Scorpion Engine

[earok]

New update to experimental. Again it's quality of life, no new features per se.

- Fixed a handful of bugs with parallax.

- Removed the "Use index 0 for GFX" option. I've reworked PNG->Bitplane conversion to be more intelligent in this regard, so there's less likely to be issues with bobs using index 0 on levels where it'd conflict with parallax or copper skies (this also resolves an issue where tilesets were being generated with index 0 regardless of whether that box was ticked or not).

- Removed 128x pixel wide limit on icon graphics on static panels.

- Added some sanity checks in to prevent compilation of a game where icon graphics on static panels overlap the edges of the screen (this would cause an error since it'd be blitting outside of graphics memory).



Edit: I'm planning on making an official 2021.5 release once I've reworked Amigo The Fox sample with a new tileset and parallax throughout.

[invent]

Top effort @earok, I even managed to create a quick project [ Show youtube player ]

Desperately need a focused Discord discussion channel - Do have a channel James (Iridium) very kindly setup https://discord.gg/gP68b2Yp24

[gimbal]

I like the arm flapping about the 19 second mark, more games should have flair gestures like that In fact I'd call it Youtube-driven game design, add features to the game which content creators can use to put in their video recordings of your game Or you can use to non-verbally communicate with each other in a multiplayer setting.

[invent]

Thanks Gimbal, yes one of the idle animations that one Another one will be him holding Ziggy in his hand high in the air, admiring the cute floating robot ball that in this game generally follows the player and blurts out a few amusing sounds/comments.'

[malko]

Originally Posted by invent

Top effort @earok, I even managed to create a quick project [ Show youtube player ] [...]

Nice
The used colours reminds me the C64 palette.

[UltraNarwhal]

Coming along nicely

May have found bug though in latest experimental.
Using the A600 setting and clicking run in WinUAE causes my game to exit with error after pressing fire on titlescreen.

Doesn't happen if I use A500+ setting or export with exe2adf then run in WinUAE with 1MB RAM, nor using same button in 2021.4.

Uploaded latest build of game to my git.

[nikosidis]

This is very crappy video but I wanted to show the parallax game from Earok on real A1200, CRT.

[ Show youtube player ]

[earok]

@nikosidis that's cool! I didn't actually get to test it on a real machine, so good to know it's working there.


Latest experimental checked in to experimental and duckstroma repos, UltraNarwall's report prompted me to have a look at memory usage and I was shocked to find a LOT of wasted memory (there was even some redundant stuff dating back to old versions of AlarCity and The Kiwi's Tale that wasn't used but still present in the codebase). I don't exactly know how much I've saved but it was enough to make it so Duckstroma will run on A500 512/512 (whereas before it wasn't running on A600 1MB).


Edit: Sorry, I forgot to reply to Invent! It's looking really good

I do need to set up an official Discord server at some stage, but in the mean time I'm more than happy for that channel to be the defacto channel for Scorpion on Discord. Game is looking like a really cool start, excellent work

[invent]

@earok Thankyou, yes an official Discord would be very useful, I am tempted on making the game a free game on Scorpion Engine (as I may need help making it happen)

@malko, yes strictly C64 palette but Amiga Copper in background.

[earok]

Oh wow, I didn't even recognise the c64 palette

Hey uh, if you're interested in making the game completely free / open source, I'd be happy to include it in the Scorpion Engine demos pac in the git repo.

[UltraNarwhal]

Thanks Earok, worked again after replacing experimental build in folder

[nikosidis]

I love the C64 palette. Smart move to just use Amiga copper

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

New update to experimental. Again it's quality of life, no new features per se.

- Fixed a handful of bugs with parallax.

- Removed the "Use index 0 for GFX" option. I've reworked PNG->Bitplane conversion to be more intelligent in this regard, so there's less likely to be issues with bobs using index 0 on levels where it'd conflict with parallax or copper skies (this also resolves an issue where tilesets were being generated with index 0 regardless of whether that box was ticked or not).

This has had an interesting effect for me and I've finally been able to isolate all the sprites where I accidentally left some pure black in - as it has become transparent. (EHB meant I had a transparent black and another not transparent black so i had some leftover cruft from that, now it's super simple!)

- Removed 128x pixel wide limit on icon graphics on static panels.

Thanks for that one. I'm still having weird glitches between menus, or when leaving my main menu to go to the game, it shuffles the graphics around between fades. (and when leaving the intro sequence on loop, so it scrolls down, then fades back to the splash screens, its jumpled then)

Only just getting a chance to properly experiment with the parallax tonight.

When I generate a 512px parallax file with my 32x180px wide graphic, according to Pro Motion the slices are actually 31 pixels apart and my buildings are getting squashed? I've included a screenshot with 32px grid enabled and a 31px grid to show how they're seemingly not aligned right and also a close up.. that left hand tower block is correct.. The right 3 are different variations of squashed?

