Scorpion Engine

[Aladin]

IndieRetroNews:
Rick Dangerous - A very difficult platforming classic is getting an enhanced Amiga 1200/CD32 edition!

Originally Posted by domkid

no just 32 colors, (a600 also)

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

Second daily update - was inspired to make some further changes and I think people will like them (I hope!)

Are you kidding I LOVE them, haha!! This is going to make creating intros, floating UI stuff, and so many other things so much simpler. (Im glad i hadn't started making Visual novels in Scorpion properly yet, as this is exactly what i needed for that to work.. Just saved games now, haha!)

Hmm.. I'm surprised you arent constantly being nagged about high scores considering how many people are making arcade ports.

- The second green guy is the new "parent locked" movement type. Parent locked is fixed to the position of the actor that spawned or shot it, and also copies the animation direction - should be useful for things like wingmen in games like 1942, and splitting the legs from the torso in other games.

Acidbottle's wonderboy fairy. Oh man, the amount of things that's useful for is pretty staggering.. i can imagine using that in combinaton with other behaviour types to make really neat attack patterns.

[acidbottle]

The changes sound absolutely outstanding! It opens up so many possibilities, particularly with shoot-em-ups I would say.

The floating ankh I assume is just a 16x16 sprite in the above example, if I can use larger gfx sizes (even chopped up and joined) then that will be 100% ideal for the floating text Im trying to incorporate. Will then have to 100% make sure I get this stumbling thing working on the latest versions

Great changes nonetheless earok, thanks man!

Oh, as for the rick dangerous port, looks incredible .. amazing job on that and really polished. Cant wait to check all these games out, who needs a gaming PC right.

[skan]

Originally Posted by domkid

hey guys, just to let you know that Maria Renard's Revenge is on standby, for the Wip on Rick Dangerous for AmigameJam with Troudki (Z-Team).
[ Show youtube player ]

Cool! The gfx reminds me of this unreleased version ...are the assets the same? BTW, Dangerous Xmas would be a good port as well!

[earok]

Latest experimental update:

- Added "hide children" tickbox to animation. It simply means that when this animation is playing, all child animations are turned off (eg, on a character with a separate legs and torso actor, you may have special animations that render the whole body, in which case you'd want to turn off the legs while playing the animation on the torso)

- New CPU_ParentOrbit. It doesn't rotate by itself so you need to nudge the rotation angle each frame if you want it to move around like that (simply set VAR2 to an angle between 0-360 degrees). As with the other Parent movement type, it's a hierarchy so you can have children rotating around children rotating around children etc etc. In this case, the cherries are orbiting the ankh which is orbiting the player.





This uses up almost all of the VAR values, I may come back in the future and make it so that it uses XSpeed etc instead.

[acidbottle]

wow!

This is another cool development indeed.

On the other hand, when you mention angles, I immediately think of new game possibilties ... I wonder! Does this angle VAR essentially enable bobs and sprites to be set at to any direction and then move, if understanding this correctly? Combined with bounce that opens up many interesting project ideas!

On a wonderboy note, I cannot get the animation to trigger for that stumble earok, really fresh out of ideas, really jumbled up my code and tried allsorts. In the end have just set it to how it was before, more or less. Anims trigger for everything else in game, cannot fathom why not here!

[alexh]

Originally Posted by skan

Cool! The gfx reminds me of this unreleased version ...are the assets the same?

Looks like it. The unreleased GBA "enhanced" version looks even more polished, perhaps because the original gfx was 256 colours and it's been converted to 32-colours?

Interesting to see that the Wii version was originally enhanced for the GBA?

[earok]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

wow!

This is another cool development indeed.

On the other hand, when you mention angles, I immediately think of new game possibilties ... I wonder! Does this angle VAR essentially enable bobs and sprites to be set at to any direction and then move, if understanding this correctly? Combined with bounce that opens up many interesting project ideas!

On a wonderboy note, I cannot get the animation to trigger for that stumble earok, really fresh out of ideas, really jumbled up my code and tried allsorts. In the end have just set it to how it was before, more or less. Anims trigger for everything else in game, cannot fathom why not here!

Hmm. Hadn't thought too much about using angles for anything other than rotating one object around another. They simply won't collide with tiles so bounce won't be possible, but they should be able to trigger collisions with other actors (if you wanted to swing a ball and chain around or something like that)

Send me the latest code and I'll have a look. If it's a bug with Scorpion, I'll fix it, if it's a bug with your code, I'll work it out.

[acidbottle]

Ahh i get you, indeed naming it CPU_orbit should have been a clue to! Was thinking of how this could be used for extending the possibilities with angles, since I had never been too sure how to handle them in scorpion. Like the bat and ball in pong, as an example.

