I'm about to put the background information into my game and I would lvoe to see parallax layers along with it, although i'm not sure of the best way. I was maybe eiter thinking of having one big image, or maybe sub divided images that when put together make one big image, like strips. This is just a simple 2d game done in OpenGL. What is your experience with performance with backgrounds and layers?

Preformance dips fearly rapidly on the rage128 with too many layers. With strips that don't overlap too much you should be able to get away with quite a few before you hit it. On any higher end graphics card you would have to be far more wastful with fill than just having a handful of layers with transparency.

If you want to do anything too complicated - like flat planes receding into the distance, you are better off (Trust me on this) using a perspective view, but simple repeating layers moving at different speeds is relatively easy and effective for a 2D game.

David