Scorpion Engine

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

Fixes for experimental for today:
- Distorted audio fixed (as an aside, audio is now trimmed so all silence is removed at the start and the end, not sure if this could cause any problems or not)

Great, sounds sound right Only one small problem now, after playing a sound a high pitched ringing plays until another sound cancels it.

[earok]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

Great, sounds sound right Only one small problem now, after playing a sound a high pitched ringing plays until another sound cancels it.

Eeep. I think I've fixed that now. Was a little too greedy with the audio trimming.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

Fixes for experimental for today:
- Fixed issue with copper right edge
- Fixed sprite ordering. I'm hoping this doesn't have any flow on effects interfering with parallax etc but so far it seems to be OK

Thanks for the copper right edge fix..

In my parallax, the top of the screen goes weird after a few seconds displaying the level, IDK if its a sprite ordering thing, it might first happen when sprites start rendering on screen, certainly seems possible in the motorbike example here (the smoke puffs)

[ Show youtube player ] - shows the glitch in action on two different levels.. its more obvious on the motorbike level though.

edit: it's definitely as soon as a sprite appears on screen.. On one of my stages 99% of the parallax backdrop disappears as soon as you punch, haha. See in this video at the end: [ Show youtube player ]

Oh, can I request a new animation type? a tickbox for random order? where every time the anim is called it does them randomly. That'd be really neat for some effects and would save making it in codeblocks, could be nice for fires, etc.. (and particles)

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

Eeep. I think I've fixed that now. Was a little too greedy with the audio trimming.

All is back to normal now, many thanks.

[earok]

No worries:

Daily check in is just the Scott Pilgrim AGA demo and some more fixes for sprites. There's not a lot in the Scott Pilgrim demo (I may add a few more animations and features to it sometime) but the "jump" routine might be useful as a reference for beat em ups.

[earok]

Check in:

Fixed a couple of bugs re: sprites, not sure if that's going to fix your issue though Mixel? Do let me know if it's still a problem.

Major new feature for the day is bit testing comparison. That's a more advanced programming technique that may not be useful unless you really need that capability, but there's one use for it that may be useful for most games:


if Test bit player_lookdir on LookMask_left
; player is looking/jumping/falling left
else
; player is not looking/jumping/falling left. Could conceivably be looking straight up or straight down
endif


This is a way of testing all left directions (including upleft and downleft) at once as opposed to writing a series of if statements. It's identical to how Scorpion internally tests for direction.


Edit: Mixel, wasn't sure what you mean by random order? Like, play the animation randomly forward or backwards, or pick a random animation to play, or..?

[Mixel]

Oh it was fixed in the previous latest build, things stopped disappearing, I thought you fixed it on purpose.. Sorry forgot to mention it was working again!

For random frame i meant play the frames of an animation but in an entirely random order, constantly, so after each delay specified in the animation it picks a different frame at random.. like a random number generator where each of the frames of the animation is a different number. Or something..

bit player_lookdir sounds super useful, i think i can simplify some code with that.

[earok]

Simplifying code is always good

I think the easiest way to do it with the current scorpion would be something along the lines of this:

Create a bunch of 1 frame animations, something like FX1-FX9 (the fact that they're in alphabetical order will be important)

Then, at the end of each animation, trigger a codeblock that does something like:

Roll dice with 9 sides
Play animation FX1 - 1 + Dice

[Mixel]

Thanks that method is perfect.

I'll use it for the for puffs of smoke from the motorbike too, as while animations used to hang around until the they'd completed animating even if the actor limit is reached, now, the animations never get a chance to complete.. Which is probably better for most things but not that smoke, i think? Random will solve that maybe.

[amigaosx]

Some animation swap test I did today for a combo hit system [ Show youtube player ]
Music is borrowed from @saimon69

@earok
Is there a way to check for hardware specs?
I mean a way to test if the hardware that's going to be run on is capable/optimal before loading the game, and if it's not display a warning. Thanks!

[earok]

@amigaosx Looking cool! There isn't yet (except for being able to check IsAGA and IsNTSC) but I was thinking of adding performance info as something that you can check in the codeblocks. Is just the processor, kickstart and fastram equipped enough?

---

Experimental check in:

- New "strafe" options under set look direction. Using strafe doesn't actually change the way the actor is looking but allows you to change the way that they're moving (so you can make them moonwalk, walk sideways etc)

- Some fixes for slopes (in particular, a fast moving character should no longer become airborne running down a slope, so long as the slope isn't steeper than 45 degrees at least). I happen to be working on a secret project that's based on a Sonic esque game so more slope fixes might be forthcoming.

- Optimisation for copper list. In particular, a game with less than six bitplanes won't have all six bitplane pointers updated at the 18th tile wraparound.

- Some fixes for copper jankiness - there's still a slight black line at the 18th tile wraparound with Fetchmode 1 off on 5 and 6 BP modes, but otherwise it seems to be gone (including all modes with Fetchmode 1 on and AGA). Though I haven't extensively tested with sprite parallax modes.

