It was 3am... I was bored... so I decided to attack a project to kill sometime and let me avoid doing any real work for a while...

I basically wanted to create something like an old skool 90s demo type thing, no real point to it, well it let me get my 2D on which will be good practise for when I attack what I should have been doing over the weekend [grin]

So, a few hours later, mostly taken up with pondering what to add and how to do it, The Parallax Project was, more or less, completed.

I say 'more or less' because it's known to break on at least one Vista machine and as I currently don't have Vista I can't point the blame anywhere other than in the direction of poor OpenGL drivers (very poor infact as I'm pretty sure this project uses nothing more than OpenGL 1.1, maybe 1.2 at the most...).

Anyways, 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...

There are a few credits to throw around for this;
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

Compiled version
Source code version

Do with as you will.
To compile you'll need
Boost
OGLWFW
GTL
BASS

Any feedback on if it breaks or not would be nice.. certainly from Vista peoples [grin]

edit: corrected a couple of typos in some urls, cheers Deranged [grin]