[HN Gopher] Stabilizing the Obra Dinn 1-bit dithering process (2...
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Stabilizing the Obra Dinn 1-bit dithering process (2017)
Author : CharlesW
Score : 368 points
Date : 2024-11-08 04:15 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (forums.tigsource.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (forums.tigsource.com)
| pvg wrote:
| Discussion at the time
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15766249
| m12k wrote:
| See also
| https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@runevision/11050883717334359...
| raverbashing wrote:
| Posting the link here probably was too much for a video serving
| mastodon instance
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| I just love the fact that this guy shares everything on those
| forums.
|
| I remember seeing early parts of his work on papers please and
| there is something wonderful about sharing your process and
| exposing it to feedback.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I feel like you have to have an audience of sorts while you
| work, else it's like screaming into the void.
| epidemian wrote:
| But that'd be sort of a chicken and egg problem, right? You
| can't build an audience unless you're willing to scream into
| the void :)
| jebarker wrote:
| It's also probably the best way to build a following for an
| indie game that'll otherwise just be a drop in an ocean of
| games released everyday
| tmountain wrote:
| Tigsource is a treasure trove of information and design docs.
| Lots of famous games were hatched there (spelunky and dead
| cells to name a few).
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| Minecraft's origin WIP thread, too!
|
| https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0
| Terr_ wrote:
| [delayed]
| donatj wrote:
| Oh this is genuinely fascinating.
|
| I literally had no idea so much went into the dithering, my
| presumption was there was just an off the shelf posterization
| filter applied.
|
| The end result looks fantastic and managed to give me wild
| nostalgia for playing games like The Manhole on my friends
| Macintosh Classic as a kid.
|
| One of my favorite games ever, my wife and I played through it
| together. I feel like there's not a lot of games you can play
| with another person these days and playing it like that was a
| wonderful experience. I would highly recommend playing it with
| another person if you have the chance.
| jdalt wrote:
| I had the same experience playing it with my wife. The shared
| puzzle solving lead to some very late nights. My favorite game
| of the last 10 years.
| coldpie wrote:
| There's loads of puzzle games that are great for this! Off the
| top of my head, check out Lorelei and the Laser eyes, the
| recent Monkey Island, Case of the Golden Monkey, the two Talos
| Principle games, maybe The Witness?
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Case of the Golden Monkey sounds fascinating, but almost too
| secretive. It's an Idol, not a Monkey :-)
|
| Excellent list! I'd also add The Crimson Diamond to it.
| coldpie wrote:
| Hah. Well, at least I didn't write Curse...
| jsheard wrote:
| The Outer Wilds (not The Outer _Worlds_ ) is also a fantastic
| game along those lines.
|
| Don't read too much about it, you want to go in as blind as
| possible.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I am not sure how well a non gamer would take it. I recall
| some tricky platforming or timing sections which would be
| too much.
|
| As a matter of fact, I recall I had to cheat to lookup the
| solution to a puzzle or two, only to discover I had the
| right idea, but was executing it too poorly to work.
| jsheard wrote:
| FWIW they did go back and refine some of the puzzles
| after launch, so depending on when you played it might be
| smoother now.
| grraaaaahhh wrote:
| I'd add Chants of Sennaar to this list. It's similar to Case
| of the Golden Idol/Obra Dinn in that the entire game is about
| making deductions about the game world, but in this case it's
| about decoding fantasy languages.
| teamonkey wrote:
| > I feel like there's not a lot of games you can play with
| another person these days and playing it like that was a
| wonderful experience.
|
| May I suggest Her Story / Telling Lies / Immortality ?
| ronjouch wrote:
| > _I feel like there 's not a lot of games you can play with
| another person these days and playing it like that was a
| wonderful experience. I would highly recommend playing it with
| another person if you have the chance._
|
| Absolutely. Shameless self-plug to my list of games for "non-
| gamers" that I find enjoyable with a friend or significant
| other: https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games?list=nongamer . The first
| of the list is ...... Return of the Obra Dinn ^^.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| What a great list, thanks for sharing.
| jonesetc wrote:
| A lot of great stuff on there. Random game from last year
| that feels like it would fit well is Chants of Sennaar.
| Played though it with my non-gaming partner and we had a
| blast.
| ronjouch wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Sennaar didn't gel with me, because language-based
| deduction imply an "arbitrariness" ("wobbliness"?) and mis-
| interpretations. To me, this felt frustrating compared to
| the sharpness of an Obra Dinn deduction. But for others it
| might be part of the appeal, and at any rate it's
| undeniably a polished game, so I understand that a lot
| people enjoy it :)
|
| Regarding other similar recommendations I see in-thread and
| that are not already in the list:
|
| - The Outer Wilds: one of my fav games ever (it's at the
| top of my "absolute best" list), but too 3d-mechanically-
| demanding for a very-non-gamer.
|
| - The Witness: same, thus for this "non-gamers" list I
| preferred recommending its excellent 2D little-brother,
| Taiji :)
|
| - Case of the Golden Idol: yeah it's a clear "play that too
| if you liked Obra Dinn", added as Obra Dinn addendum
|
| - Lorelei and the Laser eyes: haven't played it yet, will
| soon!
