Someone called “PercyPea” created a thread on the FlashKit forums to show off his MarioKart-style Flash engine – basically, a recreation of the classic SNES trick known as mode 7. It’s mainly a floor texture emulation.

What’s impressive about this, though, is that he has achived a pretty impressive speed with a near-perfect visual result. The technique involved is so ingenuous and simple that it almost hurts; similarly to what I’ve done sometime ago on a QuickTime VR emulation movie, the Flash movie has several movieclips, each one cointaining a line of the map, and each one resized to a different scale. Then he simply moves or resizes the map image inside of each stripe, and achieves the mode 7 effect without too much hassle (just a resolution loss depending on the size of the stripes).

There also very good examples on the thread: like this one or this one (which evolved into this — pretty insane) or this one (Final Fantasy maps anyone?), all of’em using similar techniques.

Seeing these examples made me jump from my chair, in fact: I’ve tried to do a similar thing sometime ago, but I tried creating a plain scrolling race circuit and it didn’t work so well. Sometimes you really can’t help but be impressed by clever and clean solutions to something you’ve tried before.

Source: OutsideOfSociety