I'm working on a sort of cinematic for a complex 2D game (a sci-fi action/shooter). I want the background to realistically morph into another background. I was planning a morphing of 32 images in 5 seconds (one new image appearing in the background every .156 seconds). I was wondering how I should do this. Should I: (a) create an animation for the background. The downside to this is that the animation would take about 16 MB file size. This would be a little wasteful for a 5 second background transformation. -or- (b) have the GPU create this animation by slowly morphing the two images together. The downside to this is that it is taxing to the speed, and I plan on having other things going on in the screen as the backgrounds morph. If anyone has any ideas for more effective ways of doing this, let me know. Also, if I may go a little off-top for a second, how do I program an enemy to stick to a random part of the character's sprite, and know the destination to hit when it's following the moving main character? Since the main character's X and Y axises would be constantly changing, how could the object know where to stop on a character? The easiest way might be to have the GPU draw the enemy directly onto a part of the main character, but with a lot of different character sprites for animations, this could create problems. Thanks in advance!

It really depends on what your target hardware is, what kind of morph you want to do...

If you are doing something simple, ie a positional morph (changing a box to a star) and added some alpha blending then it should be no problem (if you have a card that supports shader model 2 or even 1).