Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Black Tiger on May 31, 2012, 05:35:11 PM
That's totally doable using only tiles... without the hills and other overlapping elevation. Martial Champion spams that kind of vertically moving foreground. You'd have to sacrifice sprites to add in hills if the midground beneath the bobbing front layer doesn't remain a single color.
It doesn't look nice slapped onto this game as-is, but if the background is one in which the negative space between the peak of the hill and the straight horizontal section of the foreground can be a single color, then it will look like a regular carved out layer scrolling vertically like the Genesis or SNES would do. Something like a cave or underwater scene would look natural with a single colored section near the bottom. Even if only some of that bottom negative space was single-color, you could just use some sprites for the tips that overlapped the multi-colored artwork/tiles further up in the screen.
(http://members.shaw.ca/justin_cheer/pcepe1.html)
Samurai Ghost does a lot of this kind of vertically overlapping horizontal strip background parallax using only tiles, but it doesn't try to add and varying elevation at all.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Nando on June 01, 2012, 03:03:03 AM
Thanks BT!
I'll look more into Samurai Ghost and see what all it does.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Arkhan on June 01, 2012, 03:09:17 AM
It's trickier to accomplish with the single background layer, but yeah you can do it.
If you get crafty with sprites you can recreate that game. all of the platforms would be sprites though, so you'd have to be careful about line limits.
The background would then be able to just be the background like the video.. with horizontal parallax.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Nando on June 01, 2012, 04:08:27 AM
It's trickier to accomplish with the single background layer, but yeah you can do it.
If you get crafty with sprites you can recreate that game. all of the platforms would be sprites though, so you'd have to be careful about line limits.
The background would then be able to just be the background like the video.. with horizontal parallax.
I'm gonna have to pick your brain on this one a bit more, if you don't mind. :D
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Arkhan on June 01, 2012, 04:41:55 AM
well, you set the background layer up to be the town scene and shit. You can see it scrolls in a few regions at different speeds for that "distance" effect.
anything the player can walk on: The foregroundstuff, you use sprites for it. It's a bit goofy and requires some severe planning, but its the easiest route to go on.
You just have to make sure you don't have too many sprites per line, and make sure you don't use all the sprites possible for platforms and shit to where you can't put enemies.
Its hard to explain.
Look at Super Star Soldier for example.
The background is just the stars. All the other crap is sprites. Fire it up in an emulator and disable the sprite layer. You'll just see stars.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: soop on June 01, 2012, 05:21:16 AM
Whaaa?! Really? That's impressive, assuming I'm not confusing Soldier Blade with SSS. I'm going to take a quick look. This sounds like it pertains to my Sunset Riders train scenario.
*Edit* Ok, I just checked a video - that is seriously impressive.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Nando on June 01, 2012, 05:31:59 AM
lvl design, lvl desing, LVL DESIGN!
Awesome stuff!
Thanks Arkface! :D
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Arkhan on June 01, 2012, 05:34:40 AM
Yeah I am pretty sure this is the case at least, from what i saw a few years back while experimenting.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: sunteam_paul on June 01, 2012, 05:54:42 AM
The background is just the stars. All the other crap is sprites. Fire it up in an emulator and disable the sprite layer. You'll just see stars.
Durrr, it's actually the opposite. The stars are all sprites.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Black Tiger on June 01, 2012, 06:10:34 AM
If you're doing something original and not a faithful port, there is an infinite number of ways to use sprites for hills, structures, etc without having to make them a solid chunk of sprites. Most Genesis and SNES dual layering uses some kind of swiss cheese like foreground. You can creatively thin it out even further while making it look natural. Like in the game posted above, if there are cracked holes spread out among the elevated parts which overlap the far background. It can not only save you a sprite or two of bandwidth here and there, the holes revealing a layer of tiled art behind also gives more of an impression of hardware layering.
All that really needs to be there for slopes and platforms is the outer lining. You can design the setting from the ground up to incorporate a landscape that would look natural with mostly the outer sections being solid.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Arkhan on June 01, 2012, 06:13:35 AM
The background is just the stars. All the other crap is sprites. Fire it up in an emulator and disable the sprite layer. You'll just see stars.
Durrr, it's actually the opposite. The stars are all sprites.
see what happens when I wing it while not at an emulator to verify stuff!? lol
are you sure though? I could have sworn it was the other way around. One of the games does it, I swear.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Arkhan on June 01, 2012, 01:03:16 PM
OK, I looked at some of the games, and maybe I just don't remember what I found since it was back when Insanity wasn't even done!
I'm going to keep looking. I swear there was one game that does it. It might be a CD game.
I'm likely confusing it with the stuff I goofed with while looking at games like R-Type, Rabio Lepus, and all of that, where a good deal of terrain features are actually sprites.
Confusion/poor recollection aside: What you are looking to do is best accomplished using sprites on top of a background that is setup to do nice horizontal line scrolling. You'll be using sprites as platforms/terrain to climb / jump on. It will work out best that way.
Otherwise you'll be dicking around with strange tile-shenanigans that will get dicey fast.
