Scorpion Engine

[earok]

Thanks all!

@Mixel I was super impressed seeing what Pro Motion could do, and Mike doing things with palettes in seconds that would take me minutes of mucking around in Paint Shop Pro.

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Scorpion Engine 2022.2 is up officially - https://github.com/earok/scorpion-editor-demos - everything that was in experimental is now part of the main build.

Initial focus of 2022.3 is going to be export options (A500 mini, attempt to set up emulation wrapper for distribution to non-Amiga users on Windows, Mac etc), also to get custom splash screens going for patreon backers. I'm going to see if I can manage a faster turn-around on major updates, say every couple of weeks with fewer features rather than every couple of months with large numbers of features.

[Silverstreak]

Congrats @Earok!

[merman]

Wow, that new game looks amazing!

[DavidQ]

I enjoyed the video. What a great project Earok, I'm also following this with interest.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Mixel

That's such a damn good video! Amazing. Congrats both. I learnt a few things from this too, really interesting.

I didnt realise the panel gap was adjustable.. ! Looking forward to watching Mike use ProMotion more too in the scorpion workflow, as I love it but it's UI is so weird to me that i have a lot of adjusting to do.

Is weird because as far as i know at the beginning was very related to DOS Deluxe paint but that was in 2005, not sure now

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Is weird because as far as i know at the beginning was very related to DOS Deluxe paint but that was in 2005, not sure now

Oh yes it still advertises its DPaint-like features but it requires such an odd set of workflows when you’re used to a more “modern” style (photoshop onwards) - I think it’s by far the most powerful, feature complete pixel art tool out of the box, but it’s a bit like blender or something - like “here’s a million features, have fun!” So it’s sometimes like UI overload for me.

ProMotion uses the same “select/pickup brush” paradigm Amiga apps use over the more common copy/paste, which is very cool indeed it just feels odd (to me) in a modern ui. I’d love to be able to use it for more of my stuff, possibly replacing Pyxel Edit. (Pro Motion also supports live tileset editing, but I haven’t found out how to make that play nicely with scorpion yet!)

[earok]

Cheers for the kind words @silverstreak @merman @davidq

Here's part two of the video series, it's maybe a little more "low level" than the first, covering how to assemble animations and create controllable actors.

[ Show youtube player ]

[acidbottle]

Shall sit down with a coffee later and absorb some more of these great vids!

Had a eureka moment earlier and am unsure if its possible to set scroll speed to match player_xspeed. The reason I ask is that WB has a scroll that, upon carefully watching some longplays, activates at certain triggers on the map.

So I setup a trigger event and activate a codeblock to set scroll speed to emulate the arcade, yield for a few frames and then set scroll to 0 again. It works really well but does judder unless i set scroll speed to match player speed, which is fine if player didnt have 3 movement speeds

If there is no way to achieve a player/scroll speed match then no worries, thought id ask!

EDIT: Actually just dawned on me, can set an IF/ELSE condition depending on actor that is set ... ignore the above!

[earok]

@acidbottle ah, great! I'm glad you've worked it out. At some stage the scripting engine will support fractional numbers, but I'm not totally sure when that will be.

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First check in of 2022.3 is done. Focus for this version is going to be export options, with the eventual and hopeful goal of adding WHDLoad/A500 mini export, maybe a few other platforms that support running or emulating Amiga in some way.

- I've reworked the EXE2ADF export a little bit, renamed "Export -> ADF" (still uses EXE2ADF under the hood)
- Added a Windows 64 bit export option. This basically just does an export of FS-UAE configured with AROS to run your game.

X and C are fire one and two because it's configured on both ports to be a CD32 pad by default.

This is only the first check in, so default settings may not be adequate, and more CD32 pad controller configurations should be added (at the moment there's only XBox 360 for Windows). Also there's a batch file to run the game which I may substitute with a simple launcher (just for things like windowed or not, kind of like the launcher you see sometimes on Unity games).

If you want to customize the output, feel free to play around with streamingassets/windows64/fs-uae (you could also replace the contents of this folder with an earlier or later copy of FS-UAE)

[flibble42]

Just wondering if in Scorpion its possible to center a 15 wide 16x16px map on the screen.

Also Having palette issues (don't fully understand), what i see in the map tab is not what i see when run.


The editor looks like this




The game looks like this




Cheers

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by flibble42

Just wondering if in Scorpion its possible to center a 15 wide 16x16px map on the screen.

