Interesting Paper on Pixel Art

[Garrett]

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/paper/pixel.pdf


Wouldn't mind seeing this incorporated in a few emulators.

 

[iprice]

Sorry, but is it just me that prefers the pixel art in every single one of those examples?


I love good pixel art. But then, I am a retro gamer who grew up with the old 8bit systems.

 

[Garrett]

Sorry, but is it just me that prefers the pixel art in every single one of those examples?


I love good pixel art. But then, I am a retro gamer who grew up with the old 8bit systems.

I too am a 'retro gamer' (sounds much better than saying i owned all the systems first time around) and still have, believe it or not the same Atari 2600 ( still working) my mother bought in 1978, i still have a particular fondness for pixel art, but in the fleeting moments the warm fuzzy fog of cosy nostalgia lifts & i remove for a moment my rose tinted spectacles.. the vast majority don't half look dreadful especially emulated on HD displays, on native hardware & CRT's it's of course a different matter entirely.. but how many of us still have all the games, hardware & CRT's these days..?


For me, projects like this breathe a much needed new life into the old classics & also make them potentially more appealing to the HD generation who may well go on to become the respected developers of the future.. so i say kudos to these guys & hopefully we will see this incorporated in various emulators & other projects soon.

 

[erico]

I love pixels straight and square as they are, sometimes scaling really up (10x) may make it difficult to read on huge monitors.


But I guess it depends on those pixels, KOF 98, for example, holds up greatly projected hugely, POWDER may loose its charm, made to be small.


NEVER post process pixels...IMHO


...redraw if you must.


nice article BTW.

 

[Prometheus]

but how many of us still have all the games, hardware & CRT's these days..?

I do!





Anyhow, I remember when this paper was first released and talked about... By and large, it all looks like a cheap-and-nasty Adobe Flash game to me.

For me, projects like this breathe a much needed new life into the old classics & also make them potentially more appealing to the HD generation who may well go on to become the respected developers of the future.. so i say kudos to these guys & hopefully we will see this incorporated in various emulators & other projects soon.

Pixel-art isn't some long-lost art that needs to be bastardised for it to appeal to children - gracious me, it's still very much alive and well *right now*, and the so-called "HD generation" have grown up with it exactly the same as so many of us did.


Look at, for example, the DS, the world's best-selling system - it's still going strong there, and this thankfully extends to the 3DS, too.


Like so many things, youngsters won't think something is "bad" or "different" until people with an interest in having them believe this incorrect information start telling them that this is what they should be believing.

 

[iprice]

Sorry, but is it just me that prefers the pixel art in every single one of those examples?


I love good pixel art. But then, I am a retro gamer who grew up with the old 8bit systems.

I too am a 'retro gamer' (sounds much better than saying i owned all the systems first time around) and still have, believe it or not the same Atari 2600 ( still working) my mother bought in 1978, i still have a particular fondness for pixel art, but in the fleeting moments the warm fuzzy fog of cosy nostalgia lifts & i remove for a moment my rose tinted spectacles.. the vast majority don't half look dreadful especially emulated on HD displays, on native hardware & CRT's it's of course a different matter entirely.. but how many of us still have all the games, hardware & CRT's these days..?


For me, projects like this breathe a much needed new life into the old classics & also make them potentially more appealing to the HD generation who may well go on to become the respected developers of the future.. so i say kudos to these guys & hopefully we will see this incorporated in various emulators & other projects soon.

I didn't say I prefer pixel art, I said that I love GOOD pixel art, and that I preferred each of the examples' pixel art over the processed imagery.


I agree that not every game of yore looks (or plays great). I don't tend to wear rose tinted glasses. But I'm also not inclined to add (or want to add) filters to old games so that they look better in emulation. If I wanted HD style graphics I wouldn't use an emulator at all and would stick with only new HD games (many of which look and play just as badly as those old games do to many "kiddies" nowadays).

 

[gruso]

I remember this appearing on neogaf a while back. Oh, the debate that followed!


As a rule I don't use filters when emulating, but I to tend to try them out at least. I'd be curious to see how this one would look in motion.

