Deck16

Vox Venio update. Inspired by a bucket-load of new art from Candice, I did some stuff.

I reworked parallax scrolling. Again. Initially I was motivated to “just” fix a couple of bugs, but that led to some refactoring. Not only are the bugs gone, but the background scrolling code is better now.

As an aside, I was tempted to use some smarts in XNA to improve the performance of drawing repeating tiles. But:

1. It meant I could no longer use Reach. Which, while not too big a deal, is nice because it supports more devices.
2. I would have to use Wrap instead of Clamp samplers, which draw funny borders around my current sprites. So non-trivial effort would be required where some things are drawn with Wrap, others with Clamp. Bleh.

So I decided to not use those smarts. As long as my background tiles aren’t teeny, they won’t need to be repeated too many times to fill the screen. Performance will be fine.

As for this video, it shows two different methods of parallax scrolling.

Parallax scrolling on both axes:

1. Looks good.
2. Simulates height well.
3. Can be a pain. As the player climbs, the layers spread apart vertically. One has to ensure that they have enough extra detail to not “split at the seams” and reveal what’s underneath. At least, not until they’re safely off the screen.

Parallax scrolling on X axis only:

1. Looks kindof strange.
2. Is easier to manage — point 3 in the list above doesn’t apply.

My money is on the first method. The second method just looks too weird.

By the way, I got the idea for multi layers of progressively darkening tree-tops from Donkey Kong Country. It’s a simple effect that works.