Scorpion Engine

[earok]

Yes! in inkscript, -> is a divert. It basically just means "jump to here", similar to Goto in Basic.

Block_Spawn is a register of the virtual machine. In Alex Kidd, when you break a block it splits into left half and right half blocks. By setting the register twice, we're telling it to spawn two different actors before returning control to the core game engine.

[xboxown]

Originally Posted by earok

@malko Good idea, I've gone ahead and done that.

@xboxown I don't really feel comfortable with Kickstarting it. With Scorpion, I'm going to just continue developing it at my own pace and my own way.

No no no..you misunderstood me. I am not saying scropion itself. No...this one I leave it to you...do it the way you want without kickstarter or time frame. I mean have a separate project all together, a kickstarter, that combines all these third party tools and allow for an easy to use click and play interface that translate the design into Scropion files that the Scropion engine can access and read and form it into a game.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by xboxown

No no no..you misunderstood me. I am not saying scropion itself. No...this one I leave it to you...do it the way you want without kickstarter or time frame. I mean have a separate project all together, a kickstarter, that combines all these third party tools and allow for an easy to use click and play interface that translate the design into Scropion files that the Scropion engine can access and read and form it into a game.

That may not be allowed under licensing restrictions. Spriter is closed-source but Tiled is open-source. Check the licensing before you post stuff like this.

[xboxown]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

That may not be allowed under licensing restrictions. Spriter is closed-source but Tiled is open-source. Check the licensing before you post stuff like this.

I thank you so much for the great lecture. I would not have had a happy night without you waggling your finger at me and derating me - sniff - A hug is a must!

Now that is done with. Ever thought for a second that I mean by writing your own Spriter and Tiled that is integrated into the tool and not embedded them?

[earok]

Time for an update.

I've reworked the move types. These are the ones that are supported:

- Control. Previously "Control_RPG", I've renamed this to simply Control as it could be used for shoot-em-ups, as a cursor etc. Just allows the player to move the object in any of 8 directions.

- Control_Platform. A controllable platformer object.

- CPU. Just moves according to the speed that it's set to move at.

- CPU_Platform. Similar to the above but it's affected by gravity.

- CPU_Path. Follows a fixed path.

- CPU_Pursuit. Follows a player, but with rudimentary pathfinding around solid walls.


There's also four collision types which can now be set (previously the type of collision was assumed only by the type of movement controller). Although CPU_Path and CPU_Pursuit ignore these collision types (as they both avoid solid walls), they can be used with any of the other movement types.

- Block. The default behaviour, simply prevents walking through walls.

- None. Allow walking through walls.

- Bounce. Bounce off walls.

- Destroy. Destroys as soon as it hits a wall. More or less just for projectiles.


So these can be mixed and matched in different ways. For example, if we set the birds in the Alex Kidd demo to be "CPU_platform" and "Bounce"

[UltraNarwhal]

This is great.
Looking through the example tmx files I see a foreground layer, would it be possible (in future) to have a layer below map layer that acts like parallax?
Also will tile collisions stay square, or will it (one day) get triangle slope tiles?


Keep up the excellent work

[earok]

Cheers UltraNarwhal

I've thought about both parallax and slopes, though I don't have any firm plans for implementing them yet. Slopes could maybe be implemented already through custom events in the virtual machine, parallax.. I'll probably do it in a "dual playfield" style way rather than sprites (so sprites can be used for game objects).

In other news, Player Projectiles / Shooting are in progress, hopefully I'll be able to commit something in the next day or two.



I'm happy that I could come up with a way of being able to handle the custom way that projectiles work in Alex Kidd (that they can tear through most blocks but still be destroyed by a solid wall) without needing to specifically implement that handling in the engine - the effect is achieved just by a combination of settings.

The Projectiles have a collision type of "destroy" (so they're destroyed by hitting any solid surface), but the blocks have an event trigger when a projectile hits them - so I can delete them immediately, and since they're no longer a solid surface, the projectile flies through that space.

What I'm trying to achieve with Scorpion is, if there's a specific thing you want to do but the engine doesn't have hardcoded support for it, you should be able to implement it one way or the other through custom scripting in the virtual machine.

Also, I've started on the manual, it's still a long, long way from being finished.

https://github.com/earok/scorpion-en...docs/README.md

[earok]

I forgot to post that I updated the git repo with the player projectile thing.



To be honest, the engine is kind of at the point where it could handle a complete game of some sort, though documentation is still woefully inadequate and there's likely at least a few showstopping bugs.

[Tigerskunk]

That's such an amazing effort.

Wonder what the first game will be that gets built with this...

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Wonder what the first game will be that gets built with this...

