Scorpion Engine

[earok]

I've been away for far too long, so I've done a little bit of an update. I'm still half way through updating the Unity version of the editor, but the "Alex Kidd" demo has been retooled with creative commons and free licenced assets (as such, it's now called "Monkey Lad")



Assets have been pushed into the git repo, if anyone wanted to try it a precompiled ADF of the game can be downloaded from http://earok.net/games/monkeylad.adf

[zzbylu]

Nice game!
[ Show youtube player ]

[earok]

Cheers zzbylu! Always amazes me how quickly you come out with new videos

[UltraNarwhal]

Is there a way to make a block only be solid for enemies, but not player or projectiles?
In the picture it's the X blocks I'm trying to use to restrict movement out of areas.


Thanks

[earok]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

Attachment 69657
Is there a way to make a block only be solid for enemies, but not player or projectiles?
In the picture it's the X blocks I'm trying to use to restrict movement out of areas.


Thanks

For keeping an enemy on a platform, there's a special collision type: set CollType_Down to "special_stayonplatform". This is used for some enemies in the Amigo demo.

There's not currently a way of keeping enemies otherwise within a certain area, but I'll add that issue to the issues list.


Edit: An extremely hacky way to do it in the mean time could be to add a codeblock that runs on a timer connected to each enemy. This would add a little performance drain (especially if done every frame, but you could maybe do it every 5-10 frames or so), something along these lines (code might not work correctly)

if block_type == blockstopleft
actor_xspeed = 1
endif
if block_type == blockstopright
actor_xspeed = -1
endif

[UltraNarwhal]

I had the special_stayonplatform, but my enemies have AI that randomly jump, so jumped to freedom.
Got the restricted movement working by making my enemies player projectiles and changing speed direction based on left/right blockstop block.

[earok]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

I had the special_stayonplatform, but my enemies have AI that randomly jump, so jumped to freedom.
Got the restricted movement working by making my enemies player projectiles and changing speed direction based on left/right blockstop block.

Ahh that's genius - I had forgotten that actors flagged as "player projectiles" can collide with the player itself, so they can act as enemies that react to special blocks and collide with other enemies.


I had added that feature for Amigo - the upturned shells needed to be able to hurt other enemies, destroy blocks and potentially hurt the player themselves. So treating the shell as a player projectile solved that issue.

[earok]

Finally, getting close to finishing the first edition of the Unity Scorpion Editor. I managed to finish off most of the editor tabs yesterday, and get the compiler running inside Unity today

[earok]

[ Show youtube player ]

Quick preview of the upcoming Unity-based Scorpion Engine Editor, including a preview of a new work-in-progress sample game for the platform.

[viddi]

Brilliant stuff!!

[Havie]

Looking good!

[AF2013]

Impressive on what you have done

Do you know when going be release?

[earok]

Thanks guys!

For this release, I'm aiming for something this weekend. I want to complete the port of "Super Go Down the Hole" to the engine to release alongside it, basically so I can verify that the Unity version is stable enough to complete a game from scratch in.

[malko]

@earok : I wasn't able to follow closely the thread recently so hope you haven't already answered this :
If I recall correctly there were issues with game's speed on A500. Were you able to fix it or does the compiled games requises an A1200 ?

Ps: excellent work

[earok]

Originally Posted by malko

@earok : I wasn't able to follow closely the thread recently so hope you haven't already answered this :
If I recall correctly there were issues with game's speed on A500. Were you able to fix it or does the compiled games requises an A1200 ?

Ps: excellent work

It honestly depends on the kind of game, the number of bitplanes, the number of onscreen enemies all at once etc. I've done some optimizations for the next release (Colin Vella came up with some great ideas for speedups in Blitz that I've borrowed, plus I've simplified most collisions), plus I've added support for hardware sprites - so it'll be faster than it's ever been, but optimization is still a work in progress.

The intention at least is for *most* games to be fully 50FPS on A500, though some are definitely going to get a boost from Fast RAM or an 020.

And, cheers

[earok]

Fun thing to add to the upcoming sample game. There's no specific "push a big block" around feature in Scorpion, but it's achievable by custom scripting.

Example, there's a few lines of script here that convert the level blocks into an "actor" (so like a player, an enemy, or a projectile), slide that actor 16 pixels across (or until it hits a wall), and then convert it back into the original level blocks.

[nikosidis]

This is program is becoming fantastic! Looking forward to the new version. Great job

[alexh]

I think this work is incredible. I am very impressed. If there is an opportunity to contribute (patreon or something similar?) I would be happy to donate £1-2 pcm or whatever to make development economically viable.

Is there a list of people who are active Scorpion users and their projects?

There was talk of (semi-automatic?) porting previous games written in backbone (with arguably less than stellar performance) to Scorpion is that still on-going? I own all of the Tales of Gorluth games but I've not found time to play through any yet. I'd potentially pay a nominal fee for a "DX" version if they were being done.

[Tsak]

Backbone porting was pretty much complete (other than a few details remaining, which had to be manually corrected). At least it was in a previous build of the engine. Not sure if in this new build this feature works.

Patrick is already in the process of porting his TOG games to Scorpion btw. More on that from him

[earok]

Cheers nikosidis, alexh!

Next release probably won't have backbone conversion as I need to get the Unity version a bit more stable (as well as finish the port of the new sample game), but the one after that will so we can start getting TOG conversions finished.

As Tsak pointed out, Backbone conversion is more or less complete but there's always going to be manual tweaks needed to get it working perfectly due to differences in how the two engines work.

So far as active Scorpion users, outside myself, Tsak and Viddi, I believe it's only UltraNarwall at this stage. Hopefully it'll grow more of a following once it's more mature and there's more released games out there.

I don't yet have an official way of financially supporting Scorpion yet, I may look at Patreon at some stage.


Edit: New feature, hardware sprite support - currently just 4x 16 color sprites, no 4 color or multiplex at this stage. We can draw this 32x128 pixel portal animation with zero blit or redraw overhead.