Request: Background animations

Feature Requests
1

I would really like to be able to have animated sky and water in the background layer. @grazer would you enable this feature?

2

Yap also need it

3

I mentioned that a while ago, and he said it was a good idea, but never got around to it

4

A space background would be nice, too.

5

Oh and multiple parallax layers

6

I’ve been trying to get more layers for 3 years, lol. I don’t think it’s happening. I was going to remake a Sonic game, and SEGA Genesis has about 16 layers.

7

background behaviors…

8

So here’s he issue with background animations - right now, the background objects are all static, meaning that they can’t move (so that they can tile/repeat) or have behaviors. In order to enable animations I would need to enable behaviors as well, so that they can be triggered. There are no physics in the background layers either, so many of the behaviors wouldn’t work.

It would be possible to just add a small subset of behaviors enough to animate sprites, similar to the UI layer, so I may be able to do that without a huge amount of work.

Additional background layers wouldn’t really be all that difficult to add, it’s mostly just a matter of figuring out how a simple interface for adding additional layers would work.

9

One example I could use, let’s say I have a background that’s a sky, and I want clouds to go by, water to move, and Islands and whatever else to go by. You know how the background can be set as a color, but could we set it as an image or animation? If not, an unmoving parallax sky layer would work, and the animation could be transitions from day to night, or shooting start, while a second background layer is say islands or mountains, scrolling slowly, while all water is just animated tiles moving at different animation speeds, based on how close they are meant to look. There could be a 3rd background layer for boats, trees, closer Islands, or whatever else. I’m making it a simple explanation of examples, but honestly, I’m not an island person, I would use the 3 layers to make the sickest space sky ever. This would really help with how the game looks.