Scorpion Engine

[flibble42]

I hate makeing reports like this, Scorpion seems to have jumped from 15% GPU to 30%. Only noticed because of the UK weather. Hope i'm wrong though.

[flibble42]

Onto something more useful, as suggested i am trying to write my own teleport routine, how do i access the x,y etc of events on the map screen?

[earok]

Latest experimental

- Fix for issue reported by BitBeamCannon (Using SetAnimation to an animation with a codeblock triggered on the first frame was breaking code execution)
- Fix for issue reported by Flibble42 (copy/pasting some commands wasn't taking all of the settings, particularly camera reset)
- Fix for issue reported by Mixel where gamepads could interfere with the editor (I think maybe this was the issue Flibble42 reported as well recently? Let me know if it was something else)

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Flibble42 There's currently no way to access information about the triggered event. As a stop gap, you could have a separate codeblock for each event that has the X and Y hard coded.

[flibble42]

@Earok


You what m8? Have you not played Spy Thingy? While your suggestion is technically doable it's not really practical. The tiled map is in a state of flux, the trigger events can be cut and pasted so the names will stay valid but the coordinates won't.



(Please read this next bit and imagine sarcasm and cheekyness.)


*cough* Did it not occur to you that surfacing the event information might be a good idea when you wrote your teleport routine?


Clearly "YOU" can access the values when an event triggers. Could you not push the destination values onto the stack and then the custom teleport routine can pop them off. No new variables needed, ta da.


Anyway, you have a list as long as all our arms put together so for the time being i'll just keep building the map, working on the river section at the minute so i can get the car>boat and boat>car transitions nailed down.


All the best.

[flibble42]

@Earok


https://www.fromdustscratch.com/2018...drain-battery/


I don't know if this blog post could be applied to Scorpion, maybe you already did it.

[Mixel]

From my experiments with frame limiting scorpion you really see the difference when you’re scrolling up and down lists, and it does have an obvious impact on the animation preview, so I’m glad it’s got the full refresh rate, generally. You can frame limit it to 15 in nvidia control panel (or whatever) though if it’s really sucking your battery that much? If you have a 120+hz laptop display maybe it’s running at the full 120+fps? You could at least limit it to 60..?

Oh and ty for the “usb input device spookily controlling the editor” fix Earok, that was an odd one.

[earok]

Latest experimental:

The next few updates are probably going to relate to improvements and overhauls to the UI. Starting with:

Number fonts support custom "radix" numbers.

A radix number is basically the maximum value a number can contain before it adds another digit. As such, the radix number for arabic numerals is 10, and that's still the default, but you can overwrite that now.

Mixel Had been using the numberfont system for things like profile pictures on a UI, but would have been restrained to exactly 10 images (the width of the image divided by 10). Now there's no limit.

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Target framerate is set to 50. It can't be set lower because the animation window animates at 50HZ, as per the actual Scorpion games running in PAL mode.

[flibble42]

@Mixel

I was looking for a free dev system to write a front end for MAME, lets be honest the built in one is a bit meh. After seeing Scorpion i thought Unity might be the way to go, but the more i read the more i find that people love it or hate it, i'm starting to come down on the later.

The whole, i'm alright Jack, doesn't bother me and my desktop PC with no power issues outlook is not helpful.

Lets face it Unity is badly behaved, either because of poor default settings or poor coding (Not you Erik), reducing battery life from 8hrs to 2hrs is not on. My laptop has an expected 4hrs life when idle, imagine what that is when under load.

I consider Firefox to be a resource hog but when idle it uses about 1% CPU and 0% GPU, when i ask it to play a YouTube video that jumps to 5% and 10-15%, if i pause the video it goes back to 1% and 0%. I consider that a well behaved app.

Why Unity insists on using way more processing power than needed is a mystery, any decent system should only use what is required when it is required, 15% GPU usage to render a scaled 16x16 sprite at, lets be honest, a few frames a second is insane.

The blog post provides a little bit of hope for Unity, restoring battery life back to 7hrs is a massive improvement.


Just my thoughts..

[Lemming880]

I've upgraded from 2022.4 to 2022.5 and the player is not instantly moved to a checkpoint or teleport anymore. Instead the screen scrolls to it. Is there a way to get it instant again? I'm talking about "player > setposition".

[flibble42]

@Lemming880

Originally Posted by earok

Ah right - I've made a note to look into it.

I wouldn't use the teleport function at all, since it'd overwrite the X and Y position rather than just the Y position. I'd do something like:

Set Player Y Position = Player_Y + Dist
Camera Y Position = Camera_Y + Dist

Whereas Dist would be something like the height of the map minus 256. Also would need to untick the "reset" box on the camera command.

