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Beginners > Metoid Fusion Graphics

#9219 - dchartier - Wed Jul 30, 2003 11:11 pm

I have a couple of questions regarding Metroid Fusion's graphics:


    1. Which graphics mode does Metroid Fusion use during gameplay?

    2. How does Metroid achieve the effect of having different objects in the background -- some "close" to the player and others "far" -- scroll at different speeds? For example, in one of the game's rooms, Samus runs along a wall with windows overlooking some scene in the distance. As he runs, the wall's features scroll very quickly but the distant objects in the windows scroll very slowly. This effect generates a realistic perspective of the scene.

#9220 - ChaosX2 - Wed Jul 30, 2003 11:13 pm

I can tell you how I would do #2. Create multiple layered backgrounds and scroll them at different speeds.

#9230 - tepples - Thu Jul 31, 2003 2:37 am

Using VisualBoyAdvance 1.5 or later, you can easily discover exactly how a given GBA program does its graphics.
  • Dump the cart using a multiboot cable or a flash linker.
  • Open the resulting ROM image in VisualBoyAdvance.
  • Open the Tile Viewer, Map Viewer, and OAM Viewer.
  • Poke around until you get a sense for how it's done.


Metroid Fusion, like many GBA side-scrollers, uses mode 0.
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Last edited by tepples on Thu Jul 31, 2003 4:38 am; edited 1 time in total

#9234 - yaustar - Thu Jul 31, 2003 3:21 am

I think tepples means 'Mappy Virtual Machine' from bottled light unless VisualBoyAdvance has some new features since 1.4
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#9241 - ChaosX2 - Thu Jul 31, 2003 7:20 am

yaustar wrote:
I think tepples means 'Mappy Virtual Machine' from bottled light unless VisualBoyAdvance has some new features since 1.4


VisualBoy Advance does have those features at least the latest version does.

#9296 - yaustar - Fri Aug 01, 2003 4:00 am

Just downloaded ver1.6beta. I stand corrected, VisualBoyAdvance does have some cool new features.
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#55598 - Palamon - Thu Sep 29, 2005 8:58 pm

dchartier wrote:
I have a couple of questions regarding Metroid Fusion's graphics:
2. How does Metroid achieve the effect of having different objects in the background -- some "close" to the player and others "far" -- scroll at different speeds? For example, in one of the game's rooms, Samus runs along a wall with windows overlooking some scene in the distance. As he runs, the wall's features scroll very quickly but the distant objects in the windows scroll very slowly. This effect generates a realistic perspective of the scene.


Well, if you looked at the map layers using VBA, I'm sure you found out that the different objects in the background that move at different speeds are set onto different backgrounds that are scrolled at different speeds.

That brings up an interesting question that I was wondering about. In Elements Of Darkness demo, the clouds are all on one BG layer, yet they flow across the sky at different speeds for the different height of the clouds on the screen.
How did they do that?

#55600 - headspin - Thu Sep 29, 2005 9:16 pm

The effect is called Parallax Scrolling

Clouds moving at different speeds on a single BG would be a HBLANK interrupt used in conjunction with the horizontal scroll register.
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#55712 - Kyoufu Kawa - Fri Sep 30, 2005 9:00 pm

dchartier wrote:
As he runs, the wall's features scroll very quickly but the distant objects in the windows scroll very slowly.
Samus is a chick.

#56038 - Miked0801 - Wed Oct 05, 2005 5:27 pm

Or scrolling multiple BGs at different speeds w/o an HBlank hack.