Scorpion Engine

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by domkid

first test with the Scorpion engine, and the pixel art of Nauris Amatnieks...
[ Show youtube player ]

this looks lovely! Great start! I like the bird attack!

[earok]

Oh wow. I don't think I could pull off that many parallax layers in Scorpion. But I'm sure Inviyya engine could

[earok]

Minor fix checked into experimental, there was an embarrassing bug in the blitter routine for Blocks that meant in extremely rare cases, blocks are rendered with distorted backgrounds. (There may still be an outstanding bug with blitting to foregrounds on real hardware only, I haven't been able to reliably replicate this yet)

[domkid]

@Mixel, thank's, it' s the sprite player of "Maria Renard" in "Castlevania X Rondo Of Blood" on Pc Engine...

@Earok, I hope to add this parallax system soon ;-)

[earok]

Good luck with the parallax!

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Daily check in to experimental is an editor enhancement fix only:

- Fix for Mixel's reported issue where dragging around frames on a really long animation messes up the scroll bar.

- Something Mixel asked for all the way back in January: on screen info on the actor panel, in particular bounds of collision box, X/Y offset from tile, X/Y offset of projectile.

- On screen info on animation panel, in particular X/Y offset and bounds of melee box.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by earok

Daily check in to experimental is an editor enhancement fix only:

- Fix for Mixel's reported issue where dragging around frames on a really long animation messes up the scroll bar.

- Something Mixel asked for all the way back in January: on screen info on the actor panel, in particular bounds of collision box, X/Y offset from tile, X/Y offset of projectile.

- On screen info on animation panel, in particular X/Y offset and bounds of melee box.

Ahh! Excellent update, haha. All those on screen infos are soooo useful, thankyou. The collision box size stuff I think originally I was fumbling with it when I was setting collision boxes for the player actor and needed to make sure it was exactly centred and exactly the same width between multiple standing and ducking states, otherwise if you ducked by a platform edge you'd fall off cliffs etc.

[earok]

Daily update to experimental done, it's a bug fix only - it seemed that games with VM files (the compiled codeblocks) larger than 32K would occasionally crash. Cheers to Mixel for reporting and confirming fix.

[nobody]

Not much time lately with a small kid running around at home but i did a small demo of Curse of Issyos, 3 enemies (4 color) and player run around without any frame drop on A500 512k+512k config (using editor version 2021.4). Really impressive stuff.

[earok]

Oh wow, that looks cool. I'd really love to see some Locomalito games make the jump to Scorpion (Abbey Des Morts particularly!). If you want to do a GIF of it, I could post it to the official Facebook page for Scorpion.

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Did a minor check in to experimental today, just some better error messages for when you've got an invalid animation assigned as an actor's main idle or walk animation.

I realise I've only been doing little updates recently, but I haven't had a hell of a lot of free time so I'm doing tiny stability fixes to keep the project moving. This weekend I should *hopefully* have enough time to finish the Amigo the Fox reskin and publish the parallax stuff to the official version.

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

Oh wow, that looks cool. I'd really love to see some Locomalito games make the jump to Scorpion (Abbey Des Morts particularly!).

I may attempt to do a port/remix of L'Abbaye des Morts at some point, as I see it's CC By.

[earok]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

I may attempt to do a port/remix of L'Abbaye des Morts at some point, as I see it's CC By.

I'd be up for collaborating on it, there's a copy of the art and tiles on OpenGameArt.

If you strip out the ZX Spectrum style art, there's still 49 colors on the palette, hopefully it wouldn't be too hard to convincingly reduce that to 32.


We could maybe even put it in the Scorpion Unofficial Demos archive if you'd like.



Edit: Did an automated conversion to 32 colors



and one to 16 colors for good measure



If we could get away with using the 16 color one, it means we can use sprites and such so there's no slowdown on any particularly heavy screens.

One thing I completely forgot about is that the game is 8x8 tiles, which isn't supported in Scorpion. We could fake it to some degree with slopes, though some rooms may need some tweaking.

