Scorpion Engine

[earok]

Scorpion Engine 2021.5 is out officially.

[ Show youtube player ]

Thanks to everyone who's been testing out experimental, and also cheers to IRN for covering the launch.

[domkid]

great job, thanks to you ;-)

[earok]

@domkid thank you!

I've put in a hotfix - there was an issue where the generate parallax button wasn't properly reporting that there was an issue with too many colors on one line.

Also, did a quick parallax demo just for fun. It's based on a screenshot Daniele Spadoni's upcoming Turrican vs Terminator fangame for PC.

[AmyMor]

Originally Posted by earok

@domkid thank you!

I've put in a hotfix - there was an issue where the generate parallax button wasn't properly reporting that there was an issue with too many colors on one line.

Also, did a quick parallax demo just for fun. It's based on a screenshot Daniele Spadoni's upcoming Turrican vs Terminator fangame for PC.

These days I tried to direct this enthusiast to the Scorpion Engine, unfortunately he found it a bit difficult to master ... Develop his ideas on OpenBor.

[earok]

Originally Posted by AmyMor

These days I tried to direct this enthusiast to the Scorpion Engine, unfortunately he found it a bit difficult to master ... Develop his ideas on OpenBor.

Thanks, I appreciate directing him to Scorpion. I've indicated that I may look at converting Turrican vs Terminator to Scorpion manually when he's finished the PC original.

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I've started giving some thought to what to focus on Scorpion 2020.6, and I think broadly speaking it's going to be the "UI" update with a bunch of stuff that was present in previous versions of Scorpion but missing from the latest (Character portraits in particular), and other improvements such as unlimited elements and options, possibly the ability to print text to any HUD (not just the talkpad).

But I may include some new project importers too.

I've started working on a PICO-8 importer, which will at least allow media and maps to be brought across - though the games will more or less need to be rewritten from scratch (and some games, in particular anything that needs 3D or real time drawing, won't be able to be converted regardless).

[UltraNarwhal]

This might be useful information for any newcomers and help plan the type of game they make.

After lots of testing I've found the following best for performance with no/little slowdown

Amiga 500/600 1MB RAM
16 Colour mode - 5/6 sprites max
32 Colour mode - 3 sprites

Amiga 1200
32 Colour mode - 9 sprites

Each sprite is 16 pixels wide and uses the auto sprite mode.

[earok]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

This might be useful information for any newcomers and help plan the type of game they make.

After lots of testing I've found the following best for performance with no/little slowdown

Amiga 500/600 1MB RAM
16 Colour mode - 5/6 sprites max
32 Colour mode - 3 sprites

Amiga 1200
32 Colour mode - 9 sprites

Each sprite is 16 pixels wide and uses the auto sprite mode.

That's good to know! I definitely need to keep working on performance enhancements.

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I've pretty much finished the PICO-8 import stuff and NEESO's been giving me a few random glitches to fix, so I might release all of that as "2021.5.1" release in the next few days before getting stuck in on the UI improvements for 2021.6.

[Mixel]

Great work, much appreciated.

So looking forward to UI/portrait improvement stuff. Not certain what I'll do with it, but definitely something!

Performance is funny for me, as to test what CMOhn runs like now on a machine with no fastram I have to add more chipram than any real amiga has.. Even then, the slowdown is surprisingly good TBH even with everything jacked up to 11 like i do later in the demo. The massaging it into lower spec version/s process is going to be a fun challenge. (for another time!)

[earok]

New check in to experimental, fixed an extremely rare foreground issue reported by NEESO games (HOPEFULLY this is the same as that rare/obscure foreground issue reported by Mixel in the tunnels level of CMOHX), also the PICO-8 importer is done.

Pending no further updates, I'll do a video in the next couple of days on the PICO-8 importer and release 2020.5.1 as the official.


I'm sure we can get CMOHX running without fastram, let me think about how we can do that.

[Mixel]

I may completely have the wrong end of the stick in re: to how it works, but puzzling how it might, and I dunno if you want suggestions but when doing the parallax spreadsheets I thought it’d be cool if maps each had like a roll call csv too, where it’d generate a list of all the in game assets and you could true/false them in and out of memory, so it’d only load the ones you want at level load time?

Then for multi disk games it could compare the contents of those csvs and intelligently assign them disks based on how much space they need?

Every time I tried to imagine how you’d do it within the UI proper I couldn’t think of an elegant solution, but you probably can, haha. It could maybe support groups, so you could associate an enemy with certain actors and it’d automatically bring them along with it?) (because their timer codeblocks often spawn a bunch of other things)

Then people with smaller games don’t end up with a more complicated editor too?

