Scorpion Engine

[Pyromania]

Nice Street Fighter 2 1/2!

[Mixel]

.. Could SF2:scorpion edition have a parallax floor too? (background made of tiles though?) and a bit of sideways scrolling? Hehe. That wood panelling would look badass as 1 or 2px slices, and you could use a ton of colours on the floor then. (Too big a performance hit maybe?)

It’d immediately make it look better than the janky ports we got anyway.

I would definitely want to support someone making a functional SF engine in Scorpion, I don’t think I could ever figure out the logic involved, and fighters are basically the worst type of project to try and do solo, but.. imagining how cool a bunch of original Amiga fighting games could be is fun..

So far I haven’t noticed anything breaking from the latest update!

[nikosidis]

I'm also much more for some original fighting game than a SF2 port.
It would be cool if Scorpion engine could demonstrate something like that.
Only 2 characters or the same character to play against opponent. Could be
2-player only.

[Mixel]

I don't think anyone's really trying to port SF2..? It's just really cool to think about possibilities and this is definitely the best way to illustrate them. Build it and they'll come, etc.

Maybe a hot take, IDK: It's probably an inherently bad idea* to start making an original fighter.. 1 on 1 fighting games are the hardest genre to get right and require a lot more work than any other to make worth playing.. A mediocre platformer is still potentially worth playing, a mediocre fighter is worth like 5 mins. (looking at you Capital Punishment, lol)

Once Scorpion has 2+ player support my list of future side-projects is going to get completely reshuffled, for sure. Has anyone played Towerfall Ascension? I love that but I would like to see that sort of arena game combined with more techy powerups like Soldat / Turrican / Super Crate Box. Tiny sprites, massive firepower, total chaos.

*sometimes inherently bad ideas work out really well though!

[Pyromania]

Is the Scorpion Engine suitable to making Pac-Man style games? Or even something like the arcade classic Venture?

[earok]

Daily update time. Experimental updated with these fixes:

- Bug where sometimes moving lower right wasn't working on certain movement types (particularly CPU_Wave).
- Bug reported by Czorny where certain maps on his game weren't compiling.
- Bug reported by Mixel where it's too easy to accidentally disable a line of code.

On top of that, there's now an unofficial demos repo with the old Zelda and Ace Attorney demos, along with the source for the Pitfall 2 port and the Street Fighter 2 tech demo (Federico's latest source, I still need to add my own changes to it).

https://github.com/earok/unofficial-scorpion-demos

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Regards to Pacman style games - maybe? I haven't tried it but in theory it should be possible to put something together in that style. There's AI types designed for navigating tile mazes, and the standard player control types should work OK in a maze like environment.

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The Street Fighter 2 thing was originally meant to be a joke, and I've confirmed with Federico that he doesn't intend to take it any further than he already has, although I intend to do a little more polish on it myself. I think in all fairness, that style of game is probably doable but extremely difficult to do within memory constraints (all of the frames for all of the fighters etc) until we add the ability to load and unload frames at real time.

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

Or even something like the arcade classic Venture?

A game like Venture looks totally possible in Scorpion.

[earok]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

A game like Venture looks totally possible in Scorpion.

Agreed

New update to experimental:

- Fixed bug reported by NEESO games, blocks placed on foreground layer caused graphical glitches (blocks placed there won't actually display over top of anything, but they won't cause glitches any longer).

- New feature: "Option sound" which allows you to assign a sound to going up/down on the options menu.

[Mixel]

Yay option sound!

I have a really difficult to replicate glitch that’s pretty intermittent - to do with foreground blocks occasionally being scrambled and semi transparent, possibly the same glitch neeso reported. Usually in the past I thought I’ve fixed it by removing stuff from layers behind the foreground but occasionally it’ll happen somewhere I don’t expect it. It’s really rare though, so not the most useful bug report!

[earok]

Originally Posted by Mixel

Yay option sound!

I have a really difficult to replicate glitch that’s pretty intermittent - to do with foreground blocks occasionally being scrambled and semi transparent, possibly the same glitch neeso reported. Usually in the past I thought I’ve fixed it by removing stuff from layers behind the foreground but occasionally it’ll happen somewhere I don’t expect it. It’s really rare though, so not the most useful bug report!

It probably was the issue where, if you have a block (or maybe even just an actor) on that layer, it'd glitch out. It's because the compiler expected a literal tile on the foreground layer and not a dynamic object, so it'd try to draw the foreground tile even though there was none.

Making that fix did do another bug though - it was previously possible to have blocks and actors start behind foreground layers but now it isn't. I'll see what I can do to fix it in the next day or so.


DO feel free to report issues like that and check in your maps so I can verify and fix. I'm all for making Scorpion as glitch free as possible.

[earok]

Daily update to experimental:

- Bug: Fixed the real issue with foreground tiles, which was corruption caused by invisible tiles (eg, invisible parts of the Tilemap PNG) being drawn on the foreground layer.