[Mixel]

I would love to see this! always looked like such a cute but atmospheric game but never got around to playing any of the versions. Would be fitting if the first one I do is the Scorpion one.

.. Can scorpion get an "export all the graphics into a single spritesheet" like those option? Partly just to see what it looks like, but mostly for palette experiments that'd be amazing.

[UltraNarwhal]

Originally Posted by earok

One thing I completely forgot about is that the game is 8x8 tiles, which isn't supported in Scorpion. We could fake it to some degree with slopes, though some rooms may need some tweaking.

I found the ZX Spectrum style graphics/tiles so I intend to colour them to Amiga standards using my own 32 colour palette (16 specific for sprites), rather than use existing enhanced graphics.

Also saw the smaller 8x8 tiles use, which I can probably swap out to platform tiles.

I'll see how far I get, but could be good example to bundle with Scorpion.

[nobody]

I already thought Abbey Des Morts (i have completed the C64 version-best in my opinion), then saw the 8x8 tiles and stopped.

[earok]

Originally Posted by Mixel

.. Can scorpion get an "export all the graphics into a single spritesheet" like those option? Partly just to see what it looks like, but mostly for palette experiments that'd be amazing.

It might be a little hard to do a spritesheet exporter from Scorpion, though we've already got the spritesheet importer in the recent experimental update (+ button above images).

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

I'll see how far I get, but could be good example to bundle with Scorpion.

That would be amazing. Happy to help out with any particularly sticky problems, whether it's coming up with ways to solve the issue in codeblocks or if it needs an entirely new feature in Scorpion.

Re: 8X8, asides from using platforms and slopes as suggested, you could have four layers representing the topleft, topright, bottomleft and bottomright corners of a 16x16 block, which will then get merged together by the compiler. Though my gut tells me at least some reworking of levels may be needed anyway, hopefully nothing that noticeably changes the game.

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by nobody

I already thought Abbey Des Morts (i have completed the C64 version-best in my opinion), then saw the 8x8 tiles and stopped.

Fantastic game. I also completed the C64 version. I also like the C64 version best.

[earok]

I really should try the C64 version sometime, I've only played the original with the ZX Spectrum graphics.

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Daily update to experimental. Bad Apple demo has been updated with music (cheers JMD) and a couple of slight code tweaks.

There's a new command "GetBlock" which is used for reading the block on any specific coordinate into a variable. This was already possible but required doing three different commands and wasn't intuitive, now it's in a single easier to understand command.

This would mainly be for projects that require reading and writing the level map at realtime, such as Bad Apple and Snake, though theoretically it could be used for a level editor or something Sim City-esque.

[UltraNarwhal]

Spent a spare hour and did a quick test using ZX graphics, player speed and jump shoud be fairly accurate to original, need to check fall speed.
Also made a 16 colour palette, rather than 32.
[ Show youtube player ]

[earok]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

Spent a spare hour and did a quick test using ZX graphics, player speed and jump shoud be fairly accurate to original, need to check fall speed.
Also made a 16 colour palette, rather than 32.
[ Show youtube player ]

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

I'd really like to see with the modern palette but I figure that should be easy enough to do (if the game gets completed with one palette, it should be easy enough to drop in a replacement palette so we could do an ADF of the ZX colors and one of the modern colors)

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

[earok]

Update to experimental done for the day. It's mostly fairly trivial but useful updates nonetheless:

- Fix for bug where the root output folder was being emptied every time there's a new compile, it was meant to empty the data folder. It should now be safe to put readmes, icons etc straight into output.

- Some redundant data has been removed (I used CMO:HX as a test, it reduced the size of the project.dat file by around 50KB - both in terms of disk space and actual memory used during the game).

- It will report errors if EXE2ADF reports you're unable to fit every file on the disk.


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I've been working on Amigo the Fox, now I'm about half way through converting everything to parallax and the new tile sets. The problem is, I'm struggling to get it all to fit on a single disk (which is a little embarrassing for a game that's only six levels long), the problem is that parallax is massively bloating the gfx data size on levels.


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#.