8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: 8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]

#21

Post by archagon » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 1:19 AM UTC

skardan wrote: post #16

Thanks for submission. Inspiring also outside 8bit and 8bitish art: Environment was small enough that you actually could think about it. 8bit art is mentally and creatively manageable space to work in. It is not the first time I hear this advice. If you want to be creative, work under constraints.

I think it's no accident that one of the most renown and influential works of classical music ever made — the Well-Tempered Klavier — was mostly written for 3-4 voices, for an instrument with very limited expressiveness, and under the incredibly strict rules of counterpoint. To echo what Mark is saying, this is probably one of the reasons we find classical video game music so memorable. When you only have access to a sine wave, a saw wave, and a noise channel, you get really, really good at inventively utilizing these resources to their fullest. I can't remember most of the over-orchestrated, insipid soundtracks in AAA games today, but music from my favorite NES, SNES, and DOS games has never left my mind.

As an aside, I think Disasterpeace is doing for chiptune-style music today what Mark Ferrari has done for 8-bit graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB-pG7wEnzM

Re: 8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]

#22

Post by kitsunesoba » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 1:47 AM UTC

EyeballKid wrote: post #20

aidenn0 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deluxe Paint II enhanced had a demo of two images in one with palette shifting that shipped with it. It really is a phenomenal program. I had to do some pixel-art drawing c.a. 2000 and found nothing remotely as good; fortunately I still had a machine that would boot to dos and my copy of DPII.

You're not the only one who thinks fondly of DPaint! shameless plug: here's the paint program I've been working on: http://evilpixie.scumways.com/ (the most up-to-date code is the 'rgba' branch in github: https://github.com/bcampbell/evilpixie/tree/rgba )

Checking this out now and seeing if it compiles on OS X. In case you weren’t aware, your source code download link is missing a colon.

Re: 8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]

#23

Post by Lich » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 1:58 AM UTC

Thanks for the submission. One thing I'm confused about. So, he said that in the animated scenes, the animation was done with palette shifting, and not separate components/layers. I understand that bit. However, how would the animation be done in the game? Does he mean that the palette shifting is implemented within the game, or is the palette shifting technique to easily and quickly produce art assets?

Re: 8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]

#24

Post by roywiggins » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 2:06 AM UTC

Lich wrote: post #23

Thanks for the submission. One thing I'm confused about. So, he said that in the animated scenes, the animation was done with palette shifting, and not separate components/layers. I understand that bit. However, how would the animation be done in the game? Does he mean that the palette shifting is implemented within the game, or is the palette shifting technique to easily and quickly produce art assets?

Video cards supported swapping palettes out in real time.

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...

> Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time, so a palette of selected colors was used. But the programmer could change this palette at will, and all the onscreen colors would instantly change to match. It was fast, and took virtually no memory. Thus began the era of color cycling.

Re: 8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]

#25

Post by vidarh » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 2:44 AM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #11

He mentions Deluxe Paint II; I was fortunate among my PC owning friends to have that rather than PC Paintbrush. It was one of those rare tools that was so well made for its purpose as to make it hard to describe what was so good about it. Plus it shipped with several tutorials and a very complete manual.

My favourite feature, and I suspect of many others given how often I saw this at demo parties etc.:

The split screen, pixel perfect zoom.

I've been looking for paint apps for Android for years, and one of my pet hates is that finding one that didn't do bilinear filtering was incredibly hard (I finally found one I like reasonably well called "Artflow").

But even without filtering, having a quick and easy (one keypress) zoom that keeps the un-zoomed image visible on one side, and shows the zoomed region on the other, was vital to me, because it was one of the most frequent operations. Pretty much every paint app I see either complicates this with multiple separate views in separate windows, or by showing only a zoomed in view.

I find one of the biggest problem with modern paint applications is that they crowd the screen and don't surface the most important paint tools very well - they try to be too many things.

When I used Deluxe Paint, I wanted as little clutter as possible. I'd paint with everything off except when I wanted to change a tool, or change colour - and this to was one keypress away.

Though (relatively) low-res pixel art also tends to lend itself to using far fewer tools. I tended to mostly use the "spray can", smooth, and zoom in and draw individual pixels.

