Scorpion Engine

[domkid]

yo, Wip on my new demo with Scorpion which I really appreciate (thanks Earok and Tsak),
life and score added, boss, new level, etc...
thousands more things still to do...
[ Show youtube player ]

[malko]

Beautiful
Did you thought about creating an new "[WIP]..." thread for your game ? I think it would be better.

[Tsak]

@domkid Nice work!

Regarding the latest update, with multiplexing and for the first time, 50hz shoot-em-ups for a500 are finally becoming a really viable option with Scorpion. All 16 bullet copies in the Gunsmoke example were done with a SINGLE sprite channel, which leaves the rest of the 7 sprites free! In a sense you could literally fill the entire screen with bullets (16x8=128 bullets in total)!

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

Button_down is a constant so it can't be changed. You can use it for things like

If control1_fire == button_down
;do stuff if the button is being held down
Endif

If control1_fire == button_hit
;do stuff only if fire was pressed this frame
Endif

Possible bug or user error.. The button release doesn't seem to be detected for me outside of Player1.. I have a charge attack roughed out that works for P1, but P2-4 they just keep charging infinitely.

eg I have

if control3fire == 0
if p3_charge > 0
(insert the different fireballs types for different P3_charges)
End Condition
Yeild for P3_cooldown frames
Set P3 Charge to 0
End Condition

If control3fire == button_down then
Set P3_charge to P3_charge+1
(insert animations for different charge levels)
Yeild for 1 frames
End Condition

.. So when you just tap fire it does a puny fireball, but if you hold down fire it does two increasingly powerful, faster, but shorter range fireballs. This works with the P1 version, but none of the other players. Only way to stop them from charging their attacks is to shoot them.

[ Show youtube player ] - see the end of this video, where green player can't stop charging her fireball.

[earok]

@mixel it's 99% likely to be an engine bug, I do handle P2-P4 controls a little differently, but I'll try to fix that in the next couple of days.

Did another experimental check in - fixing a few sprite bugs - along with a demo of 4 color sprites + multiplexing. Video at https://twitter.com/earok/status/143...825423366?s=20

[earok]

Time for another check in. There's a lot to unpack but it's mostly minor bug fixes, I want to get it stable enough for a major public release.

- Bumped version number to 2021.6.0

- Joystick bugs on multiplayer hopefully fixed (since joystick config for P1-P4 is all the same now)

- 128 and 256 color modes are currently disabled, I realised there was a case where they'd break scrolling. True 64 color AGA (non-EHB) is still an option.

- Parallax fixed on 5 and 6 bitplane modes

- The combination of 5 bitplane / parallax / fmode = 1 is banned (I could never get this to work right)

- Banned using parallax when sprite color range is set to something other than 17-31

- Banned using parallax when sprite width set to something other than 16 (I've had some thoughts for an AGA alternative to OCS sprite parallax, but I haven't implemented anything for this yet)

- Multiplexing works on any sized sprite

- All 256 colors can be set with the SetColor command (not just 0-31)

- New ResetColor command will reset a palette color back to what it was originally. This will be handy for "flashing" effects (eg, you can temporarily override a color and then set it back)

[Mixel]

Lots of fixes!

Just testing it and players 2 and 3 seem fixed but P4 seems weirdly tied up to what P3 is doing somehow. If I press fire on P3 it makes P4 fire.

[ Show youtube player ] - See P4 up in the top left there fires whenever the blue cleric fires. Everything else seems fixed. (any other bugs are my bugs, haha) This was me being two of the players on keyboard while daughter was the another.. Closest to proper gameplay I've managed to do so far.

Another multiplayer bug: If P1 has "Leaves Screen" set to run a codeblock, it runs it for all the players - but only on the sides of the screen.
[ Show youtube player ] - here's it running correctly when I fall off the bottom but killing everyone when I fall off the sides, haha.

[earok]

Still investigating bug #2, but bug #1 appears to be a bug at your end - please check P4_logic codeblock line 18.

[Mixel]

Thankyou, doh! Well that’s embarrassing. How the heck did I miss that.

Wouldn’t be very surprised if bug 2 was along similar lines.

[earok]

Bug 2 was indeed at my side no worries, it happens - half of the time when I'm working on a project and I run into a bug, I have no idea if it's something in the engine that's broken or something in my codeblocks.

---

Daily check in time:

- Attempted fix for Mixel's reported issue re: falling off edges bug (that one was a bug at my side!).

- New movement type: None. As the name implies, this doesn't move and it won't move even if you set the speed manually in codeblocks, but you can still reposition it by setting the X and Y position manually. For anything that doesn't need to move by itself, it's more efficient than CPU.

- New movement type: CPU_IgnoreTiles. For anything that does need to move but doesn't need to hit walls or blocks this is also more efficient than CPU.

Consider a game like 1943 - player bullets need to hit ship tiles but enemy bullets do not. It'd make sense to set the type as CPU_IgnoreTiles for the enemy but not the player bullets.

- Updated the bullet hell demo with an Axelay-inspired pseudo 3d background.





I'm hoping to publish in the next few days to the public branch.

---

@Domkid is Maria Renard's revenge an ECS game or is it set up to be AGA mandatory?

[domkid]

yesss, Shmup with Scorpion

[domkid]

Originally Posted by earok

@Domkid is Maria Renard's revenge an ECS game or is it set up to be AGA mandatory?

an ECS game...

[earok]

Originally Posted by domkid

an ECS game...

Thanks! People were asking about it on the facebook page and assumed it was an AGA title

[acidbottle]

Awesome earok, just awesome!

I have near an entire level of Starforce I want to push out as a demo very soon. Will look at the parallax in your example as this is one thing that held me back for a while.

Need moar shoot-em-ups!!

[earok]

Thanks @acidbottle, I appreciate it!

Re: Vertical parallax, there's a few gotchas involved. The base image has to be 32x32 exactly and no more than four colors in total (I added the additional colors in the bullethell parallax demo by doing some manual editing in photoshop to the resultant image). It's also extremely DMA heavy, so it may slow things down further if not on a fast ram machine.

[earok]

Just a quick note to say I've soft launched Scorpion 2021.6 to public branch. I'll announce it in a day or so just incase any breaking bugs crop up in the next few hours.

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

Preview video

[ Show youtube player ]

[earok]

Initial check in of 2021.6.1 to experimental:

New "doublespeed" checkbox in the project panel adjusts all movement speeds, animation speeds, timers, wait/yield/frame_skip commands by a factor of two to turn a game configured for 25HZ into one configured for 50HZ.

The general idea being - if you configure everything at 25HZ for lower end Amigas, with that checkbox you can produce a 50HZ version for faster Amigas with (hopefully) no other changes needed.


(The reason why it upgrades from 25HZ to 50HZ, rather than going in the opposite direction from 50HZ to 25HZ, is basically just because of rounding. Eg, if you had an animation with 5 frames, we can't round down to 2.5 frames. But we can double that to 10 frames)

Edit: It's not 100% yet, block animation speeds still need to be handled, but it should take care of most difficulties with changing the framerate automatically

[viddi]

Wow, stunning again...

[Kaizen35]

I haven't made any progress for a while because of work, family, car, home, garden etc ... And I'm really surprised how much work you've done since! And big thumbs up to Erik!
I hope that I will resume soon without too much difficulty, and look forward to testing the novelties especially for the car game as in the last video.

[Mixel]

Wow that's excellent!

Absolutely killer feature for people starting new projects. One odd thing; It halves the jump height? Is that intentional or something that needs tweaking still?