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Posted By
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Message
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nim
Registered
17/05/2002
Points
7234
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23rd April, 2009 at 07:46:21 -
I'm making a puzzle game and need to make some backgrounds for it. I want these to be dynamic, and by that I mean animated, real-time and randomly generated. I was wondering if you had any suggestions for background effects. Perhaps something like a visualiser is what I'm trying to do, minus the synchronisation with any music. Also, it would be nice if it didn't slow the computer down to a crawl (I'm working with software mode MMF2).
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Assault Andy
Administrator
I make other people create vaporware
Registered
29/07/2002
Points
5686
    
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23rd April, 2009 at 12:45:00 -
Yes. I did this 40 times for Faerie Solitaire and I also called them "Dynamic Backgrounds" where as my friend referred to them as "Animated Backgrounds"... strange!
Anyway, for my effects they were all based on a background image, be it a forest or a cave. I used particle systems extensively where particles would be created at the start of the frame in random locations and would move in random directions etc. However since you are talking about a more abstract and perhaps 'trippy' background, you might want to look into something such as the overlay object and use some crazy maths to generate moving colours.
I find that sin and cos are my best friends when making interesting movements because they are periodic but also fluctuate between positive and negative values. For example you can set a particle's semi-transparency to abs(cos(counter))*128. Where 'counter' is a number that is constantly increasing by 1. This will make a 'glowing' effect where the particle fades in and out.
In summary: Try and get some nifty looking particles, make them move in all kinds of directions and modify their transparency and scale.
Creator of Faerie Solitaire:
http://www.create-games.com/download.asp?id=7792
Also creator of ZDay20 and Dungeon Dash.
http://www.Jigxor.com
http://twitter.com/JigxorAndy
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nim
Registered
17/05/2002
Points
7234
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24th April, 2009 at 05:55:07 -
Thanks Andy. Faerie Solitaire looks incredible, by the way 
I've made a couple so far, but they're really just objects fading in/out on a sine wave expression then changing positions. The effects is pretty good with multiple objects. Thanks.
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Sketchy
Cornwall UK
Registered
06/11/2004
Points
1970
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24th April, 2009 at 12:58:34 -
Maybe you could take a look at Nifflas' Particle widget:
http://www.clickteam.com/epicenter/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=82453#Post82453 (scroll to the bottom for the newest version)
n/a
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derek calavera
Registered
01/04/2009
Points
4
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29th April, 2009 at 12:10:20 -
Im not an expert by any means, but I second the idea of looking into the overlay object.
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nim
Registered
17/05/2002
Points
7234
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19th July, 2009 at 10:28:14 -
Just thought I'd update here again. I looked into this a while ago and the best method was simply using actives (with HWA) coupled with sine wave expressions to fade, change colour/size, etc. The Overlay object is nifty but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to use its "Paste into Overlay from another Overlay" function. Thanks for the advice.
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OMC
What a goofball
Registered
21/05/2007
Points
3516
      
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19th July, 2009 at 17:23:23 -
Can we see what you did?  Or is it uber secret? 
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