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m12k 10 hours ago [-]
If you find this interesting, you might also be interested in this video of someone diving even deeper into how to make the dither surface stable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs
pvillano 4 hours ago [-]
IMO, the holy grail of 3d dithering is yet to be achieved. runevision's method does not handle surfaces viewed at sharp angles very well. I've thought a lot about a method with fractal adaptive blue noise and analytic anisotropic filtering but I don't yet have the base knowledge to implement it.
dpatterbee 9 hours ago [-]
This really is a fantastic video. I don't think I'd considered many of the ideas behind dithering before seeing how it could be extrapolated to this degree.
The video ends in a place where I suspect even further advances could still be made.
But yes, there's still the issue of oblique angles looking different that still remains open AFAIK.
whtrbt 8 hours ago [-]
Very cool! The dither is no longer in screenspace though, which kills the retro charm.
m12k 8 hours ago [-]
Fair point, though I think that when it's low rez enough, it becomes less apparent that it's not in screenspace, and it gets closer to a retro look: https://youtu.be/EzjWBmhO_1E?t=102
tesseractcat 9 hours ago [-]
If anyone finds this interesting, I'd like to plug my post analyzing a similar technique, but generalized for perspective pixel art: https://tesseractc.at/shadowglass
ZeWaka 9 hours ago [-]
Thanks!
As a retro game dev and pixel artist, this is a lot more more preferable than the constant shimmering of other recent techniques such as Texel Splatting (https://dylanebert.com/texel-splatting). Love how stable it is, reminds me of billboarding but is clearly 3D.
Edit: Ah, I didn't finish reading the blogpost - didn't realise splatting was based on yours. I actually like your variant a bit better, but perhaps that's just due to the choice of textures/models.
progforlyfe 10 hours ago [-]
I grew up on the small 6 inch 1 bit Mac SE display so the art style has a special place in my heart. Sadly I'm too "dumb" to fully enjoy the game as it requires a lot of attention to detail -- amazing if you enjoy detective style puzzles! I still highly respect it.
teaearlgraycold 9 hours ago [-]
I got half way through but honestly just don't enjoy the core loop enough to finish. And it's the kind of game you need to finish in one sitting else you're shit outta luck and need to start over.
vagab0nd 6 hours ago [-]
This is great from a technical and artistic perspective. But for me personally, the visual style ruined a great game. I love detective/deduction games. I'm listing some of my all-time favorites in this genre. I'd love to finish Obra Dinn, but god it just makes my eyes hurt so much.
The Case of the Golden Idol
Chants of Sennaar
Her Story
IMMORTALITY
The Painscreek Killings
The Roottrees are Dead
Type Help
throwawayk7h 1 hours ago [-]
Outer Wilds is the best in class for this genre, IMO.
smallerize 2 hours ago [-]
Have you at least played with the other color schemes?
rokkamokka 11 hours ago [-]
I gave this game a shot but honestly the art style got in the way of the gameplay for me. Fun to read how much effort went into it
rags2riches 10 hours ago [-]
Interesting. I was really impressed by the art at first, taking joy in exploring that as much as the scenes themselves. But it soon faded out of focus as I was engrossed in the story and gameplay.
GuB-42 7 hours ago [-]
Same thing for me, I love the technical aspect in the same way I love the demoscene. The visuals are original and very well done, so much that it is now almost impossible to talk about dithering without mentioning the Obra Dinn at some point.
I am also a fan of puzzle/detective games, and this is an excellent one.
Truly a masterpiece in both visual and gameplay, but together... not so much. For a game where understanding every detail of the scenes is critical, it felt I was fighting the game engine. Many times I wished I could turn off the dithering effect and see the underlying models with more standard shading. At no point it felt unfair, they really did a good job making it functional, but it was a distraction.
Not enough of a distraction to stop me from completing and enjoying the game and art. But hadn't the art style been unique, I would have enjoyed it much less.
Waterluvian 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah. I’ve wondered if the game could be a total hit on some possibly-not-yet-real eink display that can reproduce the intended effect at 60fps without such eye strain.
As a kid I imagined playing Cosmic Osmo on actual magical paper at my desk at school.
vova_hn2 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I also loved the idea, but found that playing it require me to strain my eyes too much and abandoned it. One of those games that is more fun to read about than to actually play.
bombcar 10 hours ago [-]
Some of the examples in the post are really bad, but even the last one has "flickering" not of the dithering pattern but of the edges, which feel "off".
mattmanser 10 hours ago [-]
Have you played it?
