Planes with 3D Sprites

I'm quite new to this 3D lark (though I have plenty of 2D experience) and I'm using Syntax Error's Sprite Control routines to create what is basically a 2D shooter with nice alpha and blending.

Things have been going well - I have the gameplay basically done and I'm now moving on to making it look nice.

Anyway, I'm wondering if it's possible to use a Plane as an infinite scrolling background. I've tried, but I can't get anything to show - basically, I don't think I'm understanding Plane's correctly.

Hiya HappyCat - you're not in Cheshire are you???!

Anyways, createplane does indeed create an infinite plane, so texture it and use positiontexture x,y to scroll it - see if that helps.

If you want a sky you may have to flip the plane over so you can see the texture from underneath! - great for skies actually... just make sure you really scale the texture up big style!

IPete2.

Aha! Got it! I had a closer look at how Syntax Error was setting up the camera and positioning sprites and I got it sussed. Cool :-)

Um, how do you flip a plane as I get a error when I try that?

Regardless if you want a REALY big sky effect that follows you everywhere, use a cube or a sphere, flip it, and make sure it stays centered on you cammers, also sent the entity mode for that cube/sphere to not use the Zbuffer so it always gets drawn behind everything else.

Have you tried 'RotateEntity plane,0,0,180' ?

Oh, and I meant to say - not in Cheshire I'm afraid - Aberdeen in fact.

Got it all working lovely except the texture is vertically mirrored and I can't seem to flip the plane - it just doesn't display. I can live with it, just wondering if there's a way to flip the plane as RotateEntity plane,0,0,180 just makes it vanish (presumably because I'm then looking at the untextured side).

flip normals!

Sorry for the confusion, RotateEntity plane,0,0,180 is what you would use to flip the plane for use as a sky (as Strider Centaur asked). You also have to position the plane higher on the y axis... PositionEntity plane,0,40,0 once this is done you will have a visible plane above you.

If you want to use it as a scrolling background try this:
RotateEntity plane,-90,0,0 ; <-- this flips the plane 90 degrees to the ground
PositionEntity plane,0,0,10 ; <-- this moves the plane away from the camera
What you now should have is the plane in background and a small gap between the plane and the camera.
If you don't see the plane, it's inverted and needs to be rotated by another 180 degrees, that's why I've used -90 (90 would be inverted).

BTW, IPete2 was having a little joke... "Smiling like a Cheshire cat" it's an old saying ;)

VIP3R,

It's a good job there are some fast thinking folk here - like you.

Thanks for clearing up the plane thing for Strider, I had explained it quite badly in my post.

And yes cause I live in Cheshire and I was having a joke about the Alice in Wonderland ref. lol - which is of Cheshire origin.

IPete2.

Chesire cat - should have realised :-)

I've now got planes working as lovely parallax backgrounds. Yum ... and thanks for the help guys.

Another plane tip - if you want a cloud layer, etc, using a top and bottom plane it works best if you do 'ScaleEntity bottom_plane, 1.0, -1.0, 1.0, True' so that the top and bottom textures match up.