Random Background

Ok, I've got most of my shoot 'em up finished, but it needs some sort of scrolling, randomly generated background. It needs to give the illusion that you're travelling very fast, and not create any slowdown issues. How could I do this? I've got a few ideas:

1)The obvious way: Draw some backgrounds and load them up, and then use tileimage or whatever. This would take a long time, though.

2) Create some 'interchangable' images that can be used in any order, and then randomly position them/ use types or something to make an infinite scrolling background.

3) Draw some random rectangles/ovals/lines in certain (lighter) colours to give the illusion of a backrgound

Please can you tell me which way from the above I should do this, or tell me another way of doing a background?

Thanks in advance.

I've never written a scrolling shoot-em-up but if I did it occurs to me that I would try scanning in aerial photographs and cutting them into sections with morphed borders so they could be put together in as many random ways as possible.

I don't really know what I'm talking about - I just get spontaneous ideas when I read other people's posts.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but have to ask Oso why he is using a spanish word for "bear" as his nick? (just curious is all)

My wife is a Filipina and Oso (Superoso if sarcasm is intended)is one of my more palatable nicknames. Presumably the word fell into Tagalog through the Spanish influence in the Philippines.

I sympathize, my wife is Russian, I have quite a few unpalatable nicknames, myself, lol.

Arial photographs would be a good idea, but the problem is that that probably wouldn't fit in with the rest of the game. That is, it's quite stylised and high-tech looking. I'm trying to emulate something like this game...
It would be better if the background(s) is/are recognisable as a city/landscape whatever, but still feel kind of alien or futuristic...
Any more ideas?

I'd go for effect 2, I tried that once with a blocksize of 64*64 and the final effect looked pretty decent.

Mr Brine

Ok, thanks Mr Brine. I'm going to try that one as soon as I can.