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Sennaar didn't gel with me, because language-based
| deduction imply an "arbitrariness" ("wobbliness"?) and
| mis-interpretations.
|
| I definitely found the misinterpretations entertaining.
| It seems like they went to some amount of effort to
| anticipate potential misinterpretations, such that
| discovering those misinterpretations later would lead to
| amusement.
| jonesetc wrote:
| Lorelei and the Laser eyes was one of my favorite games
| that I played this past year. I think it might be good
| for a non-gamer, but they had better absolutely love
| puzzles. Also some of the puzzles require playing
| videogames within the main game and I can't remember
| exactly, but they may not make much sense or be very fun
| if you don't have experience with like PS1 era horror
| games.
|
| For The Witness, I would recommend tagging it as
| appropriately not accessible. There is a section that
| can't be completed at all without hearing, and large
| chunks of the game that I can't imagine are possible with
| color blindness. I don't have either of these issues, but
| running into those things really rubbed me the wrong way.
| It is a game that seems to value the creators vision
| above all else and isn't willing to make any sacrifices
| for the audience.
|
| Edit: I realize I misread and thought you were saying you
| were going to add The Witness to the non-gamer list,
| which was why I was saying that a disclaimer would be
| extra useful. Left it anyway.
| ronjouch wrote:
| > _For The Witness, I would recommend tagging it as
| appropriately not accessible. There is a section that can
| 't be completed at all without hearing, and large chunks
| of the game that I can't imagine are possible with color
| blindness. I don't have either of these issues, but
| running into those things really rubbed me the wrong way.
| It is a game that seems to value the creators vision
| above all else and isn't willing to make any sacrifices
| for the audience._
|
| For sure, "uncompromising" or "design-opinionated" are
| adjectives that fit Jonathan Blow (lead designer &
| programmer of The Witness) and I doubt he'd object :D.
|
| He was asked about these inaccessible puzzles, and from
| what I remember, his answer was pretty much what you
| intuited: that he was aware, but unwilling to compromise,
| in a "not every art if for everyone and that's fine" kind
| of way. And announcing them or having { I am color-blind,
| I am deaf } accessibility options to adapt could/would
| have spoiled the surprise, so he went ahead with them.
|
| Is it too insensitive / dickish? Maybe, I wouldn't know
| as I know little of how a vision or hearing-impaired
| person would feel in front of that. Hey, I'm going to ask
| a blind friend how he perceives such an attitude: is it
| _" Yeah it sucks"_, or is it _" Whatever, the game isn't
| actively making fun of disabled people, there's just two
| sections needing access to certain senses where I'll ask
| for help, I'm used to it and that's okay"_? Curious to
| see his take.
|
| I still like The Witness for what it is. Maybe I will
| change my mind someday and will flag my recommendation
| with an inaccessibility warning, but for now it's in my
| "absolute best" sub-list without caveat.
|
| > _Lorelei and the Laser eyes was one of my favorite
| games that I played this past year. I think it might be
| good for a non-gamer, but they had better absolutely love
| puzzles._
|
| Cool, will try it soon! It's already purchased, I'm just
| waiting for patches to ship (I'm a "patient gamer": I
| have my dose of coping with bugs from $JOB, so when it
| comes to games I choose to never play games
| day/week/month 1, to let them stabilize). If good, might
| add it to my "best puzzle games" sublist,
| https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games?list=puzzle
| snibsnib wrote:
| I used to follow the development blogs of the witness. I
| remember reading somewhere that accessibility was why you
| can beat the game with only 7/10 sections complete. You
| can completely skip both the colour puzzles and sound
| puzzles and still finish the game. Its an interesting
| compromise.
|
| As someone who is colorblind, you are correct. Those
| puzzles are just about impossible for me.
| meandthebean wrote:
| > Sennaar didn't gel with me, because language-based
| deduction imply an "arbitrariness" ("wobbliness"?) and
| mis-interpretations
|
| After not too far in, you eventually start confirming the
| meanings of words. Eventually you confirm the meaning of
| every word of every language. So, while learning a
| language can be a challenge of interpretation, eventually
| you do get concrete meanings.