Hopefully AlarCity

[Tigerskunk]

Haha. wow...

[earok]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Hopefully AlarCity

Eeep. I guess I should get AGA and hardware sprite support running then!


In all seriousness, there's a couple of *secret* projects using the technology that could conceivably come out this year.


Cheers @Steril707! I really appreciate your kind words, especially since you're a far better coder than I

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by earok

especially since you're a far better coder than I

No way this can be true, seeing what you have done with this...

[earok]

Originally Posted by Steril707

No way this can be true, seeing what you have done with this...

Well, I don't have three layers of parallax in my engine haha. Plus I'm relying on Blitz for 90%+ of the codebase.

[UltraNarwhal]

I've had chance to fiddle with the examples more now and have following queries

-How is foreground supposed to work?
In the Zelda example I copied the trunk tiles and trunk objects to a new place on map (foreground/map layers) and foreground effect worked. Made cloud object tiles in AlexKidd, put them over map cloud and just get corruption.


-The max variable, how far does this check before removing sprites, guessing screen width & height. I noticed even though it's set to 3 for the birds and fish, the bird trapped in blocks and 1 of the first 3 fish vanish (unless I set max to 4).

-The chairs that can be moved have a PushVar. Is there (or could you add) something like this but with x or y movement, so people could make moving platforms? I tried adding x movement a block type, but just got compiling fail.

-Future feature request. Platform tile you can walk on from top, but jump through from below (like I use in AGD).


Other than that I can see myself making a game fairly quickly in Scorpion, much like I can in AGD. Thanks for making this engine.

[earok]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

I've had chance to fiddle with the examples more now and have following queries

-How is foreground supposed to work?
In the Zelda example I copied the trunk tiles and trunk objects to a new place on map (foreground/map layers) and foreground effect worked. Made cloud object tiles in AlexKidd, put them over map cloud and just get corruption.
Attachment 63999

-The max variable, how far does this check before removing sprites, guessing screen width & height. I noticed even though it's set to 3 for the birds and fish, the bird trapped in blocks and 1 of the first 3 fish vanish (unless I set max to 4).

-The chairs that can be moved have a PushVar. Is there (or could you add) something like this but with x or y movement, so people could make moving platforms? I tried adding x movement a block type, but just got compiling fail.

-Future feature request. Platform tile you can walk on from top, but jump through from below (like I use in AGD).
Attachment 64000

Other than that I can see myself making a game fairly quickly in Scorpion, much like I can in AGD. Thanks for making this engine.

Hey, no worries! This is what I like to see. Muck around with the engine and make it break

- The Alex Kidd thing indeed was a bug. Foreground tiles were still hardcoded to be 5 bitplanes (like the Zelda sample) rather than supporting any number of bitplanes (the AK sample is only 4BP). I've checked in and pushed a fix to the git repo, the update includes clouds as being part of the foreground on that map.

- Regarding the max variable, how it works exactly isn't quite set in stone. Currently it's likely to remove the one closest to the bottom of the screen just due to how the list of actors is sorted. I'll likely make it so that it removes the 'oldest' actor of that type at some stage.

- For moving platforms, I didn't really have a plan for it. Technically they could probably already be done by implementing them as 'actors' and make it so the collision handling is done in Ink, though admittedly that might be a bit glitchy (collision handling needs to be tidied up a little bit).

Actually.. I'm going to try it.

OK. This is really rough and really buggy, but 'kind of' turns the birds into platforms.

=== player_kill ===
~ player_y = actor_y - 20
~ player_yspeed = 0
~ player_xspeed = 0
{ actor_lookdir == look_left:
	~ player_x = player_x - 1
}
{ actor_lookdir == look_right:
	~ player_x = player_x + 1
}
-> GAME

I'll keep thinking about how to properly support moving platforms.

- I'll need to think about how to implement special handling for tile collisions to support 'jumping upwards through' a tile. At some stage I also want to support Wizard of Wor and Pacman style tile collisions (where they're thin lines rather than whole blocks), I figure I could use the same system for both.

I hadn't heard of AGD before, but it seems like it could be a good candidate for writing an importer for.

[UltraNarwhal]

Thanks, that explains it then. Anyway I'll experiment more between my regular gamedev and see what I manage to make in Scorpion.

[earok]

Great

I might be a bit slow with new updates and sample games for awhile. I've got a couple of large side projects with Scorpion, they'll be more or less secret until they're done. But I'll keep responding to queries on the thread.

[Tigerskunk]

Hopefully one or two people will make crazy adult games with this engine.

[Master484]

Hopefully one or two people will make crazy adult games with this engine.

+1