In the game it's pretty great.
bombcar 10 hours ago [-]
I have and wasn't terribly bothered by it, but that may have changed if I had done it on large screen (TV).
ngokevin 11 hours ago [-]
Mostly enjoyed it but the art style gave me motion sickness during and after each session where I had to stop (playing on a TV).
car 5 hours ago [-]
When the Mac and Atari ST first hit the market in the 80's, there were Comics created in this 1-bit "ordered-dither" style. For error-diffusion dithering (Floyd-Steinberg etc.), you needed more bits per pixel, to carry the error.
I absolutely loved this game. I still think about it often, the story and the characters. I wish there was more games like it.
Interesting read!
duncanscomments 9 hours ago [-]
Agreed. The game is tied together so well with its deductive gameplay, art, and music. I also appreciate how difficult it is, I was banging my head against it frequently during my playthrough - but the "aha" moments are so worth it.
I picked up Blue Prince after - completely different game in most respects but hits some of the same satisfying puzzle-solving/deduction notes.
teamonkey 6 hours ago [-]
Some other good ones based around deduction:
The Case of the Golden Idol
The Roottrees are Dead
The Seance at Blake Manor
Chants of Sennaar
abetusk 9 hours ago [-]
I keep feeling like there's a set of fundamental assumptions that can be optimized for, or relaxed and optimized for, in order to get at what a better method might be.
For example, stability of dithering under rotation and or some type of shear translation. What about stability under scaling?
There's been some other methods that essentially create a dither texture on the surface itself but, to me at least, this has a different quality than the "screen space" dithering that Obra Dinn employs.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this idea more rigorous? Or is the set of assumption fundamentally contradictory?
What a fascinating deep dive. 2x with sphere mapping is my favourite - it starts to take on a sort of pointillism-like quality which gives all the objects (or maybe my brain) a sort of understanding of their texture.
aqme28 6 hours ago [-]
One of my favorite games of all time. An incredible kind of puzzle, oozing with its own weird style.
monkpit 2 hours ago [-]
(2017)
QuaternionsBhop 6 hours ago [-]
The final dithering effect appears to be mis-sampled and is no longer 1 bit per pixel
antics 7 hours ago [-]
> It feels a little weird to put 100 hours into something that won't be noticed by its absence. Exactly no one will think, "man this dithering is stable as shit. total magic going on here." I don't want to give people problems they didn't know they should have though so it was worth fixing.
I mean maybe it's just me, but that is literally the first thing I noticed and I appreciated it so much I instantly bought the game. I don't even play video games much!
martinknopf 11 hours ago [-]
I remember following dukope‘s well-written devlog back then. Even tried to reproduce his edge detection for a game jam. Thanks for digging this out.
pmarreck 6 hours ago [-]
These techniques were all the rage on early Macintosh things
The video ends in a place where I suspect even further advances could still be made.
But yes, there's still the issue of oblique angles looking different that still remains open AFAIK.
As a retro game dev and pixel artist, this is a lot more more preferable than the constant shimmering of other recent techniques such as Texel Splatting (https://dylanebert.com/texel-splatting). Love how stable it is, reminds me of billboarding but is clearly 3D.
Edit: Ah, I didn't finish reading the blogpost - didn't realise splatting was based on yours. I actually like your variant a bit better, but perhaps that's just due to the choice of textures/models.
The Case of the Golden Idol
Chants of Sennaar
Her Story
IMMORTALITY
The Painscreek Killings
The Roottrees are Dead
Type Help
I am also a fan of puzzle/detective games, and this is an excellent one.
Truly a masterpiece in both visual and gameplay, but together... not so much. For a game where understanding every detail of the scenes is critical, it felt I was fighting the game engine. Many times I wished I could turn off the dithering effect and see the underlying models with more standard shading. At no point it felt unfair, they really did a good job making it functional, but it was a distraction.
Not enough of a distraction to stop me from completing and enjoying the game and art. But hadn't the art style been unique, I would have enjoyed it much less.
As a kid I imagined playing Cosmic Osmo on actual magical paper at my desk at school.
In the game it's pretty great.
SHATTER:
https://imgur.com/gallery/shatter-1984-was-first-commerciall...
Robot Empire:
https://www.reddit.com/r/atarist/comments/xgs4rh/comicbook_c...
Interesting read!
I picked up Blue Prince after - completely different game in most respects but hits some of the same satisfying puzzle-solving/deduction notes.
The Case of the Golden Idol
The Roottrees are Dead
The Seance at Blake Manor
Chants of Sennaar
For example, stability of dithering under rotation and or some type of shear translation. What about stability under scaling?
There's been some other methods that essentially create a dither texture on the surface itself but, to me at least, this has a different quality than the "screen space" dithering that Obra Dinn employs.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this idea more rigorous? Or is the set of assumption fundamentally contradictory?
I mean maybe it's just me, but that is literally the first thing I noticed and I appreciated it so much I instantly bought the game. I don't even play video games much!
I thought that constraint was the whole idea?