[HN Gopher] Final Fantasy remasters reignite controversies over ...
___________________________________________________________________
Final Fantasy remasters reignite controversies over pixel art
Author : danso
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-06-25 20:49 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| musicale wrote:
| One nice feature of the PS3 is that it has analog video output
| and plays PS1 games (and PS2 if you have a launch model.) I still
| think PS1/2 games look best on a CRT, as do 1990s-era PC games.
| Even modern games look pretty great on a CRT, which is why 16:9
| CRTs command high prices.
| underwater wrote:
| I've heard the revelation "that art was specifically drawn
| knowing it would ultimately pipe through a CRT" quite a few times
| now. It's becoming a meme.
|
| It makes it sound like artists sat down and specifically about
| colour bleed, and blurry edges, and designed the artwork while
| thinking about the mechanics of CRT monitors in an academic way.
|
| In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked
| good on their development devices.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't understand the distinction you're making here. If every
| monitor was a CRT, the artists sat down at one of those
| monitors and thought about (while observing) color bleed and
| blurry edges, and drew what looked good on their development
| devices.
|
| Are you saying that people are saying that artists back then
| didn't use monitors, and had to imagine what their art would
| look like?
| tedunangst wrote:
| The opposite, I believe. A lot of people do make it sound
| like art was mastered on pixel perfect displays, and the
| artist had to imagine how it would ultimately look on some
| far off CRT.
| taeric wrote:
| This is a solid rebuttal to the idea that things were
| carefully crafted to the pixels. https://t.co/pGAxa87C1e
|
| Odds are high that things were varied considerably. Such that
| it is tough to really claim too much.
|
| Edit: as the follow-up shows. Down res and cleanup probably
| works better than folks are allowing in the conversations.
| With the major caveat that the "and cleanup" is tough to
| automate.
| bluescrn wrote:
| In the days of 8-bit and 16-bit home computing, monitors were
| an expensive luxury, and a lot of game developers will have
| used a TV connected by a composite or even RF connection.
|
| They didn't have to 'think about how it'd look on a consumer
| TV', as that's probably what they were developing on.
|
| During the era of 16-bit console development, the Amiga (with
| DPaint - which was never as good on PC) was still a popular
| pixel art tool. And even if you had a monitor, you could
| easily preview things on a TV too.
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| That doesn't really invalidate the point, and doesn't change
| the part where it looks different (and not necessarily as
| intended) on non-CRTs, or that they considered some of those
| aspects when they designed the art.
| [deleted]
| tshaddox wrote:
| They presumably developed on CRTs, of course, but I would also
| guess that they drew while zoomed in and thus were very aware
| of each pixel and of tricks to make things look good.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Drew while zoomed in? You mean using grid paper to create the
| sprites
| gmueckl wrote:
| DPaint was a thing, at least in the later years. That
| program supported zooming in.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what
| looked good on their development devices.
|
| Vector games look atrocious in modern monitors, but beautiful
| in vector monitors. Developers couldn't know what monitors the
| future would have, but they certainly designed for the monitors
| of their time and counted with their quirks in their visual
| effects.
|
| IIRC, the developer of the 2600 VCS version of Pac-Man decided
| that the ghosts should display 1 of every 4 frames not because
| it looked well in his monitor, but because he was running out
| of time and relied on phosphor persistence to mask his sprite
| reuse hack.
|
| Edit: The correct VCS Pac-Man story of the flickery ghosts
| https://boards.fool.com/atari-2600-hardware-and-pac-man-2527...
| vmception wrote:
| Many visual artists today also factor in the capture and
| display technology, specifically around color space which can
| have meaningful changes between mediums
|
| Nobody is suggesting pixel art was an advanced form of alchemy,
| they are saying many artists understood techniques or why their
| printed pixel art for a presentation would look one way while
| their digital version looked another way
| qayxc wrote:
| > In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what
| looked good on their development devices.
|
| Oh you don't even know the half of it, believe me! That was
| _not_ how it went back in the day.
|
| While every monitor was indeed a CRT, the difference between
| composite, EGA (later VGA), and RF cable, TV and computer
| monitors were in fact quite visible.
|
| You could draw perfectly good pixel art on a nice, well
| calibrated 14" computer monitor only to see the same graphics
| look like a blend of mouse excrements and frog barf on a PAL TV
| via RF cable.
|
| In fact, artists needed to make sure their palette and graphics
| worked reasonably well on both PAL and NTSC devices (different
| resolutions, slightly different colours, etc.).
|
| Some companies made good ports that worked- and looked well on
| both PAL and NTSC, while many games had terrible PAL versions.
| joshspankit wrote:
| ^ Can confirm. The tech itself might have had less
| "complexity", but devs had to practically (or actually)
| become _engineers_ of every single piece of the pipeline. The
| different connectors, the different tubes, how colour works,
| how the memory functioned (not just how the docs _said_ it
| functioned), the math that each chip did as the functions
| were run, everything.
|
| Lack of knowledge of any specific part could mean anything
| from muddy graphics to a bug in the retail version of the
| game in a time when there was literally no way to patch a
| game after release. Those bugs could ruin a company.
| gryson wrote:
| The focus here should really be on output signal, not CRT.
| Specifically, composite vs. RGB output.
|
| And yes, at least in some cases, designers very carefully took
| into consideration how the art would look on a CRT via
| composite, in contrast to how they saw it on the high end
| monitors they were designing on via RGB.
|
| Here are two of the designers of the original Sonic the
| Hedgehog games discussing the point:
|
| https://twitter.com/MegaDriveShock/status/139046602041917849...
