Scorpion Engine

[earok]

Second daily update - fixed a couple of longstanding bugs that prevented a simultaneous top and bottom panel from displaying correctly. Also tided up some code related to the talkpad - hopefully this won't break anything, I've given it a few rudimentary tests with different combinations of top and bottom panels etc and haven't had any issues.

[ElectricCafe]

Great work on the panels, I’ll sync up and give it a try!

[acidbottle]

that panel bug fix is a major godsend for this particular project, many thanks from me for that

The anim is now triggering well to, again massive thank you for the fix, as well as all the other bits and pieces!

The only downside is the 512 width limit of maps, 1 of mine is 550 sadly, going to need a massive edit

still some major improvements there, many cool projects going full speed .. good times.

[Mixel]

That is really good news! Top and bottom panels is going to be really handy. Great updates!

It dawned on me that maybe the parallax/copper system already works how I wanted it to? If the .parallax.png is the same for the entire width, is it loading 32 separate frames of animation or just repeating 1, memory usage-wise? (If so, sweet! Sorry for requesting something that’s already happening, haha)

[earok]

Cheers guys!

@Mixel yes, it is designed to work like that - every identical strip of 16 pixels is only stored once, so if all of the slices in a parallax image are the same, it'll only store one strip.

[earok]

Daily update:

8SVX files are no longer "copied" to the output folder, the data is extracted and merged into the 0.GFX file.

It's part of a longer term plan to allow SFX files to be "bundled" so that, for instance, sound effects that are only relevant to a particular level can be included only in that level rather than burning up chipram everywhere in the game.

Should also result in a bunch of minor improvements too (eg, slightly faster initial load, slightly lower overall size and memory usage)

[amigaosx]

I did a quick test for a final fight remake. this tool is awesome. Check here: [ Show youtube player ]

Question1: I tried to make a parallax background but it messed up the color palette of the entire map. Does the parallax background has a limit of colors?

Question2: Is it possible to swap color palettes? Let's say I want a title panel with a certain color palette and then the palette swaps for the rest of the game.

Question3: Where do I get the latest scorpion engine update?

Thanks!!

[Mixel]

Sorry if this is exclusively aimed at earok but
1: the parallax files can only have 4 colours per line, but otherwise there’s no limit. They’re only a tiling 32px wide thing though. (It’s complicated you’ll have to search the thread) it doesn’t use the same palette as the rest of the game. Edit: Oh! I know what will have happened. The parallax file is displayed in the last 3 colours of the 32 colour palette!)

2: you can swap colour palettes at the right of the levels tab, each level can have its own override palette. You can also edit palettes in codeblocks at any point in the game by adjusting individual colours.

3: experimental is at:
https://github.com/earok/scorpion-editor-experimental
Stable is at:
https://github.com/earok/scorpion-editor-demos
Unofficial sample projects at:
https://github.com/earok/unofficial-scorpion-demos

If you install GitHub desktop you can have them all autoupdate for you.

[domkid]

Originally Posted by amigaosx

I did a quick test for a final fight remake. this tool is awesome. Check here: [ Show youtube player ]


Question1: I tried to make a parallax background but it messed up the color palette of the entire map. Does the parallax background has a limit of colors?

Yes, parallax uses the colors 0, 29, 30, 31

[amigaosx]

@Mixel
Thank you for your advice, I have now Github with the latest repo of scorpion.
I didn't fully understand your explanation about palettes but I'll look into that. At least I know that is possible to swap palettes.

@domkid and @Mixel

I see that the problem with the colors is a you guys say with 4 colors of the palette (0, 29, 30, 31) I've attached a pic, though I'm not sure how to solve this, should I use less colors for the foreground map? Going to take a look at this whole thread. Thanks!

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by amigaosx

@Mixel
Thank you for your advice, I have now Github with the latest repo of scorpion.
I didn't fully understand your explanation about palettes but I'll look into that. At least I know that is possible to swap palettes.

@domkid and @Mixel
I see that the problem with the colors is a you guys say with 4 colors of the palette (0, 29, 30, 31) I've attached a pic, though I'm not sure how to solve this, should I use less colors for the foreground map? Going to take a look at this whole thread. Thanks!

Yup you’ll definitely need to reduce colours on the foreground map. Good luck with the thread. Respect for trying such an ambitious project.

One thing it’s worth knowing about.. are you trying to make an AGA only port, because some of your colours aren’t OCS safe(?) it’s very likely you have some colours there that are much closer to each other than you think when ran on a non-AGA machine.. you can tell they’re ocs safe if they have 3 matching digits, like 33ee22 - something like 4e1df8 or whatever is only going to appear 100% colour accurate in AGA. .. I think? (Someone correct me if I’m wrong on this.. lol)

This is the palette button I meant, when you have a map selected, you can use the “override pal” button at the right here and select another palette file.


To change an individual colour during the game you’d put display/setcolor in a codeblock. So you can switch out the palette any time during gameplay it just takes a bit of fiddling about.

[amigaosx]

@Mixel
Thanks for your support, I'm not sure if it'll be possible but I'll try.

My target is that this could run in a OCS machine, I see what you mean about the colors, when I tried it on my real Amiga some of the colors didn't look right. I understand that this is like the websafe colors?
I see that palette swap button now, I thought it had to do with PAL vs NTSC lol.

[Mixel]

Not quite like websafe colours but similar principle.. OCS is only pulling from 4096 total so ideally when making your palette you need to limit the bit depth to 4/4/4 across RGB channels. You can do that in Grafx2, Pro Motion NG, or by booting an Amiga in OCS/ECS mode and using (for example) PPaint.

