In the years that I’ve been creating things in Pure Data I have amassed quite a collection of unfinished and messy patches. Over the next few days I’ll be releasing a few of these patches and techniques that I implement when programming in Pure Data.
Infinite Scrolling
For a performance at ChipFest 10 in 2014 I wanted to recreate the look of a scrolling video game but within Pure Data. Sure, I could have just used a console emulator or recorded a clip and used that but doing it all within Pure Data allows me to have some more flexibility with how I perform. Here’s what I made:
I eventually didn’t use it all but I did use the a few techniques I learnt for future performances.
They key to those visuals and for things like 2D side-scrolling computer games is to have infinite scrolling background. That is, to have a single image which tiles and repeats seamlessly as it moves across the screen. Not sure what I mean? check out these examples from TV history:
Borrowing a bit from this answer on the Game Development Stackexchange, first you create a single tile of size, say, 512×512. You scroll it across the screeen horizontally, and once it’s position gets to 512px (or -521px) it jumps back to it’s original position.
If the original tile is repeated a few times and then offset so that the borders of the tile can’t be seen then suddenly you have an infinite scrolling background! To repeat an object in Pure Data we use the [repeat] object. This object repeats any object and its translations. So, if a [cube] has a translation of 1 on the X axis and is [repeat]ed 4 times, then the first [cube] is offset by 1, the second [cube] is offset by 1 in relation to the first [cube] (or offset by 2 in total). The third cube is offset by 1 in relation to the second cube (or 3 in total), and so on.
In action this looks like this:
Success!
You can also do the same with the Y and Z axis. For the Z axis you just need to decide where the vanishing point is. Or you could always use fog 😉
The patch for this is really quite simple but I’ve made it available for download below:
