Scorpion Engine

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

God damn, that's looking good. Did you have to do a lot of trickery because of the 8x8 tiles?

Edit: Am I allowed to reshare the video to Facebook and Twitter?

Not much trickery, some minor small level geometry will need changing though.
Where a tile for a platform has the graphic at the bottom I overlay a 8x16 rectangle slope block and for graphic only on top bit of tile I make it a platform.


Wait a week before sharing video, I might have made something nicer by then

[coldacid]

Originally Posted by earok

I really need to implement crunch sometime, the main issue is I need a crunch system that I can crunch with in C# and decrunch with in Blitz or ASM. Imploder would be great but I haven't been able to translate the C versions of Imploder to C#.

Unity still allows you to call to the system to execute an independent process, right? If you can get the C version of Imploder to build and run on Windows then you should be able to write C# code to build a command line and use System.Diagnostics.Process to run the Imploder program. It would be a good workaround until the Imploder algorithm can be implemented in C#.

[earok]

@ultranarwall Nice! I'm glad you've worked out a way around the 16x16 limitations.

---


Experimental check in done today, and it's a fairly substantial one!

I *did* manage to get imploder crunching working in the end (by creating a DLL out of the C imploder). Only tested on a couple of games (Amigo the Fox, which now uses less than 1/3rd of a disk, and CMO:HX) and it reduces the total size on average by about 60-70%. This should also substantially reduce the loading times of floppy games, especially on faster Amigas.

It's on by default but can be turned off easily if needed.

[domkid]

wow, great job...

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

I *did* manage to get imploder crunching working in the end

Very nice, Duckstroma was using 69% of disk now it's only 29%

[Mixel]

Wow! yup, that's an incredible difference! my output folder was 3.7MB before and is 1.3MB with implode active! :O

[malko]

Originally Posted by earok

[...] I *did* manage to get imploder crunching working in the end (by creating a DLL out of the C imploder). [...]

You rock earok !

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

Wait a week before sharing video, I might have made something nicer by then

I made it nicer . I'll start a new thread for any future updates to the port.

[ Show youtube player ]

[malko]

Excellent UltraNarwhal !

[nikosidis]

That game is fantastic Looking good.

[AmyMor]

Wow!
I played it in Frodo emulation, great title!
Scorpion Engine is a slice of the AMIGA future!

[saimon69]

Narwhal might be upset at me because i did not finish Dusckstrom and the game before tunes but if he need help i can do something for the Abbaye des Scorpions ^^
Would you like original tunes backported to Amiga or a completely different take on it?

[Cobe]

Originally Posted by malko

You rock earok !

+1

You grind and growl! :}

I wish I had more time or at least an idea for some simple platformer...

[earok]

Thanks guys!

Did a little update to experimental that addresses two issues:

1) Hopefully there's no longer any "flashing" when fading out on a slower Amiga on a level with parallax. (And hopefully this hasn't introduced any new bugs with fading in/out, though I haven't extensively tested. If you get anything like a screen that remains blank, please let me know)

2) If Scorpion can't find a file, rather than crashing, it'll wait one second before trying again.

In theory, this should facilitate multi disk games, but in practice it's a little tricky to manage. Sometime after the official release of 2021.5, I'll think about how to implement proper multidisk support (including disk change prompts, and a "one click" system for loading all of the data on to all of the right disks automatically).

[xboxown]

I want to do my first project using Scorpion Engine to learn how to make games and the game is tic tac toe (much like learning how to type hello world). I have added animation, object but problem is plotting on the map. I don't know how to plot the board in the map or plot objects or NPC or player on the map. I also don't know how to assign to key input for player. Can someone help me on this? I have installed tiled, but when I attempt to edit the tileset I get this error message.

[earok]

- TSX file must be a file association error? I guess you could fix that with right clicking on a TSX file in windows explorer and going through 'open with'. In any case you should be able to edit the tileset from tiled itself with opening the file directly.
- You'll want to create an entirely new image for the tileset rather than use the automatically generated block/actor images that Scorpion creates.


Scorpion is a game engine for real time 2D action games as opposed to a generic language like AMOS or Blitz, so it's far easier to write platformers and shooters in it than puzzlers. Making Tic-Tac-Toe in the engine would be like making Tic-Tac-Toe in Doom, people have done that but it's far easier to make an actual shooter level with it. Likewise with Scorpion, it'd be much easier to make a platformer with it.

In all honesty, I feel like I could probably make a tic-tac-toe game using the engine's ability to read and write blocks on the map with codeblocks, similar to the Snake or Bad Apple demos, but it'd likewise be complicated to pull off.

[xboxown]

I love Scorpion! I think, even if it is difficult, be able to pull outside the scope of platform and shooter. I just have one question please. I want when I press D the camera moves right, press S the camera moves down, press A the camera moves left and W the camera moves up. I have attached screenshot of the code for camera moving right. Is the logic correct? Finally, how do I assign the key D with those code? Once I learn this, I will be able to know how to assign keys to actors to move them too..

[earok]

In general, the code looks OK and should work - camera_y can be left blank if you only want to move camera_x.

On the project tab you can set keyboard events that link to codeblocks.

Note that the keyboard events are just that - they're designed to be triggered one at a time rather than repeatedly and it doesn't really work for them to use multiple at once. But it should be okay for things like tapping repeatedly to move a camera.

[earok]

Scorpion Engine 2021.5 has been "soft launched" to github. It's not officially announced, I'll do so in the next couple of days, but it's there if anyone wants to report any last minute breaking bugs!

A few notes:

- The only update since the last experimental was fixing a bug where the copper sky in OCS mode would be corrupted if there was an AGA copper sky also configured for a level.

(on that note, I may simply remove AGA copper sky support before launching 2021.5 officially. It's kinda buggy, copper skies in general have more or less been supplanted by parallax and the fact that no one reported this bug earlier suggests it isn't even really being used).

- Bad Apple and Flighty Fox have been removed from experimental, since they're now official demos in the official archive.

- Amigo the Fox has been extensively reworked to have different parallax on every single level.

- Zelda and Ace Attorney have been moved into the unofficial demo repository, where they sit alongside NEESO's street fighter 2 demo and Pitfall 2.


I still need to do an announcement video before officially launching, covering at least these features (did I forget anything?)

* Extensive parallax support
* Sprite sheet importing
* Moving platforms
* Imploder crunching

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Would you like original tunes backported to Amiga or a completely different take on it?

I had a quick look for new music, but if you want to do any of your own we could include it in the demo folder and people can compile with music they prefer.