Alot of this scrolling business is easier if you only have to plan on one direction of scrolling. A platformer is going to do up and down AND left/right, so some tricks don't exactly work very well.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Nando on June 07, 2012, 03:02:03 AM
so in a layering sorta way it would go
H-scrolling BKG Some sort of tile BKG on top which would be revealed even more when jumping or hitting high ground Sprites as foreground terrain Character sprites
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Arkhan on June 07, 2012, 03:33:37 AM
H-scrolling BKG Some sort of tile BKG on top which would be revealed even more when jumping or hitting high ground
You can't layer the background. You've only got one layer.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Nando on June 07, 2012, 04:18:37 AM
The scene/lvl I had in mind is this
Big full moon that travels along, think Bonk and Monolith. Except this one is being torn appart by tentacles or some soft of evil thingamajib
Night sky, far side of the area you are in is seen in the bkg, ocean and then the platforming areas. When the character jumps or moves higher the ocean area is revealed and that's where some neat, looping, animated stuff can appear. I have a few doodles that I need to scan to see if this translates well.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Arkhan on June 07, 2012, 04:27:09 AM
if you want animated tiles that are covered by something else that slides out of the way to reveal the animatey hoojoo... you'd be better off using sprites as whatever the foreground piece that slides around is.
Otherwise, you have to scroll some tiles, do some updating, animating, and all kinds of jive. It would be way more work.
If it's constantly just animating in the background under some sprite-layer that slides out of the way... your life is easier. You can just scroll the stuff up or down however you want to get the part to show up like you want.
The sprites could even stay in place and you can just scroll the background upwards.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Nando on June 07, 2012, 04:47:23 AM
okay, I think I get it. Gotta build a few mock ups first.
Thanks Ark!
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Arkhan on June 07, 2012, 05:09:41 AM
okay, I think I get it. Gotta build a few mock ups first.
Thanks Ark!
yeah, I might be misunderstanding what you intend to do. I hope I am not. I do sort of bad without mockups.
Luckily though, you dont need too many sprites to create platforms and shit for levels.
you figure, the screen is 256 pixels wide... so you'd need 8 sprites to span the screen (32 pixels wide is the largest width you can make a single sprite.. ).
You will obviously need more than 8 sprites for platforming on screen since you will most likely have things like ladders/raised bits/stuff... but
it is not too bad considering you have 64 available, and for a platformer, thats PLENTY. unless you planned on like 50 enemies on screen. I doubt you did.
You also shouldn't need to worry about line-limits, since if you span the screen with the ground all as sprites.. nothing will be at or below the ground. It'll all be on top of it... :)
if you plan the tiles well, you could lay the base 8 sprites of ground down and leave them there at all times so you never have to figure out if they are there. Then, all the built up stuff can sit on top of it and still look good.
That all depends on your pixel-fu.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: sunteam_paul on June 07, 2012, 05:52:31 AM
Nando, I highly recommend you download Magic Engine then spend some time turning on and off background/sprite layers in games. It's very eductional to see how things are done.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Nando on June 07, 2012, 06:02:23 AM
Thanks Ark!
Paul, will do. Any games you recommend looking at?
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Arkhan on June 07, 2012, 06:05:59 AM
Definitely look at the Soldier games and note the STARS are sprites. not the background stuff.
lol.
Look at games that have parallax. Dead Moon comes to mind. Sinistron, even Bonk!
LOOK AT THEM ALL.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: sunteam_paul on June 07, 2012, 06:19:45 AM
Look at Gate of Thunder, Winds of Thunder, Dead Moon, Coryoon, Air Zonk, Berabo Man and Shadow of the Beast for starters.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Arkhan on June 07, 2012, 06:26:25 AM
This is one I want to get complete. I want to see Shirow's art work in the manual!
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: soop on June 08, 2012, 02:45:47 AM
I've just been playing Star Parodier, and sometimes it seems like there's just too much on the screen - like it should be impossible. And I don't know how some of the stuff is acheived, like the scaaling on the title screen, and theperspective on the runway as the spaceship launches.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Black Tiger on June 09, 2012, 08:23:36 AM
I've just been playing Star Parodier, and sometimes it seems like there's just too much on the screen - like it should be impossible. And I don't know how some of the stuff is acheived, like the scaaling on the title screen, and theperspective on the runway as the spaceship launches.
Lots of games stretch and squash stuff like the Star Parodia title. It is kinda neat how it's done, (according to Tom) since 16-bit consoles can't warp sprites like that. It's actually part of the tile layer. When there is artwork behind something stretching, like the Macross 2036 title, the background uses sprites. Panic Bomber has a different effect each time the title screen comes up.
Mosaic, layered backgrounds, scaling, rotation, etc is just animation. The runway is the same as floors in SFII.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: spenoza on June 09, 2012, 02:16:40 PM
I wonder how much of the warping, etc is stored animation or calculated/on-the-fly animation.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: ccovell on June 10, 2012, 09:24:35 PM
It's easy to calculate warping on-the-fly. Just define a value of, eg. 0.25 to add to a cumulative scroll variable each scanline. And increase this value per frame, presto, the background warps. (You can see it in the intro to Tongueman's logic when my name comes up.)
Your scroll variable will have to be stored as 3 bytes -- 2 bytes for the usual scroll reg and a 3rd for a fractional value. (0.25 would be stored as $40,$00,$00 as the 6280 sees it.)
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Arkhan on June 11, 2012, 08:38:03 AM
I don't utilize warping, but the Atlantean backgrounds are using a similar approach to scroll across the screen all nicely.
Title: Re: Background tile question
Post by: Nando on June 11, 2012, 01:29:11 PM
So i've been toggling the stuff around. What an eye opener! And WOW like straight up to those devs/artist of the day.
Air zonk had me in awe btw. Very clever stuff and thats just from a lil messing around.