Font-Parallaxing

[Heaven/TQA]

hi guys... how would you implement small parallaxing like i have done it with boinxx (the water). Retrofan (the guy who made the tile gfx) comes from c64 and he thought that i could implement it like in some games. at the moment i rotate 2 chars (the water tiles) which is no big deal... but when i have special tiles with round edges (see the bubble level f.e.) then you see the sharp edges of the char size...

 

so i was playing around with some ideas but i can not fill the charset every frame with the water tiles and then copy on top all the rest?

 

or should i just deal with the special tile chars? but this gets little bit tricky as i made some design flaws at the moment... i have 1 game font, not for each level so the parallax routine would need to be adapted for each level...

 

any ideas welcome...

[Allas]

 

Well I see 2 different simply answers to the problem:

 

- Don't use tiles with round edges, 3r and 4th tile are very difficult for manage the parallax motion. You can create some interesting designs changing the texture floor.

 

- In other way, don't use shadows in levels with round edges design. (floor is at water level). Or better, use desert sand (this justify floor is at level sand). Balls dont bounce in the sand.

 

After that, I imagine a solution , but you should sacrifice one of the three colors in the round tiles level.

Edited November 26, 2005 by Allas

[Cybernoid]

Could you do PM underplays just for those characters? Then, every frame switch between two addresses for the PM graphics... Dunno if it is possible. I am not sure how you are using PM graphics. And, of course it will be complicated.

 

Also, if the water has just horizontal lines, then you could use DLIs to alternate the colors of the water... but this is restrictive.

 

Maybe flip bit 7 only to save speed on those characters, but it doesn't give you motion.

 

 

Other than that, all I can think of is to store multiple full character sets and rotate the whole set out...

 

hmmm...

[Heaven/TQA]

Cybernoid... i use PM for

 

- all 4 for the bouncing ball

- each 2 missles for one enemy

- all 4 players for the score panel

 

so underlying will not be a practical solution when not implemented in the design phase of the game...

[Rybags]

Can't you just move the alternate character data into the character set for each animation phase? Assuming 12 different cells, that's only 96 bytes to be moved.

 

Looking at the program, it looks like you are using type 11 (COLPF2/3) pixels for the dark water as well as the light sand, which makes things a bit harder.

[Heaven/TQA]

that's exactly what i am doing now... but... you have to put the water not only in empty chars but as well into tiles which have holes to look through...so actually you might need to mask out the "foreground" bits and put the water pixels on the rest...

[Rybags]

But aren't those characters always over water? In which case, just keep the different copies of such characters and move them into the character set. No AND/OR/store ops needed, just a simple loop to move data.

[Cybernoid]

I think he was trying to avoid doing many copies as well as many and/or ops. You could just keep 2 character sets and toggle them back and forth. This way, not only will the full-water character change, but also any "holes" in existing foreground. So this would take up 2k instead of 1k. But you could put the character set into the extended memory for the XE and toggle the banks...

[+MrFish]

One thing you can do, to make your rounded tiles blend in better, is to use a dither for the outer edge instead of a single color.

 

Also, if you were going to implement some sort of scrolling for this outer area, it would be easier because the dither repeats every other scan-line/pixel.

Edited December 10, 2005 by MrFish