Upcoming Events
Unite 2010
11/10 - 11/12 @ Montréal, Canada

GDC China
12/5 - 12/7 @ Shanghai, China

Asia Game Show 2010
12/24 - 12/27  

GDC 2011
2/28 - 3/4 @ San Francisco, CA

More events...
Quick Stats
98 people currently visiting GDNet.
2406 articles in the reference section.

Help us fight cancer!
Join SETI Team GDNet!
Link to us Events 4 Gamers
Intel sponsors gamedev.net search:

  Contents

 Smooth Scrolling
 The Concepts
 Drawing
 Final Thoughts

 Printable version

 


  The Series

 Part 1
 Part 2

 

Introduction

Ok, folks, welcome back! In this second installment of "Tiling in DirectX," I plan to expand on the topics presented in the first article, which you can find here. Due to lack of time I'm only going to cover smooth scrolling in this article. This might disappoint some of you, but please realize that with school and my own projects I have increasingly little time. Sorry.

Smooth Scrolling

If you remember from reading Part I, we set up a simple tile engine that took a map from a 2-dimensional array and blitted the tiles to the screen using DirectDraw's BltFast(). We can't stop now! I think we're ready to take the big step into producing a scrolling world effect for your games. Don't feel that this step is daunting in any way. It's actually pretty easy once you understand the concepts.

For those of us who don't know what I mean by "smooth scrolling," I am referring to the effect made when a tile-based background behind the sprites in a game moves. This creates the illusion that the main character (or whatever you are controlling in your game) is travelling from one spot of the world to another, although he may be blitted to the same location on the screen at times. Think Super Mario Bros, which is an example of a scrolling world. Get it?


Next : The Concepts