Scorpion Engine

[flibble42]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

Here's a tweaked version, reduces colours wasted for panels and lowers screen buffers to save memory.
Attachment 75260

Cheers for that, i shall have a closer look later, especially the flip screen thing.

[UltraNarwhal]

Found bug with Scorpion after the March 29th Sprite Cleanup Fix.
I think Autosprite is acting like Sprite Only, as 4 or more actors causes flickering.
Uploaded example to Git under AOTD folder, doesn't seem to affect if using parallax scrolling level (AGJ folder).

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by flibble42

Cheers for that, i shall have a closer look later, especially the flip screen thing.

It just occurred to me now I understand your centred 16px grid thing, considering the game is originally built with 8px tiles in mind, you could make it centred by offsetting the grid by 8px in the tileset? It’d mean every tile was made of half of one tile and half of another but it’d be centred, at least. Platform edges would have to be dealt with in some slightly non regular way, but definitely possible somehow.

I’d be tempted to remake the map in a way involving 4 layers - one for each of the 4 corners of each tile, and a tileset that has 4 copies of each 8px tile in each of those corners, letting scorpion flatten them down into the final thing you see in game?

[flibble42]

Originally Posted by mixel

it just occurred to me now i understand your centred 16px grid thing, considering the game is originally built with 8px tiles in mind, you could make it centred by offsetting the grid by 8px in the tileset? It’d mean every tile was made of half of one tile and half of another but it’d be centred, at least. Platform edges would have to be dealt with in some slightly non regular way, but definitely possible somehow.

i’d be tempted to remake the map in a way involving 4 layers - one for each of the 4 corners of each tile, and a tileset that has 4 copies of each 8px tile in each of those corners, letting scorpion flatten them down into the final thing you see in game?

Feel free to give an example. It's not worth it






The Spectrum has an 8 pixel border which accounts for the 16th tile, which would make the 256px screen centered, but can't put the 15 tiles inside that because of the 16px limit on tiles.


But seriously, no, the tile set already has for example 13 instances of the elevator animation when 1 should do, i'm about ready to dump this game in the bin.


I just thought, the elevator icons are not all in the same state so if i erase them it might reduce the tile count.. hmm


Also trying to buy pro Motion but the payment methods suck

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by flibble42

Feel free to give an example. It's not worth it

The Spectrum has an 8 pixel border which accounts for the 16th tile, which would make the 256px screen centered, but can't put the 15 tiles inside that because of the 16px limit on tiles.

It’s all achievable, even including the 8px border, just unusual to do. Do you have the original 8px tileset rip? It doesn’t look like it has many 8px tiles. If you want it to be an exact replica you’re going to have to think outside the box. I have no idea how to rip spectrum tiles.

But seriously, no, the tile set already has for example 13 instances of the elevator animation when 1 should do, i'm about ready to dump this game in the bin.

That’s one reason having it autogenerate the tileset is maybe a bad idea, if you mean that tiny little animating up/down arrow.. if you used animating blocks for that (blocks have transparency, animating tiles don’t) you can get away with having 8 instances, 4 for up in the different corners and 4 for down.. if you use tiles you have more control over their animation speed but the surrounding tile stuff would be baked into 16px area, making a ton more tiles. (Hmm as there arent that many of them you could likely use actors, then you’d have only a few of them because they often seem to be in clusters so could be combined)

[flibble42]

If you use Tiled it will create an 8px tile set, but it does not dedupe like Scorpion, as far as i know. So i don't know how many unique tiles there are.


If a dedupe option exits please let me know.


I just feel this is becoming to much for a first project, know what i mean?


Up until 2 weeks ago i had never used Scorpion so this is all very difficult. I get the impression that most people in this thread have been following along with the developement and learnt as it evolved.

[Mixel]

Agreed It’s partly because of project choice, there’s no way anyone would get far with a project like Dan Dare without tons of experimentation, so you’re trying to run before you can walk a bit. But it’s not a terrible choice in other ways, at least enemy behaviour and number of things on screen is pretty easy.

After looking on Tileds support forum Pyxel Edit or some other dedicated tileset editor/manager is suggested for de-Duplication.. We’re all making the workflows up as we go along. (and everyone’s are different)

[acidbottle]

It is certainly an unorthodox project to begin with. Try a simple platformer or shooter first then get ambitious

[flibble42]

Seriously i thought this would be simple, then WHAM 16px this and you know the rest.
I'm also looking at a Spectrum game called Panzadrome, that is, as far as i can tell 16px tiles flip scrolling and no walking behind things.

The goal is always to do an accurate port then redraw the GFX.

[Mixel]

A mini map is going to be very, very difficult (probably impossible) to implement. And that game seems to have two of them! Eek.

[flibble42]

Originally Posted by Mixel

A mini map is going to be very, very difficult (probably impossible) to implement. And that game seems to have two of them! Eek.

Ohh FFS!!!!!


Thats it, i'm done, where is the nearest lake..
Did you actually run Panzadrome?


Well at least i have an official payed for version of Pro Motion NG now.. upside i guess

[Mixel]

No, I just looked at a YouTube play through. I’m certain that’s impossible in scorpion currently. There have to be a lot of spectrum games that work more like average Amiga games though?