*I may be wrong about some of the vagaries of this - It just seems that in 4/4/4 bit depth it you only have 3 digits, not the 6 you get in a truecolor palette. So every second digit is kind of redundant? If you make a palette in, for example DPaint 3 it’ll only give you 3 numbers.. But I see other people using weird colour codes in ocs targeting scorpion games so I feel like I’m probably losing my marbles a bit here, lol, and there’s some nuance to it I don’t understand. Here’s a neat list of all the 12 bit colours? https://rangevoting.org/ColorCode.html#

If you’re hoping to get final fight to run on ocs machines without significant expansions I think you’re going to hit some problems.. But it’ll be neat to see what sort of spec it needs to run well.

[earok]

Final Fight on OCS would indeed be quite tricky because of the sizes of the characters, I'm assuming the version that's already out there had limited frames and possibly non-interleaved blitting to make everything fit? I believe that Leathered's (RIP) attempt in Blitz Basic required a lot more than a stock machine had in order to run.


The Metro Siege guys have built a kick ass engine that allows every body part to be an individual sprite, allowing for the construction of huge and fluidly animated characters that squeeze into 512K chip. They've also gone for a 16 color palette for their bobs (leaving the rest of the 32 colors available for sprite parallax and such, but also saving precious DMA and memory).



===

Daily update:

- Free chip ram and free other ram included in debug dumps

- Add21K is configured by default for running with "Run in WinUAE", though note that you'll need to delete your output folder before building again. The long and short of it is it'll save you 21KB of chipram. Exe2ADF -already- uses Add21K so there's no change made to ADF builds.

- A few minor micro optimisations. Levels should load *slightly* faster.

- Demo from Lemming880, it's a variation of the Ladder demo but with snapping turned off - if you'd prefer to be able to move left and right on the ladder as well as up and down, I'd recommend looking into it.


(edit: Just checked in some emergency fixes for a bug that could have caused a player to not spawn)

[acidbottle]

cheers earok, scorpion is getting better and better with each update! sense of community is amazing to

Now, is there anyway to put a warning message on compile with maps with a width greater than 512? That is, rather than "unable to compile". Not sure I had any on my 550 map but completely appreciate some people might so is fair everyone knows the potential issues.

For some unfathomable reason I have a cpu_path platform actor that goes up/down and a specific player actor falls through it everytime. left/right cpu_path actors are totally fine though. Is this a possible known issue, it used to work but did note on occasion it wouldn't. Its the last game breaking bug I have

[earok]

Re: showing a warning rather than an error, I don't really have a "framework" for warnings that aren't errors when compiling at the moment. I'll think about it.

I guess the fall through is probably something to do with platform_snap? If the value is set too low, you can expect actors to fall through platforms. I was thinking maybe I should ditch "platform_snap" as a global value and replace it with values that can be set specifically on each platform actor (so that it feels right with platforms moving at different speeds, different directions etc)

edit: And, cheers for the kind words

[Lemming880]

@acidbottle: Not sure if this is your case, but you fall through platforms when there's a second actor with 'control' in the screen.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by earok

Final Fight on OCS would indeed be quite tricky because of the sizes of the characters, I'm assuming the version that's already out there had limited frames and possibly non-interleaved blitting to make everything fit? I believe that Leathered's (RIP) attempt in Blitz Basic required a lot more than a stock machine had in order to run.


The Metro Siege guys have built a kick ass engine that allows every body part to be an individual sprite, allowing for the construction of huge and fluidly animated characters that squeeze into 512K chip. They've also gone for a 16 color palette for their bobs (leaving the rest of the 32 colors available for sprite parallax and such, but also saving precious DMA and memory).



===

Daily update:

- Free chip ram and free other ram included in debug dumps

- Add21K is configured by default for running with "Run in WinUAE", though note that you'll need to delete your output folder before building again. The long and short of it is it'll save you 21KB of chipram. Exe2ADF -already- uses Add21K so there's no change made to ADF builds.

- A few minor micro optimisations. Levels should load *slightly* faster.

- Demo from Lemming880, it's a variation of the Ladder demo but with snapping turned off - if you'd prefer to be able to move left and right on the ladder as well as up and down, I'd recommend looking into it.


(edit: Just checked in some emergency fixes for a bug that could have caused a player to not spawn)

He can try to use FF assets from the Super NES that are a bit smaller, or point to port Mighty Final Fight

By the way if you need soundtrack, my two channel musics are available - PM me

[amigaosx]

@earok
Ok, maybe AGA is the way to go for Final Fight, I'm just playing with Scorpion Engine and found it very intuitive.
Is there a command for skipping frames instead of slowing down the framerate?

@saimon69
Great! I'll send you a PM. thanks

[earok]

Originally Posted by amigaosx

@earok
Is there a command for skipping frames instead of slowing down the framerate?

I don't quite follow - do you mean, if it's possible to keep the game running at the same speed even if frames are being dropped?

---

Daily check in:

* Some minor optimization tweaks to try and get scrolling and tile redraw going a little faster. If there's any weird glitches on tiles, please let me know.

* One major new feature - palette swap. For an entire animation, you can change all of the colors of a particular index from one to another, so that should be useful for enemies that have different colored outfits on different levels, or Street Fighter 2 like games where player characters can have different colored uniforms. However there are a bunch of caveats:

- The change is permanent but reversible, so if you swap 1 with 2, you'll want to swap 2 with 1 to reset to the default colors for an animation.

- Changes can be potentially destructive - if you were to change every color on an animation to a single index (so you had a frame that was entirely white), there'd be no way to make it look how it originally was.

- It could be very slow. I'd recommend doing the color swaps before the start of levels rather than in the middle of them.

- Only one copy of each frame is actually stored in memory, so using palette swap on an animation will effect every animation with identical frames. My recommendation is to actually make an animation with every frame an actor uses so that you can run the command once.