Someone always decides what it is though…like, even if the color of the pixel is determined through a more complicated algorithm than just like, scaled blitting with nearest neighbor interpolation or w/e, it still expresses a set of aesthetic gestures someone carefully picked out…programming is an art form too…if you just rule out the possibility of any more-elaborate effects with textures/sprites beyond just scaled blitting, you lose a huge space for more complexity and self-expression in the graphics. If you view the colors in a texture as one of the inputs to some sort of wild machine, then like, you can wring thousands of cool images out of one cool hand-drawn texture…like some of the work Lily and I have been doing on commission I’ve posted recently:
Here you can see this shader works in both 2D (the title cards) and 3D (the manta ray model), because it just operates on textures, whether they’re wrapped around a model or just blittled to the screen. You could totally use this in a 2D game…including one with low-res textures/sprites…and I would not want someone telling me I wasn’t allowed.
In this scene you can see a variety of places where Lily made really cool textures by hand and then I found ways to get effects utilizing them as a basis…all of the animations here (aside from the rig-based ones) are done procedurally at runtime through shading effects.
Maybe, like, the 2D games people are grousing about just don’t do things like this…but they could! On a technical level there’s nothing stopping them. Even just the idea of “bloom lighting” can be a lot of things, it’s usually like mixing the colors of adjacent pixels in some way but there’s a lot of ways you can come up with to do that—the mysterious shimmering smoky vision inside the glass box in the second video I made using a very similar technique, but like, where mixing the colors has nonlinear effects that go beyond just lerping between the input components or w/e.
i assume others here might think this, but i definitely don’t think this as a truism. i think the specific implementation of the turbo outrun fangame is garish - i don’t think it looks good, it’s distracting, it does not mesh visually, it brings me out of the experience, even, when it comes on - partly because i actually really do like most of the other stuff it is doing, and all of that seems to be cohesive and considered.
it can be done well, i’m sure, though i cannot think of any examples at the moment.
I guess like, if I have any complaints about the lighting here, it’s more that it seems so restrained and kind of “modern retro traditional”—like, there’s such a wide palette of other lighting effects and approaches they could try out (I think it would be neat to have an elaborate materials-based lighting system in a game with low-res sprites like this …you could have a system that was more computationally expensive than normal for 3D realtime games because of the small textures and billboarding etc. and I think that might yield really neat results). I think like, at least just speaking personally, I would rather they do that than just remove the lights and have it feel like only a very slight deviation from the original…we still have the original OutRun after all.
spinnylights, the stuff you are showing off in your own work is so much more interesting and creative, it kinda feels bad to lump anything you are doing in with this (imo) poor aesthetic choice in a fangame, lol. everything you shared is killer and interesting and yes! it is good!
100% yes. that, and the gradient that appears on the ground for the headlights in that sequence. neither look particularly good to me
this game doesn’t really look that much like the original Turbo Outrun anymore. for one, this one plays in a vastly higher resolution and is way smoother. it’s really bringing quite a bit to the table such that the loss of a (imo) garish effect would be negligible. playing the original is definitely not the same!
i mean, ultimately it’s purely taste. i just do not like the way it looks, such that it causes my brain to stop enjoying what it is looking at and and go, ugh, i wouldn’t have made that decision.
Yeah, I mean, of course it is totally a matter of taste…I don’t necessarily mean it’s like really the same as the original OutRun per se also, although like, that wasn’t exactly my intention when I said “very slight deviation,” I think maybe my line for that is just kind of in a different place…I think with anything like this I usually want it to be well further away still from its original source material…Like, um, in your recent System 7 screenshot in the No Context Computing thread, I saw you had Apeiron—I love that as a take on Centipede, I do really feel like it shows a totally other side of Centipede that retains the fun of the original but strongly has its own distinctive aesthetic and feel and set of mechanics etc. too. I know that like, there’s no objective way to measure the degree of distance between two games that somewhat resemble each other but are somewhat different as well, and I don’t want to make anyone feel bad about what they like either, I guess I just don’t want people who want to experiment with things like procedural lighting in games with low-res billboard sprites or the like to feel scared off doing that, or from posting screenshots of games like that I guess. I would love to see more unrestrained experimentation with that kind of tech…I guess I’ve basically already said that but I do think it would be cool.
Sorry I just noticed this…thank you, that’s very sweet. I’m glad that at least that stuff does work for you.
ok, this is good stuff. that’s an understandable motivation and position.
my response to this is that i’d like for that to happen in a way that doesn’t look so garish, such as in the Turbo Outrun fangame. i think people should probably actually be discouraged from using it in this way from my perspective, because that implementation is like… not really a creative risk? it’s kind of a bog-standard “modern” lighting affectation (results-wise - i can’t speak to underlying code). it speaks under its breath “newer is better” without explicitly saying it - but i hear it nonetheless. had they done anything particularly interesting / different / etc - or even if it just looked consistent with the rest of the game - i’d likely be singing a different tune, even if i still didn’t care for the result!
i think the lighting in Noita is fabulous, for example - it enhances the game and is visually coherent
aside: Apeiron is so good! i think it really does stand apart from Centipede for a variety of reasons. there’s the power-ups, of course. Centipede is also meant to use a trackball for input, whereas Apeiron just uses a computer mouse. the sound effects and voice samples are also “zany” in Apeiron, giving very different vibes than the more spartan Centipede, or even Millipede, or any of their many, many home ports. and! maybe this is my classic mac bias talking, but an interesting comparison can be made between Centipede, Mouse/Mouse Eaters/Mouse Stampede (early B&W Macintosh Centipede clone) and Apeiron. kinda wonder if Apeiron was itself inspired by Mouse Stampede more than the original Centipede!
Yeah, I guess, I sort of agree but I don’t want to put too much pressure on anyone kind of—like, if someone really actively wants to put lights like that in their game I think they should go for it if they really feel it. If they sort of feel personally inclined to do something more experimental but think that like, they have to have typical bloom lights like that because that’s what “modern pixel art lighting” is supposed to be or that sort of thing, then I think I would encourage them to just take the chance with their off-the-wall lighting ideas and not worry about following trends etc. Maybe that would be a little self-interested but I do kind of feel like it does the world good if there’s a really widely-varied selection of media—then everyone can find something they enjoy.
That’s interesting—I think it might be the same shader maybe at least just from looking at it, but in Noita I guess it’s much more associated with the particle system so the game gets more variety out of it. When there are lots of small emissive objects moving around next to each other with that kind of shader their overlapping “bloom radii” or w/e makes nice variegation in the overall lighting—that’s something you miss I guess with those widely-spaced streetlights in the OutRun game.
I’d never heard of this before, it looks very cute!!
I always wonder about things like that with Ambrosia—often with their clone games you know what the very original was, but there’s like a series of clones that came between the two, sometimes on other platforms like the C64 or Amiga, that have somewhat more resemblance to Ambrosia’s version, and you can never quite know if it was just parallel evolution in some sense or if they were really riffing on one of the earlier clones.
for a moment those screenshots transported me to like easter 97 or whatever when i rinsed re1 with a tape of the fugees - the score on in the background
samurai shodown warriors rage has pretty decent polygon characters, but the real stars are the backgrounds, which are 360 degree dioramas made of the kind of excellent pixel art you would expect from snk in the late 90s
scene leading up to the final battle of superlite 1500 series angelmois 99 (a game that’s kind of like uno, and has a plot involving nostradamus’ millenial apocalypse prediction)
I’m glad that at least that stuff does work for you.