Ooh good luck with Pro Motion!

[flibble42]

Originally Posted by Mixel

No, I just looked at a YouTube play through. I’m certain that’s impossible in scorpion currently. There have to be a lot of spectrum games that work more like average Amiga games though?

Ooh good luck with Pro Motion!

I had a quick play of the demo after watching the legit game youtube videos and it feels nice if you are an old school Amiga user.

[earok]

@ultranarwhal unfortunately there's not an easy fix at the engine side, it's not to do with autosprite per se but with how sprites are rendered in the vblank area. Since Scorpion defaults to having a display very near the top of the screen, there may not be enough time in that tiny space to configure all of the sprites before the scanline hits the top of the game display.

I should be able to fix it eventually, but the work around for now is to pad the top of the screen (either have a panel up on the top, or use set screen top before or after setting y resolution).

---

Latest Scorpion Engine experimental version supports the licence keys posted for Patreon backers. The three different tiers have three different version splash screens available to them, and backers of the ultimate edition can use any panel in their project as the splash screen.

The Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/scorpionengine - was soft launched a few days ago. I haven't done any kind of big push on it yet but it's ready and asides from the licence keys, the first release Retro Animator is also available to backers at any level.

---



Retro Animator is a new animation tool designed to help you create fluid animations by assembling each frame out of separate small body part images which can be be removed, added, or replaced in any frame.

This allows games to store the individual parts only once, instead of burning up memory with large frames of animation. The upcoming blockbuster Amiga beat-em-up "Metro Siege" uses this to great effect, allowing many huge characters with fluid animations to fit within the tight memory constraints of a typical Amiga 500.

This is the first time this has been released to the public, so do expect a few rough edges. An example character and animation by Tsak has been included for you to play around with.

Note that Scorpion itself does not support the native format, so Scorpion can't currently be used to make games that feature many large, fluidly animated characters like Metro Siege does. However, animations created in the tool can still be exported to single frame PNGs, which can be used in Scorpion.

[acidbottle]

Incredible stuff, have actually been looking forward to actually throwing some coin towards Scorpion patreon All seems fair and reasonable, i vote text strings for top priority but I hope most of it there will be worked on at some stage.

I noted some very recent success with WHDloaders and Amiga Mini. is there something specific that needs doing to get this working, even if there are glitches?

Possible bug here in the latest build, actually past few builds, for me.
Have done a new check-in with latest WBoy but will email the issue outside the board, cheers.

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

I should be able to fix it eventually, but the work around for now is to pad the top of the screen (either have a panel up on the top, or use set screen top before or after setting y resolution).

Interesting, I'll have to pad or move the hud then.

Is the Patreon price shown in US or NZ dollars?

[FrozenWell]

Originally Posted by flibble42

Ohh FFS!!!!!


Thats it, i'm done, where is the nearest lake..
Did you actually run Panzadrome?


Well at least i have an official payed for version of Pro Motion NG now.. upside i guess

I've also just purchased pro motion, going to give it a try tonight

[earok]

@Ultranarwhal it *should* be in your local currency. If I look at the page, it tells me the prices are NZD specifically (something like $4.50NZD for the lowest end), but if I go through a US based proxy server, it tells me the prices are $3.50

I think if it just has a dollar sign, it's USD, if it has NZD, then it's NZD.

@AcidBottle thank you for your support! I'll definitely use the poll function to guide my priorities.

---

Update to experimental:

* Version (free, supporter, gold etc) is displayed in the top right corner.
* Fixes for sprite flicker so it should be as reliable as it used to be, it's probably still good to move the screen down a little bit so there's definitely enough scanline time to configure and position all of the sprites, especially when things like autosprite or multiplexing are used, but the sprites shouldn't flicker as badly.
* Ability to disable recompilation on the project tab if you just want to run the last version of the game in WinUAE, or export to ADF etc without waiting for the whole thing to recompile.
* Minor fix to an issue that triggered an "escape" key press on AROS (FS-UAE windows export)

Been working with Alpine9000 on various WHDLoad and A500 Mini issues, he's been a big help, and he's gotten Amigo the Fox running on the device (though with some music issues to solve). I'll be getting my Amiga Mini tomorrow and I'm fairly confident I'll be able to support it in experimental in the next day or two (though there may be some nasty workarounds required to get the games actually running on the device)

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

Update to experimental:
* Fixes for sprite flicker so it should be as reliable as it used to be, it's probably still good to move the screen down a little bit so there's definitely enough scanline time to configure and position all of the sprites, especially when things like autosprite or multiplexing are used, but the sprites shouldn't flicker as badly.

I think this may have corrupted something, Duckstroma now crashes with screen corruption after entering a scrolling level. To see what happens start a new game, enter the tree and stand on a safe ledge and wait less than 5 minutes.

[acidbottle]

Have a couple of events that trigger a setscrollspeed, yield x frames then setscrollspeed to 0 again. However, it doesn't set speed to zero again until death!

EDIT: Actually could be a possible corrupt file, redone events but need to test further.