Really sorry to bug you with my bug, in fact I'd be certain it is a bug in my code since noone else is really reporting it as an issue for them! Will fire it across later for you to look at but there is really is no hurry for a fix (well, about a month or so if I was pushy haha)

[domkid]

Originally Posted by skan

Cool! The gfx reminds me of this unreleased version ...are the assets the same? BTW, Dangerous Xmas would be a good port as well!

the graphics were from the 2008 Wii version (Magic Team), recovered frame by frame and and reduced to 32 colors...

[domkid]

@Earok, super cool update...

[skan]

Originally Posted by domkid

the graphics were from the 2008 Wii version (Magic Team), recovered frame by frame and and reduced to 32 colors...

Whoa, kudos for that.
I'm gonna have a look Dungerous Xmas with a GBA emu and check those assets as well!

[Mixel]

The visual glitch you get every 18 vertical tiles, I assumed it was only when using parallax.. On one level that I only have a copper rainbow on, i have a black line at the left of the screen.. Has anyone got a work around for this? Other than not have tall maps, obviously, haha.

On the levels with parallax i have tricks to minimize or obscure this sort of thing but this isn't so easy as it's such an "outside" level. It’d look odd to obstruct it with a cloud at the heights I’m talking about.

If nobody has any ideas or it can’t be fixed I’ll have to make a new parallax backdrop for this stage too - not the end of the world, really.



Edit: I don’t think I’ve ever spent this long fiddling to perfect an ocs gradient, haha.

[Samurai_Crow]

@earok

Re:glitches with coppershade

If the vertical wraparound is based on a modulo change on the right border, move the modulo change to just outside the left border. That way it won't interfere with the palette changes behind the right border nor the sprites behind the left border. The only downside is the horizontal sprite muxes will interfere if you use them. That and one or two others are the only interference that can conflict during the visible display.

Of course this assumes a lot but it may be a common occurrance.

[earok]

Scorpion doesn't use modulo changes. The difference between the top and bottom of the buffer can't fit into a 16 bit number, ergo I have to reset all six bitplanes pointers on the wrap around line.


Short of making the screen narrower or shunting it to the right (both of those might be possible in the next Scorpion build) I don't know if a way to fit all required copper operations on the wrap around into the left side of the screen

[Mixel]

Shunting it to the right sounds valuable then. Weird off centre Amiga games seemed par for the course. (I guess this might be why!) Thinking about other non CMOhn games, vertical shooters or rainbow islands style vertical games in particular, it’ll be pretty hard to work around.

Another feature request I guess is.. (not sure if possible!) The 3(/6 in EHB) colours that are reserved when parallax is active, can I have a tick box or some way use them on copper rainbows without having to use parallax? I know they’re a by-product but they’re invaluable for covering up stuff I don’t want the player to see. The 3 mains are just placing the colours from the left side of the parallax graphic.. that’s why I can change the “copper gradient layer” by moving those colours around.. basically could I have a gradient+ mode? Because that’d give me a bunch of extra colours too if I wrap my head around it properly! (in some areas I think I could use tiles with gradient embedded in them if the copper rainbow in the background was only using up 1 slot.. for some robocod style effects.)

edit: i realise this gradient+ idea is possible already by just making a parallax file that's one long gradient, but that seems like an uneccessary waste of memory, probably?

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by Mixel

The visual glitch you get every 18 vertical tiles, I assumed it was only when using parallax.. On one level that I only have a copper rainbow on, i have a black line at the left of the screen.. Has anyone got a work around for this? Other than not have tall maps, obviously, haha.

I noticed that glitch now appears in my game and I don't use parallax or a gradient, didn't seem to happen many months ago though (before August?).

Had to change (BG) colour to black (rather than dark purple) to hide it.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

I noticed that glitch now appears in my game and I don't use parallax or a gradient, didn't seem to happen many months ago though (before August?).

Had to change (BG) colour to black (rather than dark purple) to hide it.

Interesting! My BG colour has been black the whole time.. Hmmmm.. does make me wonder if there's a simple tweak i could do that fixes it though.

If anyone else is seeing similar lines and has the memory and palette slots to burn you can just move the gradient over to the second colour slot in a parallax file, and fill the left one with black - that fixes it until you move around a lot. but having the glitch colours means you can overlay them onto the glitchy area.. uhh..

See how colour 29 destroys the line.

[Potato7542]

Very cool engine!
The problem is the semi-null documentation
would be cool If some one makes a tutorial for this

(I Tried to make one test game and, i could not make it)

[domkid]

Originally Posted by Potato7542

Very cool engine!
The problem is the semi-null documentation
would be cool If some one makes a tutorial for this

(I Tried to make one test game and, i could not make it)

it's not a problem there are several demos and videos that can help you get started