3 Layered Environment in Off Topic

ID:117603
 
Aug 25 2011, 6:56 am
These days, in a lot(if not all) sidescrolling flash games you will see what I refer to as a "Three Layered Environment" system. In my own words; this system is to make things appear at a distance in the background. You have the furthest point, which usually moves very slowly as you move, the middle point, which moves slow but not too slow, and your actual placement, which moves as you do.

More or less, to create this system I simply used BYOND's offset screen location screen_loc="1:1,2:1" and big images(which really should be revampted to 32x32 images because the big ones cause undesired results if the interface isn't made just right).

Anywho, becides the shotty images I made(and the decent background I found on google ^-^), I think it turned out pretty nice...

Check it out.


P.S. You're supposed to be a dragon :p... All you can do at the moment is move.
#1 Aug 25 2011, 7:03 am
seems kind of laggy
#2 Aug 25 2011, 7:06 am
I'm not sure about that. I don't think that it's laggy but you gotta understand, the objects are on your screen. So while you're moving they almost seem stand still... Pixel movement could POSSIBLY fix that. Honestly though I'm not too sure.
#3 Aug 25 2011, 7:24 am
Neat!
#4 Aug 25 2011, 7:56 am
That's pretty sweet.
#5 Aug 25 2011, 10:27 am
Looks goot, I was trying to get this effect working with the built in background options for Sidescroller but I kept messing it up.

Pixel_movement would definitely help here.
#6 Aug 25 2011, 1:00 pm
Not bad. I did pretty much the exact same thing in my Megaman environment. It really would only work well in pixel movement though. You can see how the background moves one tile instantly while your layer moves gradually.

Also, images are much better for this than screen objects. Images don't lag, while large and many screen objects will. It makes a HUGE difference to use images. Besides, you're the only one who can see them anyways in either case. Plus there's the fact that you don't need to interact with the background, so images would work just fine.
#7 Aug 25 2011, 7:59 pm
This effect is more commonly referred to as parallax.

The more you know.
#8 Aug 25 2011, 9:34 pm
DarkCampainger wrote:
This effect is more commonly referred to as parallax.

The more you know.

Damn, you beat me to it!
#9 Aug 25 2011, 11:27 pm
As DC said, this is a technique known as parallax scrolling.

I've tried a few different methods of achieving this effect on BYOND and found using screen objects to be one of the slowest. Using map entities with pixel movement seems to run the fastest.
#10 Aug 26 2011, 4:23 pm
@SuperAntx: That looks great. What's a map entity?
#11 Aug 26 2011, 6:05 pm
Objects, perhaps objects displayed to only one person at a time. They'd have to follow your character around as he moved through the environment. It's much less taxing to move a few entities around on a map than it is to update a bunch of stuff on a client screen.
#12 Aug 26 2011, 7:04 pm
I use an invisible object which moves with your character and outputs an image display to you. This is only because I cannot use an image attached to the character himself because my character jumps and doesn't move the camera up or down. I really believe images are the way to go. There's just no way to go wrong with them.
#13 Aug 27 2011, 2:59 am
Oh wow SuperAntx.. Your's trumps mine completely XD...

I think I might try to use you'r method also... Sounds like it would defiently be a plus..