Scorpion Engine

[earok]

Latest experimental check in:

Added ability to link sounds to maps (the same way that animations can be). Basically just so that you can have sounds that are only in memory when that map is loaded. So that could be useful for saving memory on sounds that are only used by particular bosses, cutscenes and such.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

Latest experimental check in:

Added ability to link sounds to maps (the same way that animations can be). Basically just so that you can have sounds that are only in memory when that map is loaded. So that could be useful for saving memory on sounds that are only used by particular bosses, cutscenes and such.

That is absolutely GREAT.. Goodbye stupid motorbike sounds throughout most of the game! haha.

On the other hand.. what happens when you play a sound that doesn't exist in the level? do you get a weird noise like you get weird corrupt graphics when you try to use a non-present animation? I'll test it out

[earok]

Originally Posted by Mixel

That is absolutely GREAT.. Goodbye stupid motorbike sounds throughout most of the game! haha.

Cheers!

Originally Posted by Mixel

On the other hand.. what happens when you play a sound that doesn't exist in the level? do you get a weird noise like you get weird corrupt graphics when you try to use a non-present animation? I'll test it out

That is exactly what you'll get heh.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

That is exactly what you'll get heh.

Excellent I'm actually really glad for that, as it'll be hard to miss it if it makes some sort of horrible noise.. If it'd just made no noise I wouldn't know it was happening.. There are a few places ive reused sounds in unusual places and I can't remember where. Super handy! TY so much.

[acidbottle]

Just a quick query regarding a particular issue I had already mentioned.

The panel gap is now required on projects that use AGA sprite double. Had 2 other demos also suffer similar issues, in so far the gfx glitch if the top panel hangs down too far. Has the amount of real estate available for the game screen been adjusted for some reason as a result. It just seems I have an extra 4 or 5 blank lines that were not needed before, if it was to stop the sprite double tearing I would welcome the decision , sadly it doesn't though

[earok]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

Just a quick query regarding a particular issue I had already mentioned.

The panel gap is now required on projects that use AGA sprite double. Had 2 other demos also suffer similar issues, in so far the gfx glitch if the top panel hangs down too far. Has the amount of real estate available for the game screen been adjusted for some reason as a result. It just seems I have an extra 4 or 5 blank lines that were not needed before, if it was to stop the sprite double tearing I would welcome the decision , sadly it doesn't though

Changing AGA palettes use up an enormous amount of copper time. Basically the panel gap between top and game can be made smaller if there's fewer colors in the game and may need to be made larger if there's more colors in the game.

If the size of the panel gap at the top is a problem, all you can do is reduce the total number of colors by reducing bitplanes and moving the sprite palette offsets further up as well.

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Latest experimental check in significantly changes the "yield" system, hopefully without any breaking bugs.

1) "Yield on actor timer" is no longer in the base category. Instead it's in the actor/player/projectile/new categories so you can be more specific about which timer to use.

Use case: when a player collides with an actor, actor is destroyed immediately but the player is destroyed after five frames.

* destroy actor
* yield on player for 5 frames
* destroy player

2) New "schedule timer" events which function similarly to yield, except that they direct to a certain codeblock. This allows you to trigger multiple future events in a row.

Use case: when a player collides with an actor, destroy actor and player after five frames, unload level after ten.

* schedule "destroy actor" on actor after 5 frames
* schedule "destroy player" on player after 5 frames
* yield on level timer for 10 frames
* unload level

[acidbottle]

Ahh that explains that then, knew there had to be some legit reason and that is fair enough!

The above yield and schedule timer changes are great to, is often these subtle updates that make a big improvement on how things can be setup and work.

[earok]

Cheers AcidBottle!

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Latest experimental check in is sponsored by BitBeamCannon, and (hopefully) completes the rendermode flash/highlight function.

There's now the ability to edit the flash image to override the default. This solves a few issues:

1) Custom flash images are compatible with sprites, the default one is not.
2) Custom flash images allow for colors other than the top one on the palette (should be useful for EHB etc where you want to use white, but you can't put white as the top color on the palette)
3) Custom flash images don't necessarily have to be the whole image (eg, my custom flash images in Amigo the Fox only flash the character's outline rather than his whole body)

This does come with one caveat - using a custom flash image uses additional memory, whereas simply leaving it as the default does not.

[UltraNarwhal]

Tip for any devs targetting 1MB machines. Test on the A600 & A500+ presets, as A600 seems to use up an extra 2KB.

[domkid]

hey guys, new Wip beta 0.5 Maria Renard's Revenge
[ Show youtube player ]

[nikosidis]

Love it!
Thanks for the update.
Take my money when it is finished

[earok]

looking great @domkid!

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I haven't updated experimental in a few days, it might be another few before I do. I've been reworking the Scorpion scripting engine for better performance, turning it further away from a pure virtual machine into something that compiles more into ASM.

Currently it's just the expression calculations that are in ASM, but I want to see if I can convert the logic (branching conditions etc) to be compiled down to pure ASM as well.

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Had some fun on the weekend showing some Scorpion Engine games at the Auckland Indie Games showcase.

[acidbottle]

Great setup there, hope the event went well and you introduced a few more to the cult of Scorpion!

As a roundabout guess, how much extra in performance gains do you think is possible to squeeze out of this beast?

[skyzoo73]

I was dreaming...
how cool it would be to have an audio management
with the mixing routines by Roondar integrated in the S.E.,
and maybe even the PRETRACKER support ... or both !!
would be great...

[earok]

Latest experimental is up. This is intended to be a release candidate, so there's going to be no new features until the next public release, but maybe (probably) a bunch of bug fixes.

There's only one new feature - "NoClear" is no longer an option in rendermode. Instead, it can be turned on and off separately, which is a little more flexible (eg, you can combine the noclear option with any of the render modes, including flash and highlight etc).

I've mostly been spending time reworking the virtual machine so that it uses jump tables/function pointers instead of a long switch statement, also where possible I've been inlining functions.

I wouldn't expect any revolutionary performance increases, but it should (hopefully) be a little faster than before, especially in projects that heavily use codeblocks every frame.

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@acidbottle no real roundabout guess, it's definitely difficult to quantify. I really should make a benchmark game that quantifies performance gains!

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@skyzoo73 I don't really know much about that! It seems a bit complex, also I'm pretty well settled on the PT Player routine which handles both SFX and music together. If a plugin is released for Blitz, I could take a look at it.

[skyzoo73]

@skyzoo73 I don't really know much about that! It seems a bit complex, also I'm pretty well settled on the PT Player routine which handles both SFX and music together. If a plugin is released for Blitz, I could take a look at it.

Here is the link to the page explaining the audio mixer.

http://www.powerprograms.nl/amiga/audio-mixing.html

[domkid]

Maria Renard's Revenge demo is available for download, adf and win64 on itch.io
https://z-team.itch.io/maria-renards-revenge

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by domkid

Maria Renard's Revenge demo is available for download, adf and win64 on itch.io
https://z-team.itch.io/maria-renards-revenge

Tried the demo on my A1200/030


Looks beautiful. The game plays very nice. Finished the 3 levels quite fast. Not very difficult

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by domkid

Maria Renard's Revenge demo is available for download, adf and win64 on itch.io
https://z-team.itch.io/maria-renards-revenge

How many colors is used here at once?

[domkid]

initially 32 colors, then with the new AGA parallax feature "SSCAN2", I added 16 colors for the large parallax sprites (sprite range; 033 - 047)
Earok will explain you more if you need...