Parallax overrated/overused?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Steril707

@roondar: I'd say the biggest catch is that you cannot scroll those bitplanes independently in a smooth way without blitting them or having 16 prescrolled copies of the whole background.

You have a scroll register for even and uneven planes, and that's it.

It looks like in Lionheart you do have indeed (prescrolled?) slices/stripes of the background, neatly stacked to form the background.

having slices should also allow you to change the scroll register, before getting to the next slice.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Steril707

@roondar: I'd say the biggest catch is that you cannot scroll those bitplanes independently in a smooth way without blitting them or having 16 prescrolled copies of the whole background.

You have a scroll register for even and uneven planes, and that's it.

True, scrolling (or stopping the scroll of) extra playfields does cost extra bandwidth. But it's still less expensive than masking the bitplanes to create the layers. Plus, the only game having more than two layers that immediately springs to mind (Agony) used only a single bitplane for the 3rd layer. This is fairly inexpensive to shift & redraw.

But you are correct, it does cost something.

[touko]

To start, the Mega Drive can display three layers (one static, two scrolling)

Not really, the static one is not like the NG one,when used it's a part of plane A, and called the window .
And where the window is you cannot have the plane A,this why the window is often or almost all the time opaque .
The Md is limited to his 2 background layers, the only ways to simulate more layers is to use classic tricks, like tiles swapping or some sprites, the amiga's bitplanes are much more flexible .

[roondar]

Originally Posted by touko

Not really, the static one is not like the NG one,when used it's a part of plane A, and called the window .
And where the window is you cannot have the plane A,this why the window is often or almost all the time opaque .
The Md is limited to his 2 background layers, the only ways to simulate more layers is to use classic tricks, like tiles swapping or some sprites, the amiga's bitplanes are much more flexible .

So, err, you're right

I should've read the specs better. The MD has two layers and the priorities you can set only influence how sprites interact with the layer, not how the layers interact as I thought. They do still have advantages over OCS Dual Playfield though, with their 16 colours/per scanline.

[Marchie]

Well I've learnt a bunch!

[touko]

I should've read the specs better.

No problems

The MD has two layers and the priorities you can set only influence how sprites interact with the layer, not how the layers interact as I thought. They do still have advantages over OCS Dual Playfield though, with their 16 colours/per scanline.

Yeah, you can set sprite priorities over the two planes,and you can set priorities on each tile too .
Each tile can have 1 of the 4 palettes available.
For an amiga user it seems a lot, but for a pcengine or snes coder, it's a bit weak .
Another thing, the Md do not use bitplanes, but chunky .

I did love parallax scrolling back in the 90s and still do. Never overused!

agreed

[Tigerskunk]

thinking about it. I feel it's an aesthetic choice that must be considered given the context of the scenery of the game.

Let's say the whole game though a sprite is walking inside a house. It doesn't make much sense to add parallax here, since the most far away element is the wall next to the player character.

In a game where the player is in a wide open field, it looks kind of weird of the far away trees or mountains move the same speed as the stuff next to the player..

It's simply pleasing to mind and eye if these far away objects move in a different speed.

[sokolovic]

Zool AGA is tipically a game that doesn't benefit at all or the parallax. It makes the game very confusing and much worse than the OCS one.

Mr Nutz and Kid Chaos use perfectly the parallax, along with smooth scrolling, enemies, sfx+music.
And for Ruff'n'tumble, I'd love to see an AGA version with an extra layer. No extra color, just a layer or parallax. But thé game is great anyway and doesn't suffer to don't have one, maybe because the gfx artist make a great work.

[Marchie]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Zool AGA is tipically a game that doesn't benefit at all or the parallax. It makes the game very confusing and much worse than the OCS one.

Mr Nutz and Kid Chaos use perfectly the parallax, along with smooth scrolling, enemies, sfx+music.
And for Ruff'n'tumble, I'd love to see an AGA version with an extra layer. No extra color, just a layer or parallax. But thé game is great anyway and doesn't suffer to don't have one, maybe because the gfx artist make a great work.

Interesting, I always thought Zool looked way better in the AGA version, the slow-down was a real killer though.

Kid-Chaos is a deceptively good game - there's a lack of appeal to the design and concept, but the gameplay is kind of fun, I sat my son and his friend in front of a bunch of Amiga platform games and they found most of them too hard to get into, but with Kid Chaos they could just start charging around the levels and explore and they really got into it, there aren't many games where you can do that. And it has to be said that the execution on a technical level is first-class: loads of colours, loads of parallax layers, all smooth and fast.

[roondar]

I think the main problem with 'in your face' parallax designs is colour choices that are too 'bright'. A (slightly) subdued background is much easier on the eyes, IMHO.