 

[elwing]

the paper is interesting, but the result are always worst than good pixel art...

 

[BaDToaD]

Well as an ex pixel artist, I must say I think what they are doing is great. This would truly bring old games to life... As long as there is a way to turn it off too for when we want that retro moment

 

[-Tj-]

This was brought up before, here: http://boards.openpa...zing-pixel-art/


I could have sworn I posted in that thread, but apparently not! :lol: Maybe I didn't because it was in the development section?


Anywho, count me in with the "don't like it" crowd. I've run various filters in emulators that do these smoothing of pixels before and I always almost immediately turn them off. There's some theory and psychology behind why I don't think it works that I don't have the education and research to back up (perhaps if I did I'd be a rich doctor ), but I'll try to explain it anyway!


(I've hid my ramblings in spoilers 'cause I wrote kind of a lot...)

Spoiler

The thing about all these filtering algorithms is that they're done by a computer based on fancy math. Computers aren't creative, and likely won't be for a long time. They'll get creative when we can start programming actual intelligence into them and they can think for themselves and make changes to their own programming and such, but at the moment they can't produce their own art. That is to say, they can't take a picture and turn it into an abstract painting that still has the essence of the original. At least, they can't to the best of my knowledge.


Pixel art is a human making something with a minimal amount of information, approximating the location of pixels for details where they look like they should be, or where they work better in one position than they do another. A computer trying to figure out where to put a black pixel based on conversion of a drawing would rather say "this part of the grid looks darker than this part of the grid, therefore this pixel should be black, not this one," or with a more complicated algorithm it might do better. The human brain has all sorts of memories to compare what it sees to what it remembers, and it has the ability to simplify those memories into something other human brains can look at and create similar thoughts.


Human: Dinosaur + Cartoon = Yoshi


Computer: Dinosaur + Cartoon = Dinosaur + Cartoon


Taking that thought and applying it to this topic, this is no different to me than a computer trying to make art. There is a certain beauty lost when a computer 'enhances' pixel art because it's not a human doing approximation. The computer only knows that there are pixels here and there, and has to take that information and blend it all together to make something that looks higher resolution. When a human does the same thing, detail gets added where it wasn't in the original artwork, just because a human has prior knowledge.

For me, projects like this breathe a much needed new life into the old classics & also make them potentially more appealing to the HD generation

I don't feel it works that way. There's a lot more to making an old game more appealing to younger generations than smoothing out low resolution pixels.

Spoiler

New-generation gamers are used to high definition 2D and 3D graphics and gameplay where everything is given to them in the visuals, and everything is accounted for in the way the game works. Every blade of grass looks like grass, and bullets leave bullet holes you can go up to and see specular highlights on. If the player falls into a pit, they expect something to be there to kill them. If they see a ledge that the player can obviously jump high enough to land on they wonder why the invisible wall that blocks them exists. There is nothing there for the player to have to imagine, aside from what's not shown on the screen, and they expect what they see to work a certain way.


I don't know the sales numbers behind the Street Fighter 2 HD update, but I'd be willing to bet a majority of those players who bought it weren't of the newer generation gaming crowd. The graphics were enhanced, but what else of the game was? Last I remember, while the gameplay was tight, there's a lot from newer fighting games that it didn't have, and that might frustrate newer, younger players. Take other games like Pitfall, where a player must use a rope to cross a pit that clearly has walkable ground around it. While gamers who grew up on the 2D plane may understand that depth is usually not an option, gamers who grew up on the 3D plane may wonder why you couldn't just walk around it.


My brother, 17 years younger than myself, uttered something interesting while we played Sin & Punishment: Star Successor: "I hate games that you can't shoot into the screen." He said this on one of the only parts of the game where you couldn't shoot into the distance.

Younger gamers who will be interested in playing older games will do so regardless of how "HD" the graphics are or not.

 

[Fzero]

hmmm i have seen this article somewhere else recently, most likely Wired UK website [edit: Or....probably on that thread Tj posted].


