Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine? • Hacker News Board

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

#21

Post by maybewhenthesun » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 8:27 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #12

PowerElectronix wrote: post #4

My advice to anyone even minimally interested in retro games or just clear motion in the image is to get a cheap crt monitor and play a bit with it. You'll surely will appreciate that even against today monitors they hold their ground very well (not in brightness, though) and easily surpass them in motion clarity. We did lose quite a lot when we trasitioned to lcd screens.

I distinctly remember gaming on CRTs and then LCD screens and it was night and day difference, in favor of LCD. Monitors have only gotten better and I certainly don’t miss CRTs, least of all how hot they were.

Agreed a 100% CRTS were wobbly flickery mess. Especially in the 60Hz era. Everyhting below 90Hz on a crt gave me horrible migraines when working longer than 4 hours.

LCDs that were just constantly lit were so much easier on the eyes than a CRT where every bright pixel is flashing at 60Hz.

But one thing is true: a low res game designed to look good on a CRT looks much worse on a low res LCD. CRTs being a blurry mess gave you free 'antialiasing'.

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

#22

Post by jpadkins » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

user68858788 wrote: post #10

wallstop wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience with game engines and people that really care about CRTs - I believe the effect (confidence: 95%) can be entirely achieved with rendering glue in any of the modern game engines - Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc. Now, whether or not it is a literal shader, or a shader + custom sauce, not sure. However, I have not tried, so I cannot verify that claim to 100% accuracy. The author ...might have tried? They d…

Do you have an example? I’ve done a slightly-more-than-casual search for convincing post-processing and haven’t found success. Filters still tend to retain the sharpness of pixel edges in a way that CRTs don’t, and the contrast doesn’t look right either.

Balatro is a good example. Lots of different opinions on whether its a good CRT effect or not.

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

#23

Post by fluoridation » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

user68858788 wrote: post #10

wallstop wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience with game engines and people that really care about CRTs - I believe the effect (confidence: 95%) can be entirely achieved with rendering glue in any of the modern game engines - Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc. Now, whether or not it is a literal shader, or a shader + custom sauce, not sure. However, I have not tried, so I cannot verify that claim to 100% accuracy. The author ...might have tried? They d…

Do you have an example? I’ve done a slightly-more-than-casual search for convincing post-processing and haven’t found success. Filters still tend to retain the sharpness of pixel edges in a way that CRTs don’t, and the contrast doesn’t look right either.

Still the best CRT simulation I've seen is in an X screensaver called XAnalogTV. It simulates both CRT artifacts as well as NTSC channel cross-talk and analog interference. It amazes me that still no one has produced a portable version.

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

#24

Post by spencerflem » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 8:42 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #7

...What? >But a CRT isn’t a camera filming the world. Its a physical device that generates an image as an output of physical process. [...] That’s not a post-process overlay or filter effect, its an entirely different mental model of what it means to draw or render an image. I think this is why I struggled when trying to bolt this onto a modern engine. The foundations between the two models is just so fundamentally d…

Yeah I’m with you. Hate to assume such things but with how much AI spam is out there on programmer blogs these days I kinda just give up reading the blog post once something becomes confusing. Most of the time there’s not any insight to be learned by investigating deeper.

This one also has a lot of Its not X, its Y type phrasing

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

#25

Post by panxm » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:03 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #7

...What? >But a CRT isn’t a camera filming the world. Its a physical device that generates an image as an output of physical process. [...] That’s not a post-process overlay or filter effect, its an entirely different mental model of what it means to draw or render an image. I think this is why I struggled when trying to bolt this onto a modern engine. The foundations between the two models is just so fundamentally d…

[dead]

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

#26

Post by freedomben » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:17 PM UTC

Insanity wrote: post #6

freedomben wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. I grew up with CRTs and didn't even use an LCD screen until in my 20s. It felt magical. Then LED screens (especially the black of OLED) felt even more magical. I've never considered that CRTs might have been superior for some things. I do remember playing some NES games on emulators on LED screens and thinking the weather effects and such looked pretty bad compared to the CRT experience I remembered…

I started out gaming on CRTs in the late 90s. Moved to LCD in the mid-2000s and haven't looked back. I don't miss CRTs, not least the bulkiness of them lol.

