scrolling shooter...

[harrio]

hey seth,

i tried out the shmup demo from this thread a while back...
http://www.rtsoft.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1559&highlight=shooter

and i wondered, is it possible to make the game screen elements scroll? by scroll i mean two possible methods...

1. repeated scrolling - parallax backgrounds and game elements that scroll repeatedly like in a shooter

2. circular scrolling - where the 'map' is one sort of inclusive world, think 'defender', you get to the end of the map and it joins seamlessly with the beginning of the other end.

just thought i'd ask...

[Seth]

Hrm, I'm not sure of a clean way to loop the background... if you did the background in say, 800X600 blocks, it might be possible to hit a certain point and physically warp the player, every enemy, and every bullet BACK to the first chunk (say, 10 screens back) in such a way that the player doesn't see a change.

Crazy? Maybe.. but you could scan by layer (ignoring the BG layers) to get every entity and just offset their X by the amount.. so at least it wouldn't require any special script for each entity.

I'd like to make a shooter demo sometime.. :)

[harrio]

i definately don't want to delay your work on the engine. i just wondered how possible/difficult those scrolling methods might be. but i'd love to see any demo you come up with.

if anything, you make it easy to produce a scrolling shooter because we can just do a block of art/background and then just copy/paste a bunch of the same element in a row, with as much variety as we like.

the more i dig into this engine, the more i like it.