes.

* "palette pointer" field on the map tab, where you can set which variable controls the parallax going left or right (normally the camera_x position) has been removed.
* In it's place, you can now set the palette pointer in real time in codeblocks (display menu). This might be useful for a scenario where most of a level, the parallax is controlled by the camera, but during a boss fight at the end you control the parallax position with a custom codeblocks variable.
* Write palette color now has an option for fast or slow mode. Fast mode is only 12 bit, and the color will be reverted to the original during a fade in or out, so it's ideal for quick flashes and transitions. Slow mode is 24 bit, and the color won't revert during a fade, so it's better for semi permanent color changes.

[earok]

Latest experimental update:

- One new feature: "On platform landed" event (for platformer actors, this will trigger when a platform actor has landed after being in air)
- One new bug fix: If set screen top was set to a large number, and there was a top panel, there would be a large gap between the game display and the panel. Now, the top panel will be moved down as well, so the distance between the top panel and the game is the same as the gap.

One minor note - part of the reason I fixed the bug above is because, with the A500 mini, copper heavy games are glitchy, but glitches can be reduced by moving the screen down. For example, if your game is normally 200 pixels tall, you could set the screen top to 56 to bottom-align it. Would also recommend moving bottom panels to above the game display, this would help as well.

[acidbottle]

Some nice work going on under the hood there earok, always appreciated.

Assuming its a bit quieter on the board here due to discord being up and running, alas this is very problematic for me so thankful you're diving in here to with updates