| gfaure wrote:
| Even if they didn't draw specifically for CRT output, I imagine
| the process to have been iterative -- if something ended up
| looking bad on end-user output devices, they would make tweaks
| until the product looked good enough on CRTs.
|
| Or are you suggesting that artists of that era never looked at
| their art on CRTs at all?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If anyone is looking for a good CRT filter, I very highly
| recommend GTU v0.50 by aliaspider.
|
| Unlike some filters, GTU doesn't try to mimic CRTs with complete
| accuracy. Rather, its an idealized CRT tuned for pixel art, and
| IMO the results are shockingly good.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Well the new sprites are certainly an improvement from the last
| time they remade these games, but I still think it's a step down.
| I don't really get what they're doing. I fell in love with FF6 at
| a young age, and huge part of that was that the visuals blew me
| away, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. It reminds me of the
| Star Wars special editions, why do they insist on tinkering with
| something people already love?
|
| I understand the issue that stretching these pixels out to 50+
| inches gets a little ridiculous, but there are already solutions
| that other re-releases have done. You can add borders to keep it
| from getting too huge, add optional filters for scanlines or crt
| blurriness, and if you want to mess with the colors a bit instead
| of sticking to the very limited original palette, that's probably
| ok.
| jacksonlango wrote:
| They should make the tilesets easily moddable on the Steam
| versions, modern pixel artists could do some incredible work with
| these games. Maybe open up post processing modding to allow CRT
| effects too.
| vmception wrote:
| That's one thing that always bothered me about 90s nostalgia from
| people born in the late 90s and early 2000s, all the fan-made
| stuff didn't have the scanlines.
|
| I like how this is being addressed, people go out of their way to
| emulate VHS artifacting now with dynamic filters, and then
| pretend to pipe that through a CRT. This is much more appealing
| to me aesthetically
|
| Square's Final Fantasy remakes do not do this, instead they try
| to show characters in the way the final result would have looked
| like if they had never had to use pixel sprites back in the 90s
| in the first place. Grave mistake. Nobody wanted that.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| Tl;dr:
|
| Pixel graphics on CRTs look smoother (almost like anti-aliasing)
| because CRT pixels don't behave like the clean pixel squares in
| modern displays.
|
| Just displaying the same pixels on a modern display may not match
| the original artist's intent.
| musicale wrote:
| Even without interlacing (which will alternate the set of
| scanlines that are used and thereby "double" the resolution),
| having black scanlines reduces the brightness and allows your
| brain to fill in the imagined intermediate image.
| svachalek wrote:
| I think this is why it's just not possible (or at least super
| difficult) to replicate the look of a CRT on a modern LCD. On
| a CRT it's firing an electron gun at one point on the screen
| which burns searingly bright, while the rest of the screen is
| fading out and between the scanlines it's perpetually dark.
|
| Your brain somehow turns that mess into a surprisingly
| coherent image, especially if it's animated, to the point I
| remember lots of people comparing 1080P LCD TVs in the store
| back when they came out to their old CRTs at home and asking,
| "is it really any better? I can't tell". (I still think they
| all needed glasses, but there were a LOT of people talking
| like that!)
|
| Maybe someday we'll be able to emulate the whole effect with
| fast enough, bright enough, LED/LCD screens but right now
| even the photos of CRT screens viewed on an LCD screen don't
| really give the right idea.
| qayxc wrote:
| > Maybe someday we'll be able to emulate the whole effect
| with fast enough, bright enough
|
| Please, never ever do that shit again. Ever. It was an
| actual strain on the eyes to watch TV back then (or work on
| a CRT monitor). You could actually catch tan if you were
| sitting too close to a CRT (hot sensation and slight
| discolouration of the skin from the electron radiation).
|
| Truly an ergonomic nightmare in every way (the flickering,
| OMG, the flickering...) - I don't miss CRTs.
| larusso wrote:
| It also depended on the TV set you had. I was allowed to play
| secret of evermore a few nights on the TV set of my father for
| a few nights. He had a Sony Trinitron and the game looked
| amazingly sharp. It was also one with a flatter screen compared
| to the bludgy curved mess my TV was at the time. I still love
| pixel art. I would love to see a reinterpretation of FFVI with
| the Octopath Traveler engine. I know that for some the only way
| to play that game is as original as possible. But sadly that is
| no longer possible for the most of us.
| foobarrio wrote:
| I think that's what these people are doing at Project Final
| Fantasy 6. I haven't delved into the details but the screen
| shots look just like Octopath Traveler.
| gman83 wrote:
| If you've ever tried playing old games in an emulator, and
| thought to yourself, wow this looks terrible, take a look at how
| much better these games could look on a CRT:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9C_TfmPgYM
| einpoklum wrote:
| Do these things run on Linux?
| dagurp wrote:
| probably
| underwater wrote:
| I don't understand the concept of a "Final Fantasy Pixel
| Remaster". How can you remaster pixels?
|
| If they were going for higher resolution assets, then sure. But
| they're just redrawing sprites at the same resolution using the
| same colour palettes?
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Click the link and find out? There's pretty clear side-by-side
| comparisons showing the original & the remaster which answers
| your question.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| The article explains this in a lot of detail. Pixels are not
| pixels until they're on a display, and different displays (CRT
| vs LCD for instance) display pixels differently in very not-
| subtle ways. So one interpretation of "remaster" is to emulate
| CRT-pixels as LCD-pixels through filters. Another is to re-
| design the pixel art to be optimized for LCDs.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-06-25 23:00 UTC)