Parallax overrated/overused?

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Marchie

It seems that the rule-of-thumb for Amiga games is that you can have anything - colours, parallax, animation, speed; but not all at once. .

Depends on how it's done.
Full screen parallax definitely means a lot less objects to have running or flying around in an OCS game

That's why I made the compromise on Inviyya to have around 110 pixels of Parallax and lots of objects..

[ Show youtube player ]

But then, you have it all. 50 FPS speed, animation, lots of objects and colours...
It's definitely possible..

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Orcish75

I had a 520 STFM way before I got an Amiga, so I was used to single plane jerky scrolling. When Anarchy was released for the ST, I was totally gob smacked! A full screen, 50fps, multi-layer, super smooth parallax scrolling game on the ST. In fact, it's the only ST (not STE) game I know of that managed to do that.

Enchanted Land by Thalion to name one ;-)

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by jotd

@mcgeezer: using AGA is cheating (but chunky pixel is cheating & arcade custom chips is also cheating, so let's cheat too). Zool AGA has parallax and is quite fast.

I wouldnt say its cheating at all, and remember im not usibg dual playfiield for parralax.

I agree that aga makes things more possible though, like bigger sprites.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by jotd

@mcgeezer: using AGA is cheating (but chunky pixel is cheating & arcade custom chips is also cheating, so let's cheat too). Zool AGA has parallax and is quite fast.

Well, that might have come easy since Zool was very likely a no-DP 16-color game and they just added another playfield

[BippyM]

I personally don't think it's over used. I do think the community overrates it. Its not a. Necessity, yet one of the first comments on anything new would be abiut parallax.. "ooh nice parallax" or. "shame it doesn't have parallax" etc...

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Depends on how it's done.
Full screen parallax definitely means a lot less objects to have running or flying around in an OCS game

That's why I made the compromise on Inviyya to have around 110 pixels of Parallax and lots of objects..

[ Show youtube player ]

But then, you have it all. 50 FPS speed, animation, lots of objects and colours...
It's definitely possible..

That looks really, really, really good there!

I like the design choice of the 'windows' into the parallax layer

[Chrille]

Originally Posted by Marchie

It seems that the rule-of-thumb for Amiga games is that you can have anything - colours, parallax, animation, speed; but not all at once. The only game I can think of that comes close to 'having it all' is Lionheart, but that's a pretty slow-moving game, I have no idea if it could run at Sonic/Superfrog speeds and keep all that parallax and colour.

With the Lionheart technique you could scroll as fast as Superfrog or Sonic. It is the same scrollng technique as Turrican I, Turrican II or Brian the Lion and maybe a handfull of other games.



Scrolling with this technique (you can think of a circular buffer) takes only a small amount of time. The only thing that take more time, you have to blit more tiles that are scrolling into the screen (which overwrites the old tiles that are scrolling out).



Regarding to the main question if parallax is overrated, for gameplay yes. And for graphics, it is a matter of taste. I personally like the games with parallax scrolling. But it is more important to have a game that has a full frame rate (50 or 60 FPS) and a good player joystick control with no input lag.

[BrooksterMax]

I first saw parallax scrolling with Captain Planet the pack-in game with my A500+. It was leaps ahead of the 8 bit for me, and any such effects really place me in the 16 bit era. Love the effect and the platforming genre at the time, very evocative of happy memories.

Of course there were bad games with parallax, but there is something about the style and effect that places me back in the 90s.

[Shatterhand]

Lionheart does slowdown a lot on the levels with parallax, and sometimes there isn't even a lot of stuff moving on screen. You just need like 3 moving enemies on screen and the game starts running slower. The more action-packed levels are exactly the ones WITHOUT the parallax.

The thing with Lionheart is that it managed to combine colours, parallax, animation, speed, great music.... all of this with a GOOD gameplay to boot. It's a pretty solid and fun to play game, with a good difficulty curve, good level design and all.

My only gripe with it, and it's something that happens in a few Amiga games, is have to press button AND a direction to attack. Just pressing a button does nothings. With the 2 button option (Yay, add another positive point to the game) this becomes even more annoying, as there's no reason to have to "hold button + direction" to attack.

But it's a minor gripe and one you can get used with it.

[NorthWay]

I really like parallax effects, but it has to be done "properly". A bunch of Megadrive games has a kinda meaningless background layer which doesn't really add much to the visual experience.

I think it looks better when it varies how much the front layer hides of the background layer, and happily if the front is rather solid and it feels as you peek through it to see behind it.
And having a little layer in _front_ of the sprites can also be really cool, like a low railing/fence, lightpoles, pillars and similar that swish past.

A totally different thing that I don't think I have seen much (at least in pure 2D) is jumping from one layer down into the below layer (and so the top one goes away, and you perhaps see a new layer below the one you're on now). So going up and down between layers really. (You'd need some kind of openings for going up down somehow.)

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

Lionheart does slowdown a lot on the levels with parallax, and sometimes there isn't even a lot of stuff moving on screen. You just need like 3 moving enemies on screen and the game starts running slower. The more action-packed levels are exactly the ones WITHOUT the parallax.

With 6 bitplanes running and all that coppershit the game is doing there is probably not that much DMA left to have heap loads of blit objects flying around... :/

[Shatterhand]

I really like parallax effects, but it has to be done "properly". A bunch of Megadrive games has a kinda meaningless background layer which doesn't really add much to the visual experience.

