Scorpion Engine

[earok]

@ultranarwhal apologies, I looked at my code again and spotted what the likely cause is. I've done an emergency check in for it, been running duckstroma inside the tree for 15~ minutes without any crashes yet.

@acidbottle good luck! Let me know if there's still an issue

[acidbottle]

Originally Posted by earok

@ultranarwhal apologies, I looked at my code again and spotted what the likely cause is. I've done an emergency check in for it, been running duckstroma inside the tree for 15~ minutes without any crashes yet.

@acidbottle good luck! Let me know if there's still an issue

Cheers earok, I dont know what the fudge was going on but I shall never try and merge files from a current build to a new check-in again! Must have caused chaos somewhere so ended up copying your code to my latest build. Hope, when I go to push a new build, it doesn't grumble! My fault completely.

[flibble42]

@Mixel Really? Flibbleyness?

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

@ultranarwhal apologies, I looked at my code again and spotted what the likely cause is. I've done an emergency check in for it, been running duckstroma inside the tree for 15~ minutes without any crashes yet.

No worries, always surprised how fast you fix stuff (even though I don't need it quick). As I do some thorough playtesting over the next weeks I'll see if appears again.

[earok]

@ultranarwhal no worries!

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Done the initial check in on the Amiberry / TheA500 export. A whole bunch of notes:

1. Export procedure is basically to click the Amiberry button, choose an empty folder to dump the LHA into, and follow the instructions to copy an entry into Amiberry's whdload_db.xml file.

2. The WHDLoad slave is a generic one derived from Green Beret, but with fixes for VBR deleted (instead, VBR detections are patched out of the EXE that is exported, so at least in theory all future Scorpion versions are compatible with any generic whdload slave). The slave itself does not work with 100% of Scorpion games even under WinUAE (it seems to crash pretty much straight away on anything requiring a fair amount of chip, even if I bump up the chip ram requirements in the slave source code). In any case, the slave source is under streamingassets/exportplatforms/amiberry/scorpion_loader.s - if someone can improve the slave to be more broadly compatible, I'd appreciate it.

3. Even if a game runs perfectly in WHDLoad, it may still be glitchy on an Amiberry device (eg, one game I tested had severe glitches in the parallax, though it was absolutely perfect on my WinUAE workbench setup). If it is glitchy, it's definitely worth testing the slave in a workbench setup under WinUAE to see if it's an issue specific to Amiberry (or the version of Amiberry on the A500 mini) or if it's an issue related to the slave. It might be possible to solve this through a better combination of settings than the one I provided in instructions.txt, so please do let me know if you've got good suggestions for improving game compatibility by using different whdload_db.xml settings.

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No Scorpion Engine stream tonight, but here's the third part of the Scorpion Engine video series with Mike of BitBeamCannon!

The third video covers one of the most mind bending topics of Scorpion - the translucency system - and how, with only sixteen colors, the palette can be arranged to allow actors to be tinted in multiple different ways.

We also discuss how to convert WAV files to be used with Scorpion, how Mike made a large enemy without compromising performance, how he made a "dust particle" effect that triggers when you land after a jump, and more.

[ Show youtube player ]

[saimon69]

Hope to see the composed sprite objects used in Scorpion soon too ^^ have some interesting idea

[earok]

I have some great news and some sadly disappointing news re: Amiberry / A500 mini support.

The great news is that I've substituted the Green Beret derived slave for one based on the generic 3.1 kickstart slave. Compatibility is much better - Jackal and Creeping Me Out Hex Night (two of the most RAM heavy Scorpion games) work on the mini now. That's checked in to experimental.

The disappointing news is that copper performance on the A500 mini is not good, at all. Testing on a copper heavy game like Jim Power (I tested that game just to make sure the problems weren't Scorpion specific), you can either play with the "FAST_COPPER" setting on and suffer glitches, or with it turned off and suffer a slow frame rate. What I discovered testing Creeping Me Out Hex Night is that levels with parallax were slow or glitchy depending on whether FAST_COPPER was enabled or not, but other levels (such as the barge at the beginning of the game) where there was no parallax was just fine 100% of the time.

Amigo the Fox was, for the most part, OK from start to end - except the onscreen UI (which piggybacks on the parallax system) glitched quite a bit whenever collecting scores.

My suggestion is, if you really want to release games on the mini, either drop parallax from your game entirely or test and tweak - maybe reduce the amount of parallax - until it runs acceptably. I suspect that's why (AFAIK) none of the selected games on the A500 mini make extensive use of the copper, except for Alien Breed 3D (copper chunky) which has a wildly inconsistent framerate on the device.

[acidbottle]

Really interesting results there. Would this therefore be the same problem in any distro of amiberry, for example Amikit?

I do not have a mini but do have a pi4 running amikit and noted that 64 pixels (roughly) are cropped from the bottom of the wonderboy and depthcharge. They do not run from whdload but direct from workbench. No issue at all on a real amiga, of course.