Maybe this can give a heads up.. helped me

[Lemming880]

In my case I need to set the X and Y position for the player, not just Y. And it doesn't make a difference if I use "player > setposition" or "display > setcameraposition". They both slowly scroll horizontally. I remember it used to scroll fast. Then at some version of scorpion it became instant. Now it has changed to slow scrolling.

[flibble42]

@Earok


Finally got round to it, my issue with game controllers isn't ghost inputs effecting the editor, It's more another thing Unity should not concern it's self with. When you launch Scorpion make sure that no controllers (in my case XBOX One) are connected, then connect one, i get a notification of the HID device and it failed. I hope Unity isn't wasting time scanning for hardware changes. This is stuff that windows should deal with before Scorpion is launched. Admittedly i do like that it notices changes in files, but that has utility.


So thats my report on that.

[flibble42]

Originally Posted by Lemming880

In my case I need to set the X and Y position for the player, not just Y. And it doesn't make a difference if I use "player > setposition" or "display > setcameraposition". They both slowly scroll horizontally. I remember it used to scroll fast. Then at some version of scorpion it became instant. Now it has changed to slow scrolling.

The Max camera scroll speed was reduced.

Did you uncheck the RESET option in the camera command? That should make it instant.

[Lemming880]

Yes I tried with camera reset off but the screen would still scroll the last bit. After much messing around with the coords I now have the first checkpoint working. The move player coords are X280:Y160. But the move camera coords need to be X152:Y48. It works but probably not as intended.

[flibble42]

@Earok


Latest Exp update, goto the fonts tab, select defaultnumberfont then select defaultfont, this should cause an error.


Also some of your confirmation boxes are randomly not rendering properly, delete code block has happened a few times.


Cheers

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by flibble42

@Earok Finally got round to it, my issue with game controllers isn't ghost inputs effecting the editor, It's more another thing Unity should not concern it's self with. When you launch Scorpion make sure that no controllers (in my case XBOX One) are connected, then connect one, i get a notification of the HID device and it failed.

What does the notification look like? Is it a little pop up in the bottom right of the window? If it is - that’s not scorpion or unity’s fault, it may be windows’ 10/11’s inbuilt game overlay and can be turned off?

[flibble42]

@Mixel


Nope it's Unity, Smack in the center of the screen, Unity's theme, i think i can tell the difference between Unity and some Windows function that is TOTALLY not enabled.

[Mixel]

That’s v weird. I’m constantly plugging joysticks in/out and don’t think I’ve seen that.

Also, it was a question, chill out maybe?

[flibble42]

@Mixel


Sorry if i'm coming off a bit short, it's to hot, worried about my PC melting down and waiting for cleaning stuff so i can get inside.


I am starting to get into the habit of checking "bugs" multiple times instead of just posting, so yes i took it as a bit of a slight that you thought i couldn't tell the difference, for that i'm sorry. But to be honest if you read your post back it wasn't really a question.


Sorry

[earok]

Latest experimental update is a fairly substantial one. I think I'll need to do a UI panel demo to demonstrate everything.

* Addressed teleport camera issue raised by Flibble42 and Lemming880 (basically making it so that the camera instantly resets on the player's center after a teleport)

* Addressed issue raised by Flibble42 re: selecting fonts

* Added ability to flag fonts as "monospaced", also the spacing/height settings are moved out of the panel tab and into the font tab.

* Upgraded the "counter" element type. Previously there was a Counter1 and Counter2 image (essentially for being able to do things like half hearts and full hearts on Zelda games, but without a Counter3/4 option there would be no way to do quarter hearts, for example).

It's now replaced with a single Counter image that can now has a "Counter division" setting, so for example to have four heart quarters, you'd have a single sheet with all four hearts in a line, and then divide it up into four.

If you were previously using counter2, the upgrade required is as follows:
- Double the size of your counter1 image
- Put the counter2 image on the right side of the doubled counter1 image
- Set the counter divisions to 2

* There's now a new "text" element type. It's pretty straight forward, link it to a font and a string variable, and the element will show the text in that string. That was the #1 most requested feature for the 2022.6 update and may be useful for things like entering character names.

* Various upgrades to text importing, including being able to set the width and height of each character "cell", the overall font size, and just the general ability to have any size font image (so long as there's 32 characters across and 7 characters down)

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@flibble42 I can't say I've seen the HID issue before, I'd need to see a screenshot at least.