HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

This is an amazing engineering and artistic achievement. I have the Live Wallpaper for Android and it's the most delightful $2 I've ever spent, even though it crashes every few days. Right now it's snowing. Yesterday night I spotted a shooting star.

There's a great talk by Mark Ferrari about his work: https://youtu.be/aMcJ1Jvtef0

⬐ RugnirViking

how can I find the live wallpaper?

⬐ timvdalen

It's linked from the site in the submission: http://pixfabrik.com/livingworlds/

this is incredible talk form the Background Artist of monkey island, about 8 bit and explain in details how palette cycling works, and modern way to doing the same more efficiently for modern games. 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

You should watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

...if you haven't.

Fascinating talk from the artist who made the original art about how it was done: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

The maker talks about it in this presentation (skipped to the part where he shows how he makes the waterfall): https://youtu.be/aMcJ1Jvtef0?t=3100

This is very neat, but if you want to see a true (human) master at work, check out Mark Ferrari's GDC talk here: https://youtu.be/aMcJ1Jvtef0

I'd love to see an algorithm that could approximate this degree of mastery :)

⬐ anfractuosity

Just started watching that talk, lots of extremely impressive artworks, I'd never heard of the colour cycling techniques he talks about before which are very neat.

⬐ grenoire

The problem is that none of these posterisation algorithms (reducing bit depth of channels and optionally dithering) match the quality of somebody placing the pixels by hand. It always looks more like 'deep fried' images as opposed to pixel art. None of the samples are appealing (except for perhaps that one with palm trees).

⬐ PostOnce

The Blade Runner one is missing the buildings, robocop has no mouth, BJ is missing part of the right side of his head.

⬐ jerojero

I would look at them more as a tool that you could use as part of your toolset rather than a complete replacement.

You can put an image through it and then do manual touch ups, copy and paste other images and so on and start building a composition.

If you have an interest in this kind of art, this GDC presentation by Mark Ferrari "8 Bit & 8 Bit-ish Graphics" gives lots of great detail about the art process, tools, and practices of the time (Ferrari worked on the EGA art for Monkey Island, among several others).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

⬐ corysama

When I was a kid in high school and considering a career in art, Mark Ferrari was kind enough to invite me to hang out in his home studio and chat about making art for games.

Apparently he had to fight with the engineers over switching to a dithered art style because at the time they were using run length encoding for compression. But, he re-painted a few scenes to be dithered and the improvement was so obvious that the engineers gave in and “made it work” (switched to LZW compression).

⬐ megameter

The art for Indy 3 in EGA definitely shows signs of dither being desired but not used, which I always found made it feel sparse and unfinished, even in VGA. Mind, I was coming to this from the standpoint of really getting into the Lucasarts adventures after LOOM. It's likely that on this game they were stretched for space regardless, since it spans a lot of scenes.

> The original EGA background art for Loom was made by Mark Ferrari

Obligatory recommendation for this talk by Mark Ferrari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 - truly an artist

⬐ bajsejohannes

Wow, that's amazing. Here is one of the galleries he's showing in the video: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

I couldn't find the one with adjustable time of day, though.

⬐ dividuum

Just bought https://pixfabrik.com/livingworlds/ as a result of your post. It has multiple variants for each scene depending on time of day.

edit: Also found the web version: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/

Video of Mark talking about his process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

⬐ Cactus2018

yes! That is it. The game is https://thimbleweedpark.com/

You might be interested in this GCD talk. The speaker was an artist on various classic adventure games. I found it really interesting how he considered himself a traditional artist and doesn't really like computers at all.

The things they achieved with pallette switching were unbelievable, especially considering the limitations of their tools. It's crazy how he managed to do this stuff just in basic paint programs. Some HNers will be horrified (just write some code!) but I think it's really inspiring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

⬐ flobosg

Some of Mark Ferrari's palette-shifting scenes can be found at:

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

⬐ com2kid

A few years back, I used a few tools piecemealed together to make a living wallpaper from Ferrari's waterfall piece.

I'll now gladly pay to have it done properly. :)

Edit: Curses, no parallax! The version of waterfall I made has parallax scrolling, I worked very hard getting that working! (By which I mean I found one strange wallpaper tool from a Korean developer that is the only tool that worked to pull off parallax animated GIF wallpapers). On a 21:9 screen. waterfall is about 3 screens wide...