Wasnt aware amiberry, in general, was difficult with copper but now you mention it, a few games did glitch a little.

Edit: Possible bug found with event triggers. Had one that spawned in an enemy on a specific block, out of screen, to the left of the player. It no longer triggers, at least when set to spawn 10 blocks off screen. It does however, trigger when the spawn is set to just 7 blocks off screen. Reason I noticed is that on an early March build it did spawn about 10 blocks off screen with no issue. Its no biggie, can live with 7 but it definitely wont spawn now if set to 8 or more.

[merman]

Originally Posted by earok

I have some great news and some sadly disappointing news re: Amiberry / A500 mini support.

The great news is that I've substituted the Green Beret derived slave for one based on the generic 3.1 kickstart slave. Compatibility is much better - Jackal and Creeping Me Out Hex Night (two of the most RAM heavy Scorpion games) work on the mini now. That's checked in to experimental.

The disappointing news is that copper performance on the A500 mini is not good, at all. Testing on a copper heavy game like Jim Power (I tested that game just to make sure the problems weren't Scorpion specific), you can either play with the "FAST_COPPER" setting on and suffer glitches, or with it turned off and suffer a slow frame rate. What I discovered testing Creeping Me Out Hex Night is that levels with parallax were slow or glitchy depending on whether FAST_COPPER was enabled or not, but other levels (such as the barge at the beginning of the game) where there was no parallax was just fine 100% of the time.

Amigo the Fox was, for the most part, OK from start to end - except the onscreen UI (which piggybacks on the parallax system) glitched quite a bit whenever collecting scores.

My suggestion is, if you really want to release games on the mini, either drop parallax from your game entirely or test and tweak - maybe reduce the amount of parallax - until it runs acceptably. I suspect that's why (AFAIK) none of the selected games on the A500 mini make extensive use of the copper, except for Alien Breed 3D (copper chunky) which has a wildly inconsistent framerate on the device.

Did you select Expert Mode under Settings? This gives you extra options in the game settings when loading from USB, letting you tweak how the Copper is used/set.

[domkid]

@ earok, yeahhh, it's ok for the A500 mini, I just have to try the 1st level of Maria with parallax...thank's

[earok]

@merman I didn't know about the expert mode, I had just been editing the settings in a text editor. But regardless, whether or not it's enabled, everything slows to a crawl at the parallax heavy title screen of Jim Power, it's quite apparent the music distorts. It just seems that the A500 mini is incapable of handling complex copper lists as well the original machine did.

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@AcidBottle the area around the screen that gets rendered (which also triggers spawns and blocks) was decreased to save memory. You could maybe restore the old behaviour by increasing the Buffer Width by a few tiles (at the cost of more memory consumed etc).

@domkid glad you've had success! Do you mind if I use those screenshots in a facebook post about the A500 mini? (edit, also - have you tried using auto crop and such to make the image almost fullscreen?)

[domkid]

Originally Posted by earok

@domkid glad you've had success! Do you mind if I use those screenshots in a facebook post about the A500 mini?

yes, of course

Originally Posted by earok

(edit, also - have you tried using auto crop and such to make the image almost fullscreen?)

no, I haven't tried everything yet...

[flibble42]

Well i'm having alot more fun with this..

Panzadrome

I do have questions..

Will Scorpion, as default do a tank like control system? You know rotate left and right on the spot and up and down to move forwards and back.

Also can you overlay sprites on a panel? I'm think of using sprites for the mini maps.

And does anyone have a really discordant version of Ode to Joy?

[flibble42]

Well that didn't last long
Tried to add an enemy tank.
Could someone have a look at this and explain the error for me.
PanzadromeZX - Help.rar


Thank YOU in advance

[Mixel]

Is it a plain text error or is it a gibberish seeming one? (Not at my dev machine)

I wasn’t being defeatist when I said the minimaps were impossible.. You can’t place sprites on panels, the best you could use is elements, but it’d be an absolutely diabolically convoluted and complex thing to script and would probably have a huge performance impact, (based on what griffon said about something way, way less complicated, but fundamentally similar he did w/ panels).. To recreate those mini maps + the other panel elements you’d be needing around 200 panel elements.. (I’m kind of intrigued to see what would happen if someone does try that though)

[flibble42]

"Constant enemytank-dl must not contain - (animation)"

I have no idea what it is trying to tell me.

Sprites, I figured a 1 bit plane 16x16 sprite with 1 pixel in the top left corner could be moved up/down left/right to high light the grid, but oh well..

[Mixel]

I think it’s saying the animation name must not contain.. the minus symbol. (Never seen this error before) I’m guessing that code reads as “enemytank - dl” to the compiler.

[griffon]

Avoid using minus "-" on any name or reference in scorpion. Use underscore "_" instead.

[Mixel]

It’s weird I never noticed this before though, I think I just use reallylongnamedthings

[flibble42]

I was wondering, because i was get huge long error panels, as if it was trying to evaluate an expression.. I'll give it a go