[earok]

I've been giving it some thought.

Animations are really the big thing (asides from music, which can already be loaded and unloaded at real time, and sound effects which can't currently). Actors aren't really that big individually so it'd make the most sense to be able to just bundle animations together, you could possibly even bundle them with a different palette to the project default.

So my original idea was simply to make it that you'd be able to set animations as loaded by default, or as part of an 'animation pack' that you can load or unload in addition to the default animations (so you might want to have a set of player animations as default for every level, and then some boss animations that are only for specific levels. Nice and easy).

Which should be fairly straight forward, but it gets complicated by this - for a game like Street Fighter for example, you really need to be able to load TWO asset packs at real time so you've got one for each fighter, and there may be use cases that I haven't thought of requiring three or more. So long story short, I haven't quite mentally wrapped my head around the problem, but I think I can do it.

[Mixel]

That sounds great.. In my case- I think having the ability to load a ton of packs at once sounds really, really useful for keeping memory use down, but yeah I have no idea what this'd work like in practice!

If they were unlimited I can imagine making a lot of smaller packs for enemy types, I'd probably roll all the slime variants into one pack, the zombies into another, and the bugs into yet another, as most levels don't have them all together, and that's a lot of animation in each. (actually I'd probably even seperate the big bug from the small bugs if there was no limit to the number of asset packs - because it's got so many animation frames+a unique projectile and the small ones are on almost all levels but the big ones are much rarer!)

Based on all the other stuff I know you'll come up with a great solution one way or another.

[domkid]

@earok, a newbie question, is it possible to have a different palette for different levels ?

[redblade]

Any news on the Street fighter 2 demo for the scorpion engine?

Was it 16 or 32 colours, what palette did the background use, or was it a custom copper job.

Thanks

[redblade]

Originally Posted by UltraNarwhal

This might be useful information for any newcomers and help plan the type of game they make.

After lots of testing I've found the following best for performance with no/little slowdown

Amiga 500/600 1MB RAM
16 Colour mode - 5/6 sprites max
32 Colour mode - 3 sprites

Amiga 1200
32 Colour mode - 9 sprites

Each sprite is 16 pixels wide and uses the auto sprite mode.

Is this with 8 way scrolling? or just 2 way, either horizontal only, or vertical only?

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by domkid

@earok, a newbie question, is it possible to have a different palette for different levels ?

Sorry, I realise this wasn't aimed at me, but in case Earok's asleep and you wanted to know ASAP, it's in the MAPS tab, you select "set override Pal" and choose a PNG with the palette you want to use.

You can also manipulate the individual colour values in code blocks during gameplay, but it's fiddly as heck.

Originally Posted by redblade

Is this with 8 way scrolling? or just 2 way, either horizontal only, or vertical only?

In my experience it makes no difference which way you scroll from a performance perspective.. I mean, it might, technically, but it really doesn't seem to. I have 8 way in CMOHN and never noticed any performance hitch related to scrolling at all.

Oh and SF is 32 colours.. And the background is just made of Tiles in Tiled... I reckon you could do an amazing looking floor effect if you disabled the vertical jump scrolling and used copper parallax for the floorboard planks.. (if someone was making a different fighting game, not trying to do SF2)

[earok]

@redblade

No further work on Street Fighter 2 demo is planned, NEESO made it originally as a joke but it turned out better than he expected so he did a little more on it, but isn't planning to do more. It was 32 colors, there was no copper trickery so far as I knew.

Performance wise, as Mixel said it doesn't make too much of a difference to performance on the direction you're moving.

@domkid, yes as per Mixel you can set override pal on a level, but it doesn't generate alternative versions of the animations, so you need to be careful about color indexes and such. Eg, if color #1 is red and you set it on a level as green, then anything using that color will now be green even if it was red on the original animation.

That's part of the reason why I want to implement the asset bundling system mentioned earlier - not just to save RAM by only having some packs in RAM at any one time, but being able to flag those packs as having a different palette to the core game.


Edit: 2021.5.1 is out with PICO-8 importing.

[ Show youtube player ]

[domkid]

@mixel @earok, ok great thanks, I'll try that...

[Neeso]

Hello people, I have been lurking the conversation for a while now, it was about time to register

@redblade

I confirm what earock and Mixel said about the SF2 demo, which btw is open source so feel free to grab it and improve it! https://github.com/earok/unofficial-scorpion-demos

[malko]

Originally Posted by Neeso

Hello people, I have been lurking the conversation for a while now, it was about time to register

@redblade

I confirm what earock and Mixel said about the SF2 demo, which btw is open source so feel free to grab it and improve it! https://github.com/earok/unofficial-scorpion-demos

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