[HN Gopher] Yesterday's Pixels, Today
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Yesterday's Pixels, Today
Author : luu
Score : 168 points
Date : 2024-08-16 00:50 UTC (2 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (nas.sr)
| hettygreen wrote:
| I like the trick of rendering in a small resolution and then
| scaling it back up without anti-aliasing and stuff. I wonder if
| there's any way to do chunky pixel static websites like that just
| using CSS in the same way?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, not sure. Rendering first to an HTML5 Canvas, but how to
| render CSS, etc. to a Canvas is beyond me. Maybe just a lot of
| custom CSS/HTML to give the appearance: https://www.vcfmw.org
| rikroots wrote:
| The terrible, very cheaty way to do it is to screen capture a
| website from a browser tab, and display it in another browser
| tab inside a canvas element with some form of pixelize filter
| applied.
|
| https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/dom-019.html
| jdiff wrote:
| Short answer: Not really.
|
| Long answer: Sorta, with a lot of overbearing caveats.
|
| Normal HTML elements cannot be rendered this way, there's no
| way to disable AA when drawing and no way to disable bilinear
| (or similar) filtering when scaling. Things will lose
| resolution, but they'll blur rather than chunk.
|
| Image elements and canvases CAN be scaled to preserve pixels.
| Anything you draw to a canvas can be kept chunky, but you'll be
| writing your own rendering routines because the browser does
| not know how to lay off the AA.
|
| There's probably some treachery you can pull off through SVG.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Example of some SVG treachery (getting an exact retro style
| this way would be difficult to say the least)
| https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/pixelate-page-demo-dt6w0
| jdiff wrote:
| Heads up, Firefox doesn't like SVG filters being applied to
| the root element, but the body element works just fine.
|
| Pretty impressive effect, seems tricky to tame though.
| Where's this gingham pattern bubble up from?
| jtolmar wrote:
| Going as far as adding lines support to Blender gltf export is
| quite a flex! And it looks really good on the Ferris wheel.
| megablast wrote:
| Looks great, but is there a video??
| wffurr wrote:
| You can play it: https://nasser.itch.io/restricted-airspace
|
| I did not find any videos.
| malet wrote:
| All of the twitter links are broken for me
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Seems like the posts were deleted. Sadly don't seem to be in
| the Wayback Machine either.
| lelanthran wrote:
| They're broken for everyone. It seems that each new internet
| generation needs to learn the hard way that linking to walled
| gardens (FB, twitter, reddit, etc) breaks their site.
| ulfw wrote:
| And nothing of value was lost. I hope people finally move on
| from this 'X' shitshow.
| layer8 wrote:
| X being a shitshow is exactly why a lot of value was lost.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| > And nothing of value was lost.
|
| Some presumably nice and relevant images were lost.
| andybak wrote:
| @dang - article needs a Oct 22 2019 date
|
| (spotted this because the "unfinished Blender PR" mentioned was
| merged several years ago)
| latexr wrote:
| @mentions don't do anything. If you want to reach dang, click
| the contact link at the bottom and send an email.
| wzdd wrote:
| The final result looks great, but I found it even more convincing
| limiting it to about 15 FPS: https://jsfiddle.net/9mksgbe6/1/
| zamadatix wrote:
| I don't know if it was an intentional choice or not but that's
| pretty much the general performance range of Star Fox too.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Just want to thank you for using actual low resolution rendering,
| and not pixelated-looking objects on a high-res surface. This
| looks great!
|
| The way smooth parallax and sometimes different pixel sizes (!)
| show up in "retro" games is a huge pet peeve of mine.
| mistercow wrote:
| Varying pixel sizes, pixels offset from their natural grid, and
| even rotated pixels were actually not uncommon in retro games.
| Take a look at just about any SNES game that did advanced Mode
| 7 effects, like Pilot Wings or Super Mario Kart, and you'll see
| examples of pixels being rendered at varying scales outside
| their native resolution.
|
| It's not the _same_ look as modern games, because the screen
| resolution was much lower than what we have today, but to me,
| high resolution rendering of transformed low resolution sprites
| is a perfectly valid successor aesthetic. It 's not the same as
| what a game would have looked like in the 90s, but as others
| have pointed out in this thread, neither are crisp full-color
| pixels rendered as perfect squares. It's all an interpretation.
|
| On the other hand, what I cannot abide are "low poly" models
| that use polygons other than triangles and convex quads. I will
| die on this hill.
| woolion wrote:
| Ex-Zodiac is another Star Fox inspired game that was released on
| Steam with big chunky pixels. It comes with the option to disable
| the pixel filter to simply play with a clean low poly aesthetic.
| I find the big pixels to be extremely tiring after only a few
| minutes, so I find this option to be a game-changer (pun
| intended).