⬐ dwater

If you visit the worlds link, be sure to select "Show Options" and adjust the time of day. I'm assuming there are a lot of programmatic elements that create these effects.

⬐ kevin_thibedeau

It's all palette shifting with designated regions for different lighting directions.

Heard of color cycling? http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/ http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Old_School_Color_C... GDC talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

⬐ mkozakov

That was awesome, thank you! The example where he had 2 images in one and would do a pallet swap to show one or the other was SUPER cool!

There's a lot of stuff available but the problem is knowing what to look for.

For example, the book "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" chronicles quite a bit of Commodore lore, and there are numerous resources for both Amiga and C64 online. Too many to mention, really, and lots of them are heavily specialized. CSDb[0] for the C64 demo and cracking scene, for example.

I also recommend The Early History of Smalltalk[1] by Alan Kay himself and Mark Ferrari's talk[2] on creating pixel art for LucasArts games.

[0] https://csdb.dk/

[1] http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

I don't agree with that! Early personal computers also had pixel art, and it was mind-blowing what was done with it.

Watch this talk from Mark Ferrari, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/

Check out what he did with color cycling in this demo: it's amazing. I recommend looking at "May - Jungle Waterfall - Rain" to see how amazing this is.

That's not a gif, it's a single image, just rotating the colors. That was to deal with storage constraints. Can you imagine?

The techniques of early PC and applications are worth saving, too.

The art shown in that tweet is amazing, too, but it's not the same thing! It's an entirely different thing, with entirely different constraints.

⬐ zamadatix

Those are all 640x480 though. In general a lot of the early computer style starts to blur the line from true "pixel art" into "low bit depth graphics".

Pixel Artist Mark Ferrari also talks about the contrast aesthetics between warm and cool colors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0&t=2192

Every Deluxe Paint fan out needs to watch this video of the master of that tool explain his craft

Mark Ferrari: 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

⬐ gadgetoid

Small world- I just finished watching this again today. I've been trying palette-cycling techniques with 32blit to see if I can learn the ropes and put together a half-decent tutorial. I've had these - http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ - up on my screen for the last few days. I managed to get - terrible - palette-cycled fire sprites working with smooting (which Joe calls "Blend Shift Cycling") and I think there are still some interesting interactions to be found between these classic techniques and modern hard/software.

It's really exciting to see renewed interest in these techniques and "8-bitish" games in general since it probably means we've chosen the right time to make our handheld.

Came across this in a thread on Reddit. It’s been discussed on HN before as well but I think it’s worthy of being resubmitted.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15766249

In that discussion multiple people said that they preferred the non-stabilized dithering, and they argued that that is “how it was” on the old 1-bit Macs.

“The original effect is how it's supposed to look and how it would have looked on an old computer with 1-bit graphics.” says one commenter.

I think these comments are missing the forest for the trees.

It’s not about faithful recreation, it’s about artistic inspiration and invoking certain feelings.

See also the talk “8 Bit & ‘8 Bitish’ Graphics - Outside the Box” by artist Mark Ferrari. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

If you artificially constrain yourself too much, your game will suffer and no-one will want to play it. On the other hand, if you can give a nod to the past and a feeling of nostalgia but at the same time acknowledge that we have had progress, and incorporate that progress in your game, then there is potential for a game that is actually fun to play.

Just making sure you've already seen Mark Ferrari's GDC talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 :)

If you are here and you haven’t seen Mark Ferrari’s GDC talk, you really should sit down and watch it. He is perhaps the greatest pallete animator of all time. Even if you aren’t familiar with the games he worked on, HN folks have likely seen his gallery of single-image animations linked below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...

⬐ cgijoe

Sorry, I messed up the link to the main article on my site. Here is the corrected link:

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Old_School_Color_C...

⬐ blt

I agree, the GDC talk is extremely inspiring.

⬐ lelandbatey

The second link you posted leads to a 404 for me. By going to the main website I found a link to a page that seems to be the same thing, though maybe it's reformatted a bit. Here's the link:

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/