|
| Edit: I'd also recommend The Sexy Brutale for your list,
| it's a time loop detective game.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| I think Outer Wilds might have a place in a list like this.
| lomase wrote:
| I loved the gameplay on "Her Story". I don't know if I
| finished the game, it really didn't matter anyway.
| pdpi wrote:
| Given that you have Patrick's Parabox in that list, have you
| played Baba is You?
| ronjouch wrote:
| Hola! I thought that Baba is Lovely at first, but then come
| the later levels and alas, Baba is Too Much.
|
| (With the usual qualifier: _for me_ ! I don 't doubt many
| puzzle freaks absolutely loved it and 100%ed it, but for me
| it was too much, too hard, too tedious).
| atombender wrote:
| Big fan of The Case of the Golden Idol, mentioned in that
| list.
|
| According to Steam stats, it's been a huge success for them,
| which surprised me and has given me hope for the state of the
| gaming scene.
|
| The two DLCs have been excellent. They're also working on a
| sequel set in the 1970s, The Rise of the Golden Idol, due for
| release in a few days [1].
|
| [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2716400/The_Rise_of_th
| e_G...
| evan_ wrote:
| Oh interesting, I heard about The Case of the Golden Idol a
| few years ago but it wasn't out on a system I owned- I see
| that it's available on Mobile free with Netflix. I'll check
| it out immediately!
| atombender wrote:
| One of my favourite games ever. Have fun!
| rjh29 wrote:
| Extremely addictive and chunky if you like deduction
| puzzles, and scaled perfectly so it doesn't become
| overwhelming. Only problem is it's over so quickly.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Thank you very much for the list.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Such games are a treasure. My wife and I enjoyed Firewatch and
| Take of two brothers, as well as all the amanita design games
| like that. One person has the controls but two people are
| actively engaged :-). Any tips for others?
| devit wrote:
| It looks like none of the proposed approaches work well, and the
| problem seems to be much more complicated that it looks.
|
| I think what might work properly is:
|
| - A "fractal" dither pattern so that it can be zoomed out and in
| smoothly and is scale invariant
|
| - Doing things in texel space so that both camera movement and
| object movement works properly
|
| - Doing bilinear filtering (perhaps keeping all samples instead
| of storing the weighted average) or perhaps supersampled
| rendering of the dithered pattern, and then using some sort of
| error diffusion pass in screen space (with a compute shader)
|
| But not actually sure if this works in practice.
|
| If that's not enough, an alternative would be to do things in
| screen space "naively", then reverse map the screen space
| rendering to texel space (in a resolution-preserving way), and
| use the information in texel space on the next frame to create a
| screen space solution compatible to the one in texel space, map
| it to texel space, etc., effectively building up the fractal per-
| texel pattern incrementally at runtime. This might be the best
| solution but seems very expensive in terms of memory, computation
| and complexity.
| dgant wrote:
| I've got a fractal approach working pretty well as of last
| week:
|
| https://x.com/dgant/status/1851840125065453894
| https://x.com/dgant/status/1851835968342446576?t=kCUSWCtJEc_...
|
| How it works:
|
| - World space dithering
|
| - Apply 2D ditheringalong triplanar-mapped surfaces
|
| - Choose coordinate scale based on depth such that the dither
| pattern ranges on [1px, 2px)
|
| - Paint sufficiently distant surfaces using spherical
| coordinates
|
| So there's some repainting at depth thresholds but it's not
| very loud in practice.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That is wild! It's not every day I get to see a completely
| new, unique visual effect. Kudos.
|
| I'd love to see a video with vastly slower movement, so I can
| pay attention to what's actually happening. The fast movement
| turns it all into a blur (literally).
| diabllicseagull wrote:
| Having worked on graphics programming for more than a decade, I
| still didn't pick on that when I played the game. Considering the
| overall visual language of the game, I'd say it's 100 hours well
| spent.
|
| Could have easily published this at SIGGRAPH under temporal
| coherence for non-photorealistic rendering.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I always found the error diffusion dithering techniques to be
| very interesting. It's amazing the result you can get with such
| minimal information.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Harsh 1-bit dithering is such an interesting topic - even in 2d
| there are multiple ways of doing it, each with trade-offs and
| advantages.
|
| It is amazing to me that something that was so integral to the
| 80s computing experience is now actually quite tricky on modern
| hardware. For my own project[0] I found that it is almost
| impossible to ensure a one-to-one mapping between offscreen
| pixels and the canvas provided by the browser.
