Scorpion Engine

[viddi]

Amazing work so far. Getting better and better!!

[LanceT]

Looks good.

Win7 Ultimate 64bit

If project has a space in it, it will compile to OUTPUT but it won't load up in winuae. It forgets everything after the 1st space. May need to be quoted ""?
EG: <AlexKidd Part2> loads as <AlexKidd>

When I start getting this error (not sure what I did) it wouldn't go away so I unzipped the d/load to a new folder. It's error line is strange because I didn't even use my C: drive or the folders names after that.

Meanwhile later on................
I believe the error started when I clicked edit on levels (.tmx)/Level 1 then after that it wouldn't compile or run in WinUAE it produces error as in the 1st screenshot.
(Probably because I don't have a TMX editor?)


Quick question: Where does it store default settings, like file locations/default programs? I cant find in the Scorpion folder. Is there an editable .ini settings file somewhere?

[SteveMoody]

Just gave it a try here (Window 10 Pro) and had no problems. Was able to build the Alex Kidd project and run it in WinUAE without any problems.



I tried the import from PNG option and and it seems to work great.

[earok]

Hey thanks guys, I appreciate it!

@lance you're right about the spaces thing! I'll try putting the path name in quotes.

In regards to the settings save location, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...-default-saved

At the moment, there's only three settings (path to last project, path to fsuae, path to winuae). I'll likely put a settings section in the app, but for now they'll only prompt you to set them once (or, if you move winuae or fsuae, it'll ask for the new locations)

If you're still getting those errors, any chance you could zip and email your copy of the project to me? Earok3d at Gmail dot com

[LanceT]

@Earok I was able to reproduce the fault by selecting Alexkidd_ghost then in "Inspector" changing the "Defaultlookdir" to "left" then running the build project or run in Winuae.
Fixed this manually by editing a line in the "alexkidd_ghost.actor" file to read "DefaultLookDir: up"
It's probably something I shouldn't have done in the 1st place?

[earok]

Ahhh. I'll fix that so it doesn't happen.

Whenever you run the game or try to edit a level, it regenerates the actor.png files with icons of each actor. The icon is generated from the animation of an actor's default direction. But if the actor is set to a direction it doesn't have an animator for, it won't work. So I just need to include some checks for that scenario.

[earok]

I've started publishing the editor to Github (closed source binaries, though the demo projects themselves are and will remain open source)

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

* Fixed Lance's reported issue with spaces in folder name
* Also fixed Lance's reported issue in regards to having default direction of an object set to a non-animated direction

Documentation still more or less needs to be done from scratch, but the editor is a lot more automated and self evident than the command line compiler was, and I'll start making more tutorial videos.

[Bren McGuire]

Wow! so how do i use this? Scorpion Editor is all is needed to make a game?
Is this Blitz Basic?

[earok]

Originally Posted by Bren McGuire

Wow! so how do i use this? Scorpion Editor is all is needed to make a game?
Is this Blitz Basic?

The Scorpion Editor has only been under development for a few weeks, so it's neither well documented nor is it very feature rich. The Engine side of Scorpion is a Blitz Basic executable that's been in development for longer, but a fair deal of the stuff it can do isn't supported by the Editor just yet.

Over the next few weeks and months, I'll get all of the features the old compiler supported into the Editor, as well as built in documentation.

[Tigerskunk]

Great work, Earok.

[vulture]

That's a very important project earok, could mean much for future games' developement on miggy, kudos!

[Bren McGuire]

Originally Posted by earok

Over the next few weeks and months, I'll get all of the features the old compiler supported into the Editor, as well as built in documentation.

And then you can do what I asked? You can make the whole game within the editor?

Thanks for your hard work!

[crazyc]

Originally Posted by vulture

That's a very important project earok, could mean much for future games' developement on miggy, kudos!

+1 (despite my desperate desire to see your Raid over Moscow port finished)

[earok]

Cheers Steril707, Vulture, Bren and CrazyC

@Bren, the short answer is yes. The longer answer is, it's not very complete yet - even compared to the older version of Scorpion, the graphical editor version is still missing a bunch of important functions and documentation. It'll be a lot better when all of those things are up and running.

But having said that, feel free to download it, have a play with it. Break it and report the bugs you find.

[earok]

I'm having bit of a mental blockage with something.

With the previous Scorpion engine, if you had a "talkpad" configured (like in the Zelda and Phoenix Wright demos) you could make it print to the screen just by putting those words in the script. Eg, if you wanted to have someone say "Hello there", all you'd need to do is put in the script.

Hello there

You'd need to have a special talkpad object configured, along with a bitmap font, but essentially that's all you'd need to do.

But I haven't got anything like that configured in the new graphical editor just yet, and before I get to work on that I really want to nail how I want to change it.



I was thinking about adding the ability to output to different channels. For example, you could put

DOS>Hello there

To print to the AmigaDOS window, which would be a step towards getting live debugging working with the visual editor.

Beyond that, I may make it so that you can configure channels on different panels. For example, if you've got an inventory screen, you could maybe put

Inventory>Health kit

So that if you've got an inventory panel, with an attached font and text area, it'd write the words 'health kit' on that panel.


I'm not entirely sure if that's the best way to approach it though. I'd be keen to get some feedback.

[Samurai_Crow]

Are you sure you want the output redirection operator backwards from AmigaDOS?

[earok]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Are you sure you want the output redirection operator backwards from AmigaDOS?

Well... to be honest, I don't really know. But it does make sense having it like so

Hello world >DOS

So long as it doesn't inadvertently give the impression that > works like AmigaDOS redirection - all this would do is output to the command line, you couldn't use the game's script itself to redirect output to a specific file (though you could direct all output to a specific file when you start the game)

[earok]

I'm gonna try and get a new update out the door this weekend.



I'm a little bit closer to getting dialogue fully working in the visual editor.

We can import any TTF font into a PNG (and then make manual tweaks), which in turn we can link to a "panel". That panel can be assigned as the project "talkpad", so all dialogue is displayed on that panel.

The font image size is 512x112, with all of the individual characters in 16x16 grid cells.

The characters don't necessarily need to be fixed width - the relative top and left offsets from the grid determine how much margin there is at the side of a character, so we've got extremely fine grained control over how it looks and feels.

[malko]

Excellent earok !
Simply excellent !

[earok]

Cheers

New update time. In the 2019.11.1 release:

• Phoenix Wright demo has been ported and added to the repository
• "Talkpad" functionality has been added, allowing for branching dialogue sequences in games
• The ability to import fonts from TTF files
• Various minor updates and bug fixes

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

I've also done a video (apologies for the crap narration!) where I go over downloading and running the editor, as well as doing the groundwork for porting the second level of the game.

[ Show youtube player ]