Background tile question

[Nando]

 take a look at the vid, start around the 4min mark. When the character jumps more of the background is shown.

how can one do this on the pce?

 m.youtube.com/#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DOGMmAehAFog&v=OGMmAehAFog&gl=US

[Black Tiger]

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.





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.

[Nando]

Thanks BT!

I'll look more into Samurai Ghost and see what all it does.

[Arkhan]

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.

[Nando]

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.

[Arkhan]

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.

[soop]

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.

[Nando]

lvl design, lvl desing, LVL DESIGN!

Awesome stuff!

Thanks Arkface! 

[Arkhan]

Yeah I am pretty sure this is the case at least, from what i saw a few years back while experimenting.

[sunteam_paul]

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.

Durrr, it's actually the opposite. The stars are all sprites.

[Black Tiger]

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.

[Arkhan]

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.

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.

[Arkhan]

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. 

[Nando]

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

[Arkhan]

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

You can't layer the background.  You've only got one layer.