The Parallax Project
It was 3am, I was feeling a little bored so I decided to go old skool.
The basic idea behind this project was to make an old skool 90s style demo, which required a few things;
- A scroll text
- Some kind of scrolling background
- Some other stuff scrolling around
The scrolling background kind of apes something I saw a while ago in an Atari ST demo, were the two background images would cross fade between each other. The images are various ones I found during my trawling of /b/ over the last few weeks.. my 4chan channel is a little strange.
The scroll text, it was infact pretty easy to write. There was easier back in the day when everything was a fixed width character, however applying a bit of brain power the problem became easy to solve; all we need to do is track when each character falls off the left of the screen and then set the postion back to the left and move up to the next character as the head of the text.
The ‘other stuff scrolling around’ was covered with two things;
The first of these were the ‘raster’ or ‘copper’ bars; again back in the day these would have been done differently, as it is I’ve just got some textured quads moving in a sin pattern up and down the screen, I quiet like the effect over all, certainly when blended in with some of the background images.
The final ‘othe stuff scrolling around’ is covered by the effect to which the project gets it’s name; the parallax scroll. The idea is to give an idea of depth by moving different layers at different speeds. It’s often used to good effect in old 2d games and cartoons, although the best application I’ve ever seen was in Final Fantasy 8. This isn’t the best ever but it fits.. maybe I’ll make a better one another day…
Project Status
Totally completed pending any reported crashes
Credits
Bitmap font generator from Angelcode
Code to load and decode it by Promit in this forum post on gamedev.net
Music by Big Jim / Valhalla
Sound system is the BASS Library
Craig aka Wisey for being a Vista Test Monkey
Requires
This should run on hardware which has been made since about 2000. It uses OpenGL so up to date drivers might help, but it doesn’t use anything fancy so even a TNT should be able to do something with it.. we only run at 800*600 after all.
32bit desktop is required or window creation might well fail.
Downloads
Parallax Project Binary files (0 bytes)You’ll want this one if you want to experiance the madness… Parallax Project Source (0 bytes)
C++ Source Code for Parallax Project. Requires Boost, OGLWFW, GTL and BASS
You must be logged in to post a comment.