It's because on the Mega-Drive is *so easy* to do it, and there are no caveats, there's basically no reason to not do it, even if it doesn't add a lot. You always have 2 layers of background available, and there's a pallete for each one, which will be there available for the background either you use it or not. There's really no reason to not do it.

With 6 bitplanes running and all that coppershit the game is doing there is probably not that much DMA left to have heap loads of blit objects flying around... :/

No doubt, it's still damn impressive. No wonder those "open" levels with the parallax are more about exploring and jumping around than killing enemies. Thalion obviously designed the levels around the limitations.

They sometimes feel a bit like some late 8 bits games (like Sonic Chaos on Master System or.. .erm.. Sonyc on MSX).. very colorful backgrounds, insanely smooth scroll for the system they are running, but nothing much happening on screen most of the time. But of course, in a 16 bits system with all the oooh-aaah the system can deliver

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by Marchie

Sounds promising...

This is what you need to MAX out your parallax needs

http://109.228.4.199/rygarsound.mp4

[donnie]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Depends on how it's done.
Full screen parallax definitely means a lot less objects to have running or flying around in an OCS game

That's why I made the compromise on Inviyya to have around 110 pixels of Parallax and lots of objects..

[ Show youtube player ]

But then, you have it all. 50 FPS speed, animation, lots of objects and colours...
It's definitely possible..

That is perfect parallax. Gives a great sense of depth, which is the point. It would not look remotely as good if it was full screen paralax. Then it would look cheap mega drive paralax that northway mentioned.

[Marchie]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Depends on how it's done.
Full screen parallax definitely means a lot less objects to have running or flying around in an OCS game

That's why I made the compromise on Inviyya to have around 110 pixels of Parallax and lots of objects..

[ Show youtube player ]

But then, you have it all. 50 FPS speed, animation, lots of objects and colours...
It's definitely possible..

Looks sweet! Seriously nice work!

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

This is what you need to MAX out your parallax needs

http://109.228.4.199/rygarsound.mp4

Also looking great, nice one!

[Marchie]

Here's a graphic-artist-who-knows-nothing-about-coding question:

We always talk about dual playfields when it comes to parallax, which would give us two levels of parallax without breaking a sweat, but how do we get 3 or 4 or more levels of parallax? (and the almost 3D sky/ground planes in Lionheart)

And why is foreground parallax so rare on Amiga games - as an example I remember looking at Flink, which is a simply gorgeous game, and while I understand the MD version has significantly cut-down levels compared to the CD32 and MegaCD, I also noticed it had foreground parallax that the CD32 version did not, is there a hardware reason why the CD32 could not handle an extra layer in front of the main playfield while the Mega drive could?

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by Marchie

Here's a graphic-artist-who-knows-nothing-about-coding question:

We always talk about dual playfields when it comes to parallax, which would give us two levels of parallax without breaking a sweat, but how do we get 3 or 4 or more levels of parallax? (and the almost 3D sky/ground planes in Lionheart)

And why is foreground parallax so rare on Amiga games - as an example I remember looking at Flink, which is a simply gorgeous game, and while I understand the MD version has significantly cut-down levels compared to the CD32 and MegaCD, I also noticed it had foreground parallax that the CD32 version did not, is there a hardware reason why the CD32 could not handle an extra layer in front of the main playfield while the Mega drive could?

Sprites and copper split screen effects get the parallax effects up to those standards.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Marchie

Here's a graphic-artist-who-knows-nothing-about-coding question:

We always talk about dual playfields when it comes to parallax, which would give us two levels of parallax without breaking a sweat, but how do we get 3 or 4 or more levels of parallax? (and the almost 3D sky/ground planes in Lionheart)

Basically, extra layers (other then Dual Playfield) can be done in three ways: brute forcing it using the blitter/cpu, using a sprite layer or making use of the way bitplanes work. The former two tend to not be used for displays greater than two layers. For that the bitplanes are (ab)used.

See, bitplane displays such as the Amiga divide the display up in several distinct planes (each kept separately from the others in memory), which are combined by the graphics chip into a single display. For instance, an 8 bitplane display would allow for 256 colours (2^8=256) and would be contained in 8 separate single bit deep bitmaps in memory, each representing one of the 8 powers of two.

The advantage of these layers being separate is that it's fairly easy to adjust just one or two of them rather than all of them. Combine this with clever palette choices and you can (in theory) have as many layers as there are bitplanes and it won't cost you any extra CPU/Blitter time as such. The catch is that a single bitplane seperated out would only allow for a single colour in the layer. So if you want colourful extra layers, you tend to need at least 2 bitplanes per layer.

Hope this is clear!

And why is foreground parallax so rare on Amiga games - as an example I remember looking at Flink, which is a simply gorgeous game, and while I understand the MD version has significantly cut-down levels compared to the CD32 and MegaCD, I also noticed it had foreground parallax that the CD32 version did not, is there a hardware reason why the CD32 could not handle an extra layer in front of the main playfield while the Mega drive could?

Amiga Dual Playfield mode, though allowing for two layers, is actually far more limiting than Mega Drive/CD layers. To start, the Mega Drive can display three layers (one static, two scrolling) and each can have 16 colours in use. Furthermore, these layers support priorities and other interesting hardware tricks, which allow you to effectively display up to 4 (or six, I forget) separate scrolling layers on screen - albeit with some restrictions.

The above is a fairly dense overview but I hope it suffices

[Gaelion]

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

[Tigerskunk]

@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.