Best way to do a multi-frame background?

[Ozwalled]

Hi. Before I start delving into this too far, I was wondering if anyone could help me out.

I'm going to to a background with multiple frames of animation (beyond the 4 frames that are curreently allowed, at least as far as I know), and I'm wondering the best, most efficient/ effective way to do it (i.e., preferrably without massive slowdown).

What I'm going for it a sort of "psychedelic effects" lightshow, with blobs of colour slowly changing shapes and positions.

In thinking about it, I've come up with possible solutions.

1) Making a flat background and making the floating colour blobs into characters that move around with the help of the character control plugin (I think that's what it's called...) and have the colour/shape changes as animation frames.

2) Rawdrawing a bunch of moving objects on a flat-coloured background, maybe changing them colour with some sort of palette cycles.

The first option could work, maybe, but I don't have much experience with that plugin or know how much it slows things down (or doesn't). If it's not a viable option, what about the rawdraw? Is that at all realistic?...

(If it helps any, there probably wouldn't be much else animating on the screen while the psychadelic room would be in action. Probably one shortish animation at a time, tops.)

Again, any tips or advice you might have to push me in the right direction on this one would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Gilbert]

(beyond the 4 frames that are curreently allowed, at least as far as I know)

Well according to the manual it's 5, but that makes no difference on your problem I know.

1) Making a flat background and making the floating colour blobs into characters that move around with the help of the character control plugin (I think that's what it's called...) and have the colour/shape changes as animation frames.

Actually you can script their movements without the need of a plugin I think (unless you want some specific complicated movements, I don't know what that plugin was for actually), and I think it works also using objects too, just put the codes in repeatedly_execute_always().

2) Rawdrawing a bunch of moving objects on a flat-coloured background, maybe changing them colour with some sort of palette cycles.

Can work, but you may need to call RawRestoreScreen() frequently for it. And remember you can only change colour of drawn sprites if the game is 256 colours (unless you're just drawing basic polygons, circles, etc.)