If the player is good at playing Mars Runner, they could drive along the surface of the planet for quite a while. This creates a challenge when displaying the planetary background—how do we display a continuous background image no matter how far the player travels?
We have a couple of options here. We could create a background panel with a seamless texture on it and place multiple copies of it in the right position so they march past the camera at the appropriate rate. We are going to do exactly that to implement the track that our player will drive on.
We could also revert to using 2D images for the background. We would simply need to draw enough copies of the image, offsetting it as the player travels, to fill the display.
Both of these approaches would work for Mars Runner as we are implementing it in this book, but what would happen if we allowed the camera to move or rotate? Our flat background panels would quickly be revealed for what they are, and if we were...