A background is the foreground

Certainly an odd subject line, I'm sure. I'll try to clarify.

As I'm learning to better use C2, I wanted to get creative and have the gameplay BEHIND what might otherwise be considered a bg image, the hope being it would display an interesting visual as you watch the action take place behind it...obviously, it would have to be see-through in some respect.

Since I'm not much of an artist, I drew a grid on MS Paint, then filled in the blank spaces to make a "pixelated" stickman (making editing animation frames much easier for me). I called him Mr Stick (he has an arch nemesis called Dr Box...be afraid). Each "large pixel" is roughly 9x9 pixels in Paint...I think. I forget the exact dimension. Anyway. The individual spaces in the grid are large enough to see through, while the grid lines are only one or two pixels thick, so they can be rather easy to see, too.

So imagine standing on one side of a fence and watching the action on the other side, with minor portions of the characters hiding behind the fence links, while at the same time other portions are equally coming into view. All of this, of course, in the form of several tiny squares but a couple of pixels separated.

I've set the "background" grid as Layer 1 and the paralax to "0,0" with "Yes" transparency, and the gameplay action as Layer 0 ("100,100" paralax and no transparency).

Can anyone picture this? What are your thoughts? Does this sound like an interesting graphical presentation? (I'm not inquiring about if I did it right - the technical/programming elements are working fine.)

I'm not sure what your question is, what you tried so far and what result you gotten.

If the question is: is it possible? Sure it is. The foreground is then a layer with scenerey (or a fence), your actions are taking place at a lower layer (mid ground) and behind that is the actual background (which can be several layers as well).

If the question is: "I set it up correctly, but I'm only seeing my foreground", then the answer is: you have to make a graphic with opaque and transparent pixels. MS Paint doesn't support transparency, so you need something like paint.net (on a pc), or GIMP (these are free) or another graphics solution like Photoshop and then export to a format that supports transparency like 8 or 24 bit png files.

If the question is about layers and parallax scrolling, look at the wikipedia entry for an easy explanation. (I can't post links yet)

RicoD - Thank you for the input. :)

My question was really about if they could picture what I was trying to describe. I pretty much got everything set up just fine, including transparency with another program like the ones you suggested.

I wanted to know if anyone could visualize what I described and if that seemed like an interesting graphical presentation.

Yeah you are just putting an object in the foreground with transparent areas that allow you to see through to the background. lots of games do that. but its usually just some foreground trees or something.

justifun - *chuckles* Thank you, too, for your input. I guess I need to clarify what I'm after. The technical/programming parts I've got down just fine. It's working on that end. What I wanted to ask about was if - according to my description - that sounded like an interesting graphical presentation. Where the "pixels" of my stickman are constantly hiding and reappearing from behind a grid immediately in front of it. Like, imagine a piece of graph paper and the lines are solid, but the spaces are transparent. Then imagine watching all the action take place behind it. The characters are made of of squares of the exact same size as the spaces of the graph paper. And portions of the squares (pixels) seem to "hide" behind the graph paper grid lines OR reappearing on the opposite side of the of the grid line. Almost to the point that the individual pixels look like they're resizing as they go behind the grid lines. All of this while the normal action takes place.