Author Topic: [Suggestion][Editor] Parallax Backgrounds? or set parallax background feature  (Read 2539 times)

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Offline GigaLem

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My main issue with my FP tilesets is making Neolemmix friendly backgrounds, and I've wanted to ask for something like this for a while
however the thing stopping it
How would you handle the image feature?

Offline namida

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It came up a few days ago in IRC, whether the background system needs to be a bit more powerful - perhaps with an ability to place background pieces in a similar fashion to terrain pieces or objects.

Parallax scrolling backgrounds could also be a nice addition along these lines. I don't think it would be very hard to implement, although it might look a bit weird in the editor. The one issue that comes to mind is the question of how to handle cases where the background is not big enough to fill the entire screen area. To use an example (that admittedly isn't likely to happen in practice), if a player with a 4K display was playing NeoLemmix at the lowest zoom, the background would need to potentially be able to cover up to a 3840x2200 area. Of course, this could be achieved with a runtime re-sizing of it rather than requiring the parallax background to be insanely large, and in practice it's more likely to need to be "the size of the level" than "3840x2200" as few if any levels would get that big, but the point still somewhat stands.
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline Nepster

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I am very much in favor of turning all backgrounds into a static images, that won't move with the level (assuming that was meant by "parallax background"). This makes it much easier to distinguish terrain and background (and I might even set my options to displaying background again).

As lots of styles have rather small background images (e.g. honeycomb or mineshaft), we will still need the paving function for backgrounds. Granted, with backgrounds that display a solid ground and sky at the top, this will look pretty weird if paved vertically, but for such cases we might use a rule like: "Pave up to 160 pixels vertically, and then resize once to the full height needed". As this resizing would only be done once at the very beginning (and perhaps if the player changes the zoom level, but that's rare as well), we wouldn't incur any performance issues from the resizing.

Offline GigaLem

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Another suggestion for when a Parallax background is in use...
For the images and H.Q.minimap, have it set to show the background color
so when see either image or minimap, you won't have to see the background because its only used in game