Level backgrounds

Yes, you can use Death Egg's background effects by changing two relative offset indexes. However, if it looks good or not I cannot tell.

I have myself spent the last 4 weeks trying to understand backgrounds, and I haven't finished yet so I can't really help more than telling you it is possible.

Use Nemesis' guide to find the first offset.

 

He dosen't just want the deformation effects, we wants the art and mappings as well. This is difficult in S2.

 

It is always difficult when it comes to art. And even worse with maps.

 

What I did to put the Death Egg background into Mystic Cave was take 5 or 6 (don't remember how many different tiles are in the DEZ background) tiles that were junks (messed up graphics in SonEd) and replaced those with the DEZ tiles I needed manually (took a while but I got it). Then I simply changed the deformation index for MCZ to point to the one for DEZ. It looked so-so but only because that background doesn't go with the level. The effect worked perfectly.

 

I know a bit how backgrounds works.
I can make some nice effects like a vertical scrolling, change backgrounds in the same act...

There is two parts: the background and the raster effect.
Background: Looks at MZ, there is a background scrolling X and Y, but no raster effects.
Raster effects: Looks at DEZ, there is a raster effect scrolling, but the background is stuck.
Raster effects usually have several blocks of different sizes scrolling. There is 36 (24 in hex) blocks for DEZ.

So, I recreated the Death Egg zone raster effect perfectly (for my level 01). I have to tell you that the background should not scroll in X and Y positions, else this will not look good when you are moving. Only the raster effect should scroll in X position. Unfortunately, the original raster effect for DEZ is good for a 3 tiles high level, not the others like ARZ... and start positions are important too. Then, I can't help you very much for ARZ because every case is different.

I can suggest you to copy the raster effect of DEZ and modify some values to fit your level:
-The level start position at $C1D0 (try to keep it as it is now)
-The first E1 84 and E1 85 values, to something like EE 0C. This is the background scrolling speed for the Y boundary. The more higher, the less speed. EE 0C will stuck the background (or almost).
-From 34 C4 to E6 89 values, the raster effect blocks speed.
-4A 38 EE BD...4E 75 The earthquake.
-From 4E 75 to 36 bytes after (where there is a lot of 08's), the blocks size themselves. The first value is 80, which is the value to modify to set your effect at the good Y position on the screen. This first block of 80 pixels high isn't scrolling (speed of 34 C4) and does not appear on the screen in DEZ.

I hope this is helpfull to you.

EDIT: Hey! That's a one month old topic. Strangely, I never saw this one.

 

That's amazing Sonic Hachelle-Bee! How you could find out so much by hex programming.

It took me 4 weeks of my life to understand the works of the backgrounds in Sonic.