   The 2D World
  I'm going to start working in XNA to develop a 2D side-scroller.  My question is about the 2D world.  I've seen tutorials where they have a foreground, mid-ground, and a background all scrolling at different speeds to add depth to the scene.  In these tutorials, the foreground and background use a simple texture that's tiled across as the player advances.  What about the mid-ground though?  In a game like super mario, is the ground that's relative to the player sprite tiled as well or does it just use one very large texture the scrolls as the player advances?   
  Traditionally it was hell to make the background to scroll smoothly without "dedicated hardware" such as NES console or various arcade machines. Problem was the fillrate of the graphics hardware back then was uttely incapable of producing 320x240 x 24++ pixels for every second.Back then the things seen on games such as Super Mario were most likely composed of large variety of small mosaical "tiles" that were used to construct the background from larger split up textures. Once the "adaptive tile refresh" innovation on PC ( Commander Keen 1 ) it became practical to have smooth scroll on background.These days it matters not so much, but generally its a good idea to only draw what you see. At least some chuncking would be required for anything but the smallest of worlds, given the inherent problems of "wrapping" a single texture around for it to repeat. That could be solved by temporarily using 2 instances of the thing, but how silly would that be with huge areas of the texture located outside the screen coordinates.One huge texture just is not an optimal solution to the problem.Sure, on modern machine it would be doable to quite a degree, but I would not call that an elegant solution.[Edited by - rmed002 on June 7, 2010 1:49:29 PM]