I may well have done something wrong, hehe. (uploaded this stuff to Git in case it's helpful, i've put my parallax related files in the Levels folder)

[earok]

Originally Posted by Mixel

When I generate a 512px parallax file with my 32x180px wide graphic, according to Pro Motion the slices are actually 31 pixels apart

That's as expected. The parallax generation moves the frame over by 1 pixel each slice in order to create the "wrap" (the reason why it only uses 16 frames rather than 32 frames to do the entire shuffle is because the two halves can be swapped). The sprites don't actually move on screen at all, they simply change "frames" like an animation.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

That's as expected. The parallax generation moves the frame over by 1 pixel each slice in order to create the "wrap" (the reason why it only uses 16 frames rather than 32 frames to do the entire shuffle is because the two halves can be swapped). The sprites don't actually move on screen at all, they simply change "frames" like an animation.

My brain. It just took me staring at the 512px version for far too long to fully grasp what you mean. (im really glad i dont fully have to understand it all, haha) Ok, I'll have this combined with foreground stuff today. Super exciting. Goddamn it that's really simple now i understand it.



I need to decide if it's worth doing parallax at all on a level where you spend 99% of the time underground.. Probably not, but also really tempting for max impact on that first stage. Hmm.


I like the spreadsheet method after initially being a bit spooked by it! I think the only thing I don't fully understand yet is how you did those two overlapping foreground layers with the Daemonclaw graphics? (Is it just a case of manually offsetting them/moving them over each other in the 512px version, in which case i guess you could have unlimited overlapping layers, it'd just be confusing to animate?)


Jeez the pole spawning codeblocks in Flighty Fox are so elegant. Amazing!

[earok]

Cheers haha. I was pretty happy with how flighty fox turned out as a demo.

DaemonClaw mockup was something like this.

Use 32x generator at 1x speed for bulk of the parallax
Use 16x generator at 0x speed for far mountains
Use 16x generator at 2x speed for close spikes

Then layer them all together in a paint program

The reason why both the far and near parts are only 16x wide is there's only 16x frames, attempting to do that trick with something wider is going to cause problems with the two halves being swapped

[Mixel]

Ah that makes perfect sense! I don't think I'll be using that, hehe. .. Oh god, yes I will, for foreground brambles or something.

I have some pretty funky looking stuff now but have found a glitch where it seems like there are seams in the parallax which get worse the further down the map you get.. And they're only mostly visible if you jump? Can only make them happen by teleporting to "3" in Cmo, but maybe easier to test in something else. (that level probably isnt even going to have any vertical scrolling so it's not a critical bug for me, but might be for something)

Other than that wow this is fun to mess with, but impossible to decide which options to use. - here's some parallax and the bug i mentioned: [ Show youtube player ]

[earok]

Daily update:

- Exiting a Scorpion Game will display remaining chip/other ram. This is mostly for my purposes (I need to put some effort in to squeezing out ram inefficiencies in the engine proper) but it could be useful for working out how much memory you have left to play with, or seeing how much of a difference any particular change makes.

- Fix for Mixel's reported issue with glitches after fading out a static panel.



@Mixel regarding the parallax on level 3 bug, I believe the problem is primarily a copper timing issue. There's only so many copper moves that can be done in a scanline, and when it happens to be on a line that crosses the splitscreen boundary AND has sprites to be configured, that might just be too many.

The splitscreen boundary is every 18 tiles I think, so if you aligned your areas with multiples of 18, that MIGHT fix it.

I did check in a slight fix to the level 3 spreadsheet to resolve the slight black line at the top left, which is a related copper time issue. I made it so that the top slice is at line 1 rather than line 0.

---

Been thinking about something to focus on for the next update, after parallax is done I really should get back into finishing up TOG1 remaster. One of the difficulties porting it is the fact that it's split into four separate parts (the original backbone game used an AmigaDOS batch file to load one part after the other, which technically could be done here also but I'd be nice to solve the problem without repeatedly exiting/reloading).

So I think the focus in Scorpion 2021.6 is going to be replacing the "data" folder with a single "cartridge" file (like the PICO-8), as well as allowing "cartridges" to be swapped out at real time in codeblocks (for launcher menus, multi-part games, games on multiple floppies, that sort of thing).

[Mixel]

Ah yes if it’s always around the 18 tiles range I can design levels around that quite easily I think! I’ll try dividing up the parallax stuff by 18px too and see what happens. It also did it ever so slightly when it was just a flat 1 layer parallax background but it was just 1px line that appeared while jumping. (it was in the same places as the lots of lines glorp now, so probably was the same issue, so easily circumvented.)

The carts system sounds great, that’s probably what’ll make CMO work on 2mb machines if I can unload a few things I assume are always in ram but don’t need to be. The quitting memory report button sounds ideal for helping prune things down too. I’m almost scared to look, lol.

Really interested to see how you implement the carts.

[earok]

Minor update to experimental, fixed an embarrassing bug that broke the Phoenix Wright demo and did some general tidy up (hopefully this hasn't broken anything else). Getting closer to the 2021.5 public release.

Slight aside, NEESO games let me toy with the source code to his Scorpion Engine Street Fighter 2 port. He originally meant as a joke but it's gradually shaping up as a viable tech demo. I did some tweaks to the codeblocks so that hadoukens can be triggered with quarter circle and fire.