For real haha. I remember helping my dad move his old big screen TV out of his house when he replaced it with a "flat screen" and holy hell, it beat the hell out of 4 of us and we only had to take it 100 feet. The bulk was something I'm the young will never be able to appreciate :-D

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

#27

Post by khedoros1 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:28 PM UTC

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #17

superxpro12 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what the primary causes of that are. Like, I had a similiar experience growing up in the 90's. I think it was just the sheer increase in resolution. Text looked so much better, and you could fit more on a screen. And then they got BIGGER.

Same here, I very distinctly remember the first time I got to use desktop-class LCD monitors (it was at a new job at the time) and four things stood out: - The screen size. Going from a 17” or maybe 19” CRT at home to a 19” LCD but without the CRT bezel — the screen looked HUGE. - The clarity and flatness. The lack of smudging on text, the consistent geometry, being able to see the screen edge right up to the bezel w…

I went from a 19" CRT capable of 1600x1200@75Hz to a 17" LCD capable of 1280x1024@60Hz, basically because that CRT would've taken up a huge chunk of desk real estate in my dorm.

My first impressions were that the screen was bright as hell, sharp (but I was torn on whether that was good or bad, given the blockiness that it introduced), thin and light (awesome!), and sucked to run at anything but the native resolution. After a few hours, I realized that my eyes weren't getting tired looking at it, and that it was nice not to have the subtle hum around anymore.

The CRT was a decent screen (for 1999), and the LCD was a decent screen (for 2003). Of course, I just got used to the differences, since the LCD was much more practical in my life. I still have it in storage right now.

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

#28

Post by slopinthebag » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #7

...What? >But a CRT isn’t a camera filming the world. Its a physical device that generates an image as an output of physical process. [...] That’s not a post-process overlay or filter effect, its an entirely different mental model of what it means to draw or render an image. I think this is why I struggled when trying to bolt this onto a modern engine. The foundations between the two models is just so fundamentally d…

Mmm, while this person's articles are clearly AI written, they do make some sense. Their renderer keeps samples the previous frame to achieve the effect, which of course is totally possible to do in Unreal or Unity but they also seem to have their own lighting and PBR models, which might be a bit harder to achieve.

>Lighting systems are designed to remain readable under CRT-style color quantization. Sprite and mesh pipelines emphasize bold shapes and strong contrast. Even debugging tools in the engine, like the grid overlays and scene visualization systems, exist partly to help developers maintain spatial clarity and composition.

This is AI nonsense but it could be a summarisation of something real.

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

#29

Post by imtringued » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #7

...What? >But a CRT isn’t a camera filming the world. Its a physical device that generates an image as an output of physical process. [...] That’s not a post-process overlay or filter effect, its an entirely different mental model of what it means to draw or render an image. I think this is why I struggled when trying to bolt this onto a modern engine. The foundations between the two models is just so fundamentally d…

As you said, the CRT just receives the frame data and turns that into a visible image. This means you can simply build a filter that transforms the final frame buffer by simulating the physics of a CRT.

A filter is not a game engine and a game engine is not a filter.

Building a custom game engine for CRTs represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how a CRT works and what the responsibility of a game engine is.

Re: Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

#30

Post by imtringued » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC

user68858788 wrote: post #10

wallstop wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience with game engines and people that really care about CRTs - I believe the effect (confidence: 95%) can be entirely achieved with rendering glue in any of the modern game engines - Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc. Now, whether or not it is a literal shader, or a shader + custom sauce, not sure. However, I have not tried, so I cannot verify that claim to 100% accuracy. The author ...might have tried? They d…

Do you have an example? I’ve done a slightly-more-than-casual search for convincing post-processing and haven’t found success. Filters still tend to retain the sharpness of pixel edges in a way that CRTs don’t, and the contrast doesn’t look right either.

I think you are underestimating what a filter is allowed to do.

You could build a simulation of the universe, send the frame data to the CRT inside that universe and capture the output of the simulated CRT and show it on the LCD.