|
| Typing this I remembered "A short Hike" similarly had the option
| to disable it and I also preferred it disabled. It wasn't as
| important as it is slower paced though.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yesterday's pixels look quite different on today's screens than
| they looked on CRTs of the time. In particular, "pixel-perfect
| lines and points" weren't a perfectly sharp grid, but mixed up
| and re-defined by the CRT's shadow mask and scanlines, making
| them look more organic and less pixelated.
|
| Look at this for example (CRT left, "perfect" pixels right):
| https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/media%2FFQI0t9PacAALT14.jpg
|
| Many more examples here: https://xcancel.com/CRTpixels
| glitchc wrote:
| I don't understand the love for _thick pixels_. The effect
| clearly reflects the resource constraints of the platform. Is
| there anything here beyond nostalgia?
| layer8 wrote:
| It's also false nostalgia:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41282225
| tekknolagi wrote:
| Not if you had LCD video games like on a Gameboy.
| layer8 wrote:
| The Game Boy is a bit of a different story, but its pixels
| weren't as chunky because they had significant separating
| lines, and the long LCD afterglow blurred anything in
| motion, further supported by its low contrast. It's still
| quite difficult to accurately emulate the appearance of the
| real Game Boy screen on modern displays.
| bogwog wrote:
| It might have originated from specific technical constraints,
| but it's a unique art style. Some people will like it, other
| people won't. Nostalgia might be a factor in its popularity,
| but people without nostalgia can (and do) fall in love with it.
| glitchc wrote:
| It's akin to falling in love with brutalist architecture IMO.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Yesterdays aesthetic wasn't thick chunky pixels with outputs
| exactly matching the indexed palettes with wide color range.
| Sure, resolution was low and color choice was limited... but so
| similarly limited was the way we transmitted and displayed
| things. These dithered polygon shadings turned into new colors,
| the blocky details into new smooth shapes, and the colors overall
| more muted than just popping the RGB value onto a modern screen
| would suggest.
|
| That's not to say this aesthetic is "bad" (I'm actually quite
| fond of it and similar styles too) but just that it's absolutely
| nothing like the emulated Star Fox screenshots being used as the
| target suggest. If yesterday's pixels is the goal then this is
| missing the main part of what made those pixels look the way they
| did.
|
| For those who haven't seen games like this on the typical
| technology of the era: this is a photo of LCD output using a
| similar path as taken here, a photo the same with a CRT emulation
| shader, and a photo of an actual CRT (don't take this one CRT to
| be gospel of what every CRT output from all of time looked like)
| https://i.imgur.com/lo8ytRq.jpeg
| bitwize wrote:
| I know, right? It's like those people who listen to Zeppelin on
| CD or -- ugh -- _streaming_ instead of how they were meant to
| be listened to: on vinyl.
| zamadatix wrote:
| There's no right or wrong way to enjoy good content but if
| you're goal is to recreate the original aesthetic then "Hey
| Siri, play Stairway to Heaven remastered" isn't that.
| dahart wrote:
| Meh, the remastered version is what they wish they could
| have done the first time, and what they would have done if
| digital audio had been available. People have nostalgia for
| the limitations of tape and vinyl and radio, but that's
| what they were, limitations, not an aesthetic choice.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I was there and I think it's mostly fantasized that pixels were
| _that_ different than the blocky pixels they were. I have a
| (still working) real vintage arcade cab from the mid-eighties,
| with an old, blurry CRT. It 's amazing to play on that vintage
| cab (especially _Robotron 2084_ [1]) but it 's not because of
| supposedly "blocky pixels not looking blocky".
|
| It's amazing because the joysticks are amazing. Standing is
| arguably cooler than sitting and then when things gets hectic,
| you'll physically "move" (or let say "shake") the cab by
| frantically going left/right/whatever.
|
| In the case of _Robotron 2084_ it 's amazing because _nothing_
| today offers the same gameplay: you need two 8-directions
| joystick, on to move in one of 8 directions and the other
| joystick to _fire_ in one of 8 directions. They don 't make it
| like that today, unless you play a Robotron clone using actual
| arcade joystick. And even then: you better have a full-sized
| cab if you want the experience to be even more fun.
|
| Sure, we had scanlines and whatnots but it was still very close
| to blocky pixels shown today on a modern flat monitor without
| any shader (for example without artificially recreating the
| look of a CRT).
|
| Also the "blockiness" of them pixels back in the days was
| highly dependent on how old your CRT was.
|
| It's not as if there was "one correct bluriness" induced by
| CRT. Every CRT brand / age / model had different
| characteristics.
|
| To me the "supsension of disbelief" was there. For example I
| remember playing _Sundog: The Frozen Legacy_ on the Atari ST.