Re: 8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]

#26

Post by corysama » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 3:04 AM UTC

Lich wrote: post #23

Thanks for the submission. One thing I'm confused about. So, he said that in the animated scenes, the animation was done with palette shifting, and not separate components/layers. I understand that bit. However, how would the animation be done in the game? Does he mean that the palette shifting is implemented within the game, or is the palette shifting technique to easily and quickly produce art assets?

The pallete shifting was implemented in the game.

At the time, the video cards worked by having a 4 or 8 bit image resident in video RAM and also a 16 or 256 entry pallete of colors as well (18 bit was common in VGA, you didn't even get 24bit palletes!). The card would do the pallete transform every frame pixel by pixel as it scanned out the image to the CRT. The point being: at no point in time did a 18 bit, full color image exist anywhere in RAM.

That meant even on a machine that was too slow to even just upload a whole frame of 320x200 8 bit pixels 30 times/second, you could still easily upload a pallete of 256 colors every frame. Just doing that would change how the whole image displayed without actually doing the work of touching any of the pixels.

Re: 8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]

#27

Post by EyeballKid » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 3:15 AM UTC

kitsunesoba wrote: post #22

EyeballKid wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not the only one who thinks fondly of DPaint! shameless plug: here's the paint program I've been working on: http://evilpixie.scumways.com/ (the most up-to-date code is the 'rgba' branch in github: https://github.com/bcampbell/evilpixie/tree/rgba )

Checking this out now and seeing if it compiles on OS X. In case you weren’t aware, your source code download link is missing a colon.

Oop - thanks!

I've had it running on OSX, but haven't tried it recently. I'd expect there to be a few hiccups, but nothing fundamental.

Re: 8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]

#28

Post by Ezhik » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 4:16 AM UTC

yxlx wrote: post #18

LoSboccacc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm following this game https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1183462809/paradise-los... Called paradise lost, and the trick the graphic team are using to fit 8bit pixelated graphics to the modern taste are incredible, like having to tweak animations so no parts ever move half a pixel, which influences walking speed and dozen pther things. Their blog is quite informative.

Looks like an interesting game. Reminds me a lot of the 2D J2ME version of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow by Gameloft. Screenshot: http://www.gameloft.com/common/products/60/us/web/screenshot... I attempted to find an official page for the game but couldn't find any. Instead, I found a bunch of documents about the Gameloft business. https://media01.gameloft.com/web_mkt/corporateV2/pdf/en/Refe... https://media01.game…

J2ME games, that's one hell of a blast from the past.

Re: 8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]

#29

Post by city41 » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 6:47 AM UTC

dalke wrote: post #2

I almost overlooked this link. The presentation is very nice. It starts with an evolution of 8 bit (256 color palette/EGA) images at Lucas Games, from simple to dithered to more advanced (and impressive) animations based on palette-shifting. It then uses the metaphor of "Renaissance" vs. "Renaissance Faire" to talk about an 8-bit style, which doesn't have to reproduce the exact details of 8-bit colors, but rather the…

I feel you omitted one of the best parts of the talk. When he is explaining the palette techniques used in the X-Men Storm game where a single image can be clouds, trees or a cityscape with just a palette swap. I actually let out a small gasp when he went over that, really impressive.

(this part is about 12 minutes in)

Re: 8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]

#30

Post by city41 » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 6:48 AM UTC

exlurker wrote: post #12

corysama wrote: post #10

Actually leveraging the power of palletized graphics has been a lost art for well over a decade. Mark Ferrari is the only person I know of that I can call a master of that art. When I was working on PlayStation 2 games, it was frustrating that all of the artists I worked with were creating textures that would ultimately end up palletized, but none of them had any concept of the techniques presented here even then. Th…

Mark Ferrari also teamed up with Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick (et al) to create a new 2D adventure game called Thimbleweed Park[1] (No affiliation!) - awesome backgrounds by Ferrari! https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/

In this talk he goes into detail about the Thimbleweed Park art he made and how he uses Photoshop to pull off pixel art techniques far more efficiently.