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Avatar Anchorless Screen Scrolling in Computer Games


Avatar-anchorless Screen-scrolling



In 2D computer games Avatar-anchorless screen-scrolling refers to screen-scrolling that is unanchored to the avatar's position; that is, the screen does not automatically scroll with the avatar's movement. Instead, the viewport is manually scrolled by players in the following three main ways:

  • Edgescreen autoscrolling: moving the mouse-cursor to the edge of the screen (Baldur's Gate). The screen continues to scroll in that direction until you move the cursor away.
  • Mouse-click scrolling: clicking at the screen edges (Sid Meier's Civilization).
  • Click-drag scrolling: holding down the mouse-button while moving the mouse (The Settlers).

Avatar-anchorless screen-scrolling is contrasted with avatar-anchored screen-scrolling.

Avatar-anchorless scrolling can be icon-driven, mouse-movement driven, joystick-driven or driven via arrow keys. Thus, we can see that the term "mouse-look" scrolling does not suffice.

An example of an avatar-anchorless computer game is Baldur's Gate: the screen scrolls only when the mouse-cursor is moved to the edge of the screen. Thus, avatars can be positioned off-screen aka outside of the current viewport. And avatars can be moved to screens-edge without the viewport updating by even one pixel.

Baldur's Gate features area-wide avatar-anchorless edgescreen autoscrolling whereas Fallout's radius is capped; that is, the scroll distance radius from the avatar is restricted.

Arcanum carried the restriction over, but it can be disabled with the -scrolldist:0 switch.

Avatar-anchorless scrolling is employed primarily in cRPG, RTS and TBS genre; that is, in computer games in which the player directly controls multiple avatars, units, buildings and/or bases.

That said, the most advanced avatar-anchorless scroller of the 1990s was StarCraft 1: super-smooth scrolling, massive sprite-count, complex battles.

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