| One of the best game ever made (by FTL, who then created
| Dungeon Master, which is basically the ancestor of all FPS
| games). When I was playing Sundog, I was a rogue space trader
| buying low /selling high, gun fighting in cities, etc. And I
| remember it as... Very blocky [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron:_2084
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy
| zamadatix wrote:
| Another thing that was/is very hard to replicate on common
| modern setups is that feeling of instant feedback you can get
| from quality (certainly not all) games at the time. The
| inputs were polled, there was no room for a 3 frame output
| buffer even if someone had wanted one, the displays didn't
| add a bunch of image processing time on top of it. You press
| fire and things fire, you dodge right and you move right. It
| wasn't truly instantaneous but it tended to be a lot better
| than a typical console+TV setup today (even in "game mode" on
| the TV). Worth noting Star Fox in particular was not one of
| these games... it was... struggling to do the output 3D at a
| fast or consistent rate even with the extra chip :). Again,
| not that all games were like this just it can be hard to
| replicate the feel of the ones that were with different
| technologies. Run-ahead is one way to bridge the last bit of
| that gap on many average systems these days.
|
| And you're 100% right there is no "correct blurriness" for
| CRT. When I say "don't take this one CRT to be gospel of what
| every CRT output from all of time looked like" I mean it -
| some CRTs, particularly for computer style displays instead
| of TV style displays, were relatively sharp. And a high end
| barely used CRT from the late 90s is probably a lot less
| blurry than a low end and heavily used one from the early
| 80s, everything else equivalent about them. That said, Star
| Fox had expectations of both being output on consumer TVs as
| well as through the SNES video output which wasn't
| particularly sharp itself anyways.
|
| Another classic example of this in home game consoles is the
| waterfalls in the Genesis era Sonic games. If you play them
| on a modern display it looks more like a sharp set of blue
| and white door bead curtains. If you play it on a typical CRT
| television it looks more like shimmering water falling (not
| perfectly but the bright single pixel whites are not so
| perfectly contrasted and there is some blur between the
| vertical lines with the background instead of a straight
| alternation).
| Minor49er wrote:
| >In the case of Robotron 2084 it's amazing because nothing
| today offers the same gameplay: you need two 8-directions
| joystick, on to move in one of 8 directions and the other
| joystick to fire in one of 8 directions
|
| This kind of gameplay is known as a "twin-stick shooter" and
| is a popular genre even today. Most of the biggest consoles
| have had two sticks on their controllers for decades that
| have enabled this style of gameplay
| nox101 wrote:
| Maybe I have different visual perception than you but playing
| Super Metroid or Zelda: A Link to the Past, in a emulator
| with crisp square pixels looks nothing like it did on a CRT.
|
| There are tons of articles on the difference. Here's the
| first one I found, googling. It gives a good example of the
| difference
|
| https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-
| tvs-a...
|
| I went to a museum exhibit once where they were showing old
| consoles connected to LCD displays. It was infuriating to me
| how they where effectively disrespecting the art but not
| showing it the way it was at the time. It would be no
| different than if the Louvre replaced all their paintings
| with giant LCD displays of the same paintings.
| CasperH2O wrote:
| > In the case of Robotron 2084 it's amazing because nothing
| today offers the same gameplay: you need two 8-directions
| joystick, on to move in one of 8 directions and the other
| joystick to fire in one of 8 directions. They don't make it
| like that today, unless you play a Robotron clone using
| actual arcade joystick.
|
| One could argue they do, these types of games are referred to
| as twin stick shooters. You can play them on modern PCs with
| modern gamepad that have two directional joysticks.
|
| Two of my favorites are Enter the Gungeon and Brigador.
| mikae1 wrote:
| What shader's that? Tried CRT-Royale[1]?
|
| [1] https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT-Royale
| raytopia wrote:
| On home consoles smoothed pixels were common due to CRTs but
| for the handheld world sharp pixels were the reality. So if you
| played any 3D DS or GBA games the output would look similar to
| the results in the article just with a larger color palette.
| zamadatix wrote:
| This is a good point, handhelds were indeed sharp (barring a
| rabbit hole about temporal smearing on some of the ancient
| Gameboy era ones). That said, they were actually pretty
| visually sharp too, not really the chunk-ified aesthetic you
| see added here. E.g. the GBA was 240x160 in 2.9" so ~100 DPI.
| To display that in the same aesthetic on the modern web you
| can just render 1x since it assumes about the same
| virtualized render density (96 DPI). If you blow it up to
| have chunky pixels as here it's again not about the original
| aesthetic and more about creating a cool pixelated render.
| philistine wrote:
| All devices with the name Game Boy have some level of
| temporal smearing. It's just that the newer devices'
| display lag might not be perceived by everyone.
| lulzury wrote:
| Very cool style! I wonder if one could further reduce some of the
| constraints (i.e. # colors on palette), maintain the pixelated
| style, but improve overall aesthetics.
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