Also Having palette issues (don't fully understand), what i see in the map tab is not what i see when run.


The editor looks like this

Attachment 75240


The game looks like this

Attachment 75241


Cheers

Is this a game for AGA or for OCS/ECS? the palette values are a bit different between the two (12 bit values OCS, 16 bit values ECS) and you might need to tweak up

[flibble42]

OCS/ECS based, looks the same on all hardware though.


I can say that the brighter colours are a value of 255 and the dim ones 200.

Heres the project if anyone wants a look..


DanDareZX.rar

[Mixel]

Do you have every single spectrum colour present in your game’s palette? (Project tab) May as well delete all of the ones that aren’t necessary. they should all be coming out the same if they are.

You can move the map around with display/set camera position in a codeblock, the x,y values represent the top left corner of the view (I think!) sometimes you want to use a trim of empty around the map too in a non scrolling single screen game.. I certainly do in wizonk and I can’t really remember why, haha!

[flibble42]

In the map files only 2 colours sre not used Magenta Bright and Blue Bright..


So 13 in total.


And not present in the project tab, don't know how to that, can i not just import it?

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by flibble42

Just wondering if in Scorpion its possible to center a 15 wide 16x16px map on the screen.

Also Having palette issues (don't fully understand), what i see in the map tab is not what i see when run.

The editor looks like this

Attachment 75240

The game looks like this

Attachment 75241

Cheers

I see you haven't set your palette. You're currently using the default Scorpion one. See that Project_Palette.png in your root folder? Edit that file and change the index colors used to your palette.

Also I've seen your assets are using non OCS Amiga colors. So it might be a good idea to also convert these.
F.e. your blue color 0101b9 should become either 0000bb or 0000aa.
Or your grey color c9c9c9 should become either cccccc or bbbbbb. Depending on how you round up the colors you'll either end up with slightly brighter or darker versions (but they will still be close to the original).

[griffon]

You just have to set the project palette accordingly.
The ZX spectrum has a fixed 16-colors palette, so you can do it in one of those 2 ways:

1) set the colors from the prject page, by clicking the number under every color and inserting the correct value. Keep in mind that to obtain the exact same hues you have to use 24 bit AGA color. for ECS, you have to change them slightly

2) create a project_palette file with the correct colors.


I attached the project_palette.png file that you can just paste in your project folder, and atached what your project page should look like after the import.

You won't need to use more than 16 colors in your project if you're going for a 1:1 conversion, so you can reduce it to 4bp / 16 colors from the graphic section of the main project tab.

The project palette is really tiny, you might need to magnify your screen to right-click on it and save it. Or just copy the values from the bigger thumbail directly in your project tab.

[flibble42]

I think that fixed it, the shadows appear ingame now, thank you.

[earok]

@flibble42 glad you've got the palette sorted out. Screen center is ambiguous on Amiga since the overscan area on left/right and top/bottom isn't even (and some games do align the screen to the right in order to get more time for copper operations on the left), but in any case the default setup of 256 wide (16 tiles) aligns in the center of the regular Amiga screen. I don't think 240 wide (15 tiles) can be centered in exactly the same way since you can't nudge the screen over by half a tile.



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Latest experimental check in:

* Clicking category in codeblocks brings up a full sized pop-up box with inline documentation on what each category is for. I was a little loathe to do this, but the categories keep getting longer, so hopefully it won't be too hard to get used to.

* New command under the new control category: Set Jump Controls. You can use this to override the default jump control settings at runtime.

One cool trick you can do to make it so that up-to-jump is disabled when a player uses the second button to jump:
- Create a one line codeblock that sets jump controls to second fire only.
- Create an event on the project tab that triggers that codeblock whenever the second fire button is pressed.

* Added Mac export. Note that this doesn't contain a copy of FS-UAE, you'll need to download the appropriate one (Intel or ARM) and use a Mac to extract that DMG into the folder. It could maybe work for Linux as well but that's untested.

[flibble42]

Yeah the centering is a real pain, i tend to go for presentation so my OCD is kicking in big time


Unfortunatly it is something i can't change as the Spectrum version is 15 tiles wide and won't work otherwise. When and if i ever make an Amiga scrolly version it can be remedied.


Talking of presentation how do i tell a panel to be 16px from the top of the screen?

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by flibble42

Heres the project if anyone wants a look..

Here's a tweaked version, reduces colours wasted for panels and lowers screen buffers to save memory.
DanDareZX_Tweaks.7z