- Feature: The new Option X Step and Option Y Step fields in the Panels menu allow you to have better control of menus (for horizontal menus and even grid menus). Basically each field determines how many options are stepped over when pressing up/down or left/right on the joystick.

So if you had a 2x2 options menu, you could set Option X Step to 1 and Option Y Step to 2 for proper grid control.

[Mixel]

.. Well now I feel silly for having five menu options LOL. (joking, I can easily add/remove an option..)

Reason I didnt report that issue is i couldnt get it to happen when I wanted.. It's been a bit of a Schrodinger's glitch where I keep thinking you've fixed it as i can go ages and revisit places it happened and without having knowingly done anything to fix it it'll work fine.

Now I have a full alphabet in my tileset and I've wrapped my head around some of the parallax I'm tempted to do my credits screen in the style of SOTB/Giana sisters.

Something I confirmed today: Your suggestion to avoid around 18tile height sections of the map works out perfectly. If I mask out about a 5 block high strip at every 18tile height line of the map (which is really easy in some maps, and very easy if you design the maps around it) i dont get any of the seams in the background.

[earok]

Great to hear that the 18x tile thing worked

Anyway, latest experimental is checked in. It reworks the parallax a fair bit to be a little simpler and more flexible, but it does require a 1024x base parallax png - 512x base parallax pngs will no longer work (but you can still use the utilities to generate a 1024x map)

In short, it works like this:

- The 1024 wide image is made up of 32 "slices" of 32 pixels wide.
- Each of those slices is essentially a "frame" in an animation. So when you do an import from a 32x wide image, it bumps the image over by one pixel in each frame.
- While this potentially could use up to 100K of chipram for the background, the compiler does try and reuse image data where possible (which is to say, a repetitive pattern will use up a lot less chipram than one with unique changes in each frame).

[Retro1234]

I think some great total conversion can be done with this, think you need to start doing some video tutorials to get people interested.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I think some great total conversion can be done with this, think you need to start doing some video tutorials to get people interested.

Though I fully agree, I very much appreciate how he’s just been powering along with feature updates. vid tutorials are tiiime consuming to make. If he’d made them when I started using Scorp he’d have had to remake them multiple times the amount features have evolved in a relatively short time.

There are so many different things people could want to make, almost infinite bases to cover, what would you like to see tutorials for? Maybe some of the users could pick up the video tutorial slack?

[earok]

Agreed with Mixel, videos are extremely time consuming to make and they'll go out of date quickly. The other thing is I'm not in a massive hurry to get a lot of people on board with Scorpion. Until we can get a Patreon done so that development of the engine can be financially supported, I'm happy just to focus on features and fixes for the people who are already users.

[domkid]

hello Earok,
thank you for this great engine in development, I like it a lot, and there are already a lot of demos and videos to have fun if you really want to start, I'm starting some things slowly and we can already work a lot of things, good luck for the next steps...

[Mixel]

Is there some way to stop large actors from becoming invisible when they're beginning to go off screen? I worked around it with my doors (they're a mix of actor and block) It seems to happen with particularly wide or tall actors? with the doors(tall) it was when you approach them from above/below and on wide ones it's when they're overlapping the screen sides.

Imagine a big boss actor flying around.. I have this it a little with the floating skull ghost thing.. I think there might be an option I'm missing.

[earok]

@domkid welcome to EAB!

@mixel: I can't think of any way to do it, the cutoff is because there's a limited "drawing buffer" around the camera, making the buffer larger would burn more memory and make scrolling slower in every game.

For any really big bosses I'd make them out of animated blocks, and move the camera to make it look like they were moving (using copper skies or parallax to keep the background static). I think this is essentially how the massive bosses in Apidya worked.

[earok]

Done a new update to experimental. It makes the parallax system a little more complicated, but a fair bit more flexible. I do need to apologize because it does mean that new parallax pngs will need to be generated.

The major change is that it supports 4 colors of any colors, rather than 3 colors + black. More than that, it's possible to configure exactly which color goes into the 0, 29, 30 and 31 slots (rather than leaving Scorpion to "guess" which colors should go into those slots).

The generated parallax images are now 1056 wide (which is a 32 pixel wide palette section on the left side, and the remaining 1024 pixels are 32x slices of 32 pixels as before).

The new palette section on the left has four color strips which determine which colors go into each of those slots (the first one in particular is important because it's essentially the "copper sky" background for the map, and you'll definitely want to make sure the correct color is in there for foregrounds and clouds).

If you're a little confused by that - I've updated the Flappy Fox sample which is bundled in experimental to support the new format.



Another slight change - Fetchmode 1 for AGA is now optional (and off by default). You'll get a performance boost (on AGA machines only) if it's turned on but it may cause parallax issues under some configurations (32 colors particularly, EHB and 16 colors is probably fine).