[Mixel]

That seems great about copper - it currently doesn't play nice with my hacky way of fixing the jank myself in EHB, lol. Sorry! (potentially awkward as i know my method isn't in any way approved, but i've been using it throughout the game)

ed: you HAVE fixed it if i turn off the parallax and just use a copper on the ship level! (i was only using parallax to be able to fix the seams originally, but then started using it for wave effects and stuff)



This pic might not make any sense at all. but basically the seam is now a darker, translucent yellowy thing? and the glitch fixer colour that got rid of the line during previous builds doesn't do much at all anymore (though it does fend off an odd black line that appears within the translucent one sometimes) In that little shot at the bottom you can see the black line that appears when i haven't used a fix tile, when i jump to certain heights..

Before now If I had black in column 1 of the .parallax file and I use colour 29 tiles it'd completely gets rid of them. Now it has a partial masking effect, in that a black line doesnt appear but the weird orange one is persistent. And the other colours just shuffle it along a colour slot, and none of them work 100% as when you change your Y coordinates the orange line follows through those.

My fixy tiles wouldn't have been able to fix this entirely anyway (as they only make it into a copper gradient), but here's what it looks like when there's a full parallax backdrop and a seam on one level: [ Show youtube player ]

Oddly my old tiles *do* seem to still work on my swamp level. So.. uhh. I have no idea what's up with that.

Maybe this is useful.. from this angle you can see it's switching between translucent copies of the colours at the end of the top palette (pink, orange, blue etc) depending on height.. (?) [ Show youtube player ]

[acidbottle]

Originally Posted by earok

Latest update:

@AcidBottle it is sounding like an engine bug rather than something you've done, I don't suppose you'd mind giving me a copy of the game where the bug can be demonstrated at the start?

Sorry for the delay in my reply here, too busy lately

Sadly I cannot replicate this other than playing the game in a normal way. That is, if I spawn the power up (that changes to the offending actor) near the lift it works just fine. The initial power up and actor change is about 1 minute previous into the level. The main "walking actor" will use the lift just fine in every instance.

I can do a video showing the issue if that would help. Have tried to call an on_spawn with some var settings like platformsnap set to a high value, among other things but no joy.

Love all the new updates though, some proper technical stuff that I have yet to get my head around but sound like they are helping others greatly.

[earok]

Just did a check in that (hopefully) should fix parallax bug reported by mixel.

@acidbottle Are you able to reduce the amount of time it takes to get to the bug by, for example, making the main character run a lot faster along a long, flat platform with no enemies to that part of the level? If it's possible to trigger the bug within a few seconds one way or another, that would make it much easier for me to test out various assumptions to find the bug.

[acidbottle]

Yes, should be no problem to make an easymode version to test to be fair.

Will sort that out and email across in the next day or so. Thanks earok

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

Just did a check in that (hopefully) should fix parallax bug reported by mixel.

TY for fixing that, and confirming it was a bug, And not just something randomly happening to me.

Feature request: ability to load new .parallax files (and choose .csv) in codeblocks? Understood if that’s not doable, but i can think of some situations where you’d maybe want to swap for a boss fight or something. (Or if you couldn’t decide which of two parallax effects are better so you leave it up to the player to decide with an option. )

[earok]

Originally Posted by Mixel

TY for fixing that, and confirming it was a bug, And not just something randomly happening to me.

Feature request: ability to load new .parallax files (and choose .csv) in codeblocks? Understood if that’s not doable, but i can think of some situations where you’d maybe want to swap for a boss fight or something. (Or if you couldn’t decide which of two parallax effects are better so you leave it up to the player to decide with an option. )

I'll need to keep it in mind. There are complexities with swapping out a parallax file at real time (in particular needing to regenerate the copper list).


---

Daily experimental update:

- Re-added AGA 7BP (128 cols) and 8BP (256 cols) modes.
- Removed FMode, XCenterAdjust and XWidthAdjust options. These are all supplanted by a "screen mode" drop down that sets all three with settings that should be mutually compatible. There's currently only six options (for different combinations of 256 and 224 wide, fmode 0 and fmode 1, and offsets from the center of the screen)

[earok]

Just a heads up:

I'm looking at implementing a 288X wide scrolling mode and a 320X wide vscroll-only mode in the next few days. This will come at the cost of some chipram due to the wider buffers needed, even if smaller widths are still used (due to hard coded constants etc). I think this is only going to burn up around 7-10K of chip (at most) but I thought I should give everyone the heads up on that.

Edit: I might be able to make some chipram savings elsewhere to compensate for that...

[acidbottle]

Originally Posted by earok

Daily experimental update:

- Re-added AGA 7BP (128 cols) and 8BP (256 cols) modes.
- Removed FMode, XCenterAdjust and XWidthAdjust options. These are all supplanted by a "screen mode" drop down that sets all three with settings that should be mutually compatible. There's currently only six options (for different combinations of 256 and 224 wide, fmode 0 and fmode 1, and offsets from the center of the screen)

Another big game changer, cant wait to try this out, amazing work!

[Z-TEAM]

Originally Posted by earok

Just a heads up:

I'm looking at implementing a 288X wide scrolling mode and a 320X wide vscroll-only mode in the next few days.

Good News,I can't wait to test it.

We continue to implement Rick Dangerous and we remain a bit stuck on a use case. We spawn bonus actors (gold inca) after loading a level, as soon as the object is captured it disappears but we don't understand how to not respawn it when the player starts the level again.

Does anyone have this kind of mechanics in their game. Spawn actor once only even reloading the level until the game is over.

Merci (Thanks)