|
| [0]
| https://sheep.horse/2023/1/improved_web_component_for_pixel-...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I genuinely prefer the original and think the final approach
| gives too much of "low res texture" look as opposed to a pure 1
| bit dithered output.
| nemetroid wrote:
| For a five-second demo I agree. But for five hours of playtime,
| I think the original would result in serious visual fatigue.
| itronitron wrote:
| Yeah, I've played hours of Minecraft with my own dithering
| renderer, but I'm sure going to 1-bit would give me a
| headache within minutes.
|
| I wonder if rendering the in-game graphics as if they are
| being shown on a virtual monitor would provide some respite.
| If the virtual monitor was on a desk with other items, then
| would give players some place to rest their eyes.
| feverzsj wrote:
| The game is mostly black and white. The dithering effect isn't
| actually pleasing and sometime confusing.
| Darthy wrote:
| I recently downloaded it from GOG and tried to play it on a 5K
| studio display. I wasn't able to get a result that did not blur
| those beautiful pixels, which is such a shame. Yes, I did go into
| all those setting menus.
| bombcar wrote:
| You have to find a way to set your display letterboxed to a
| resolution that is a direct multiple of whatever the game plays
| at.
| seanhunter wrote:
| For people who are unaware "Return of the Obra Dinn" and "Papers,
| Please" are both games by Lucas Pope and they are both considered
| absolute classics and have won multiple awards. Well worth
| checking out even if you don't consider yourself a typical game-
| enjoyer. They are not typical games.
| stavros wrote:
| "Papers, Please" is a masterpiece. Obra Dinn I must have made
| some mistake, because it stopped giving me clues after way too
| few stories to match anything else.
| db48x wrote:
| What do you mean by "stopped giving clues"? The clues are all
| around you. Hair styles, clothing styles, accents, places,
| etc.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| There were some I found really hard, and required a lot of
| backtracking, ie watching "other" scenes but picking up who
| was there in the background and such.
|
| I might have had a couple of lets say educated guesses, but
| the rest was hard work piecing together details.
|
| Easily one of my favorite games ever, and I've been playing
| for almost 40 year now.
| atribecalledqst wrote:
| I definitely brute-forced my way through significant portions
| of Obra Dinn, but the fact that you can do that at all (and
| it's not TOO onerous) is nice.
| init2null wrote:
| Once it starts raining you have access to all the bodies you
| need on the ship. Rewatch every flashback and take notes.
| Details really matter, and those flashbacks are crime scenes
| that need to be studied fully. Pay special attention to clips
| in quick succession, as a clue from another flashback may
| show the means of death or the killer.
| stavros wrote:
| Ahh, thank you! I'm not sure it started raining, I'll
| check.
| tmountain wrote:
| Papers, Please is an all time favorite of mine. I made flash
| cards to remember key bits of information and drilled on them
| to improve my review skills. Not many games would have me doing
| that. Never played Obra Dinn because the art style didn't
| appeal to me. That said, if you like mystery games, check out
| Curse of the Golden Idol. It's adjacent to these games from a
| creative standpoint and a lot of fun.
| SamBam wrote:
| I've only played Obra Dinn, but I similarly had a notebook
| filled with notes that I used through the game.
| mietek wrote:
| I've been playing FPS games since "Wolfenstein 3D", and "Return
| of the Obra Dinn" is the only one that has ever given me motion
| sickness.
|
| Still finished it.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| His website has many really cool projects he did for game jams.
| Really fun/creative ideas. Several became full games.
| tantalor wrote:
| > maybe I shouldn't let these bullshit little pixels push me
| around
|
| Found a new mantra for my life.
| makizar wrote:
| Went a bit further down the rabbit hole and found the previous
| devlogs he posted about the topic for anyone interested. [1] [2]
| Of note was an upsampling algorithm called Scale2X he talked
| about. [3] Pretty neat !
|
| [1] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.260 [2]
| https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg121719...
| [3] https://www.scale2x.it
| tantalor wrote:
| Just for fun, here's the OST from this game:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qvdAWLcPyU
| easythrees wrote:
| This is one game I think would be amazing in VR.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I don't know, I start feeling off when just watching a video of
| the game (a little queasy, a bit of a headache). I think that
| playing it in VR would be a horrible experience.
| SamBam wrote:
| You're right, I think they would be fun.
|
| Part of the appeal was definitely the retro look, but this is a
| very-specific retro look that the author worked hard to put
| into 3D space.
|
| If people tried to make a "retro" to VR games, you'd mostly
| just get lots of blocky, cheap-looking graphics. But this could
| really be weird, in a good way.
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