It does sound like an interesting thing, definately would like to play Mario or something with the smoother vector graphics, but also would like to then revert to retro pixelation.


Does anyone remember an old website which was for creating pixel art for your mobile phone?


Back in the day when colour didnt exist and the extent of personalisation to your nokia came in the form of changing the operator logo.


There was a website i used to go onto a lot, it used to let you send SMS from their site, for free, but its main feature was a grid matrix of about 100x30 pixels, you could then 'draw' onto this grid to create an image/logo/text, which you could then send to your phone and replace the stock 'nokia' logo on the middle of your nokia 3310 or whatever handset you rocked back then.


Anyone know the site i mean? it had an orange/white theme from memory. It probably doesnt exist now, as nobody has these type phones anymore.


Back to this depixelising, does that formula round off everything though? Like on the example of the k/board .. you'd perhaps want some squared corners for keys and such.


i especially liked this bit:


E(i)p = kpi �� ^pik4;


joke, i dont understand none of that, id take a wild guess PI is Per Inch. thats it.

 

[BaDToaD]

Does anyone remember an old website which was for creating pixel art for your mobile phone?


Back in the day when colour didnt exist and the extent of personalisation to your nokia came in the form of changing the operator logo.


There was a website i used to go onto a lot, it used to let you send SMS from their site, for free, but its main feature was a grid matrix of about 100x30 pixels, you could then 'draw' onto this grid to create an image/logo/text, which you could then send to your phone and replace the stock 'nokia' logo on the middle of your nokia 3310 or whatever handset you rocked back then.


Anyone know the site i mean? it had an orange/white theme from memory. It probably doesnt exist now, as nobody has these type phones anymore.

I remember that site, or one very similar. I created a few logos for myself and friends.


I always created mine in paint at work then manually copied the art to the website.


Attached is my favourite one. A piglet on a pillow, done for a female colleague. It's so hard to create anything in such a small space(72x14 pixels :blink: ) with only 2 colours!

piggy3.bmp

 

[Fzero]

Nice, I wish i had bmps of the old ones i had made now too.


Somewhere, on an old floppy disc, i will have backup of my old web favs from 1999-2001, it was around that time. It'll be fun to browse those again and see what used to interest me then, also to see which of the sites even still exist.

 

[erico]

better look here:


http://www.pixeljoint.com/


check the hall of fame.


Those are heroes.


And I prefer the LCD looks of pixel art nowadays.


beware using chrome if you scale those pixels at pixeljoint, it gets interpolated, which for me is heresy... :rolleyes:

 

[lomaxx]

IMHO these pixel-scalers that makes pictures "rounder" and "softer" are nothing but ugly.


The only modifications which I would like to see in an emulator are those that undo the changes to the graphics caused by the technical differences of modern lcd-displays compared to old crt-monitors the games were designed for. Unfortunately - as far as it concerns my thought on this - the resolution needs to be at least 3 times higher than the original resolution in order to correctly emulate RGB-mask and add scanlines in an fairly accurate way. And the resolution of the Pandoras is not high enough for that.


The complete list of video-features that i would like to see in an emulator are:


- keep aspect-ratio


- only do full-integer-scaling (i.e. 2x,3x,4x,...)


- scanline-effect with slighlty shaded/transparent scanlines not harsh black lines


- rgb-mask-emulation


- slight colour-bleeding effect


- very slight blur-effect


hm, probably i forgot something. Of course the first two points mean that the picture shows black bars at the top/bottom and/or left/right side, but for me this is much less of a problem than a deformed picture or wrong calculated pixels due to none-integer scaling. Implementing a colour-bleeding-effect and a slight blur might seem like a step backward, but you have to keep in mind that the graphics of old games have been created with these side-effects being present and thus they live from them.


Here are some links about this topic:


http://www.bogost.co...simulator.shtml


http://www.chrismcov...creenshots.html


http://www.tested.co...mes-on-pc/2982/


http://mattiasgustav...-games-on-a-tv/


http://nfgworld.com/...Modern-Displays


http://eab.abime.net...34&postcount=12