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Comment by Aaargh20318 | Hacker News Reader

Aaargh20318

> People who grew up with Nintendo and Sega really like pixel art.

As one of those people, I really don't like pixel art at all.

Today's pixel art looks nothing like games did back in the day. The simple reason is that those Nintendo and Sega games weren't played on 27" 4k LCD monitors or 65" OLED TV's but on on the barely 14" CRT in my bedroom. We didn't have huge pixely sprites, they were small and blurry. It had a way softer look than todays pixel art does.

To me, the whole pixel art craze looks like false nostalgia. People longing back to something that never existed that way.

this image demonstrates it nicely: http://i.imgur.com/lQFPG14.png

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Eh, i played NES games on my grandparents' ~24" TV, those pixels were clearly visible (though not so visible on my own monochrome TV). Also while "pixel art" is often associated with NES/SEGA by the people who grew up with those systems, it is was also very common in home computers where image clarity was much better than on TV - especially with most games being 320x200 that appeared double scanned on pretty much every EGA and VGA monitor. Even the shitty monochrome 14" VGA monitor that my 386 had had enough clarity to distinguish individual pixels at 640x480

I have several CRTs and pixel art looks pretty much the same in them as it does in modern flat panel displays (blurry pixels is the result of hardware issues and badly configured focus which in many cases it can be fixed). The biggest difference is scaling of low resolution video modes though the integer scaling that is being introduced recently in new drivers should address that (at least as best as possible on a fixed resolution display).

I played Pokemon on the GBA, lots of sharp pixels all around

I grew up playing DOS games on a VGA CRT, most of which were line-doubled 320x200 resolution. The pixels were much sharper than you'd see on a cheap SD TV, and not far from the sharp edges of nearest-neighbor upscaling, which is my preferred style. I also point out that some official artwork for old console games showed sharp pixels (e.g. the Super Mario Bros. cover art). Calling it "false nostalgia" is making assumptions about the hardware of the time and the artist's intentions that aren't universally true.

That era also had fantastic art in arcade games, so don't deny that things like Kim Kaphwan's pants exist

https://www.resetera.com/threads/animation-excellence-a-eulo...

I'd say today's pixel art generally doesn't hit the heights that it did in SF3 or some of the mid KoF games

> https://www.resetera.com/threads/animation-excellence-a-eulo...

> >Current technology isn't even close to being enough to replicate this with real-time physics.

The claim on that page, that those detailed cloth animations were superior and somehow lost in the transition to 3D games, is bunk though. Modern games are very detailed, e.g. https://youtu.be/ot_sYoqe_2w?t=2355

That claim is subjective, and detail != style. A couple floppy rags are not comparable to the big flowing pants on a gi.

The claim that current technology is insufficient to replicate it isn't subjective.

Perhaps the point should be that we lost sense for a particular aesthetic during the transition to 3d graphics techniques.

Perhaps the point should be that we lost sense for a particular aesthetic during the transition to 3d graphics techniques.

I think this mirrors the transition from painting to photography over a century ago. As photography grew to dominate everyday images, painters had to go in a different direction to distinguish themselves. It's no coincidence that art became more and more abstract as photography grew.

There's probably a certain amount of truth to that. It seems like those animations sit in some kind of sweet spot between 'realism', 'beauty' and 'being visibly pixellated'. Since pixellation seems to mostly be used for the nostalgia factor as opposed to either realism or beauty such animations really must be a niche interest

I don't think that's true. While physics for clothing have gotten a lot better, it's a lot of visual flash that seem easier to work like scarves, coat tails, pieces that hang down, etc. I can't recall seeing the kind of bounce that those old school pixel art pants have. Those Aladdin/MC Hammer pants have a weight and shape that I imagine is still really difficult to replicate well. But maybe I just haven't seen such an example yet.

In the few recent fighting games I can think of, Tekken 7 and Mortal Kombat 11, even with relatively light use of physics based fabrics I still see a lot of wonky movement/fabric clipping and getting stuck inside bodies. I definitely don’t think we’re quite there yet.

Consumer hardware probably isn't fast enough to have that level of natural movement and detailed lighting in real time for physics-based clothing. So I agree that the claim is true.

Of course, the animated clothing in those pants wasn't from a physics engine. I'm sure similar results can be accomplished in 3D if they're not phsyics-based.

> Modern games are very detailed,

Detailing them is one thing, replicating them with physics is another (false equivalence from the author).

The 2d animations look fluid and realistic. The Horizon Zero Dawn clip you linked looks simplistic in comparison - floppy 2d textures glued onto a character. The detail is much higher of course, but the realism is much worse. It's interesting how 2d animators could capture things that existing 3d tech can't even scratch the surface of.

That link has a fun and informative video.

That link (and the video in it) are so good you should submit it directly! Thanks!

I also grew up with pixel art. What I do like about pixel art was that it forced you to use your imagination more to complete the scene. That has driven me towards modern games made entirely in ASCII or text, however, not towards more pixel art.

I highly recommend Brogue or Cogmind for people that want an example of a beautiful looking contemporary game made with ASCII/ANSI. The developer of Cogmind open-sourced his ASCII-art making tool![0]

[0] - https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/

It wasn’t until I started working on my own game that I realized just how important readability was for pixel & ascii games. Producing readable high resolution art, 3D or 2D, is actually extremely hard. I like ascii art a lot, but I’m not sure how much of that is a nostalgia issue for me and how much reflects what a new player would see.

It can be easier to set up a photorealistic level using PBR materials in Unreal now than to design a readable level from the ground up. I suspect more developers are going to use photo realism to mask larger problems in their games, and to some extent they already have.

There's always one guy saying this, but CRTs aren't supposed to look like that. You can clearly see the pixels; they're certainly not emphasized, but if they're that blurry, it's because you need glasses.

Super Mario Bros (NES): https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LgO7CNdQx0A/maxresdefault.jpg

A Link to the Past (SNES): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C0qPvqpVIAAoEz4.jpg

Both of the above look far more like the picture on the left than the right. I actually don't even know what your "blurry" picture is supposed to be a picture of, I don't see the scanlines I'd expect on a CRT.

Good pixel artists aim for the peaks of mid-90s arcade, the Saturn, PS1, and GBA. With a proper monitor/TV and cables (or just the GBA), you were looking at sharp pixels and vivid colors.

Most (not all) people going for NES-inspired graphics are just amateur artists who try passing off their lack of skill for “retro style”. And frankly, it can work. Amateur artists can make good low res art.

The real problem is people who just draw on a small canvas and call it pixel art. They lack the fine details.

I’m no artist but making games seems fun so I’ve been dabbling. I make vector art, and write scripts to make raster animations at low resolution. This isn’t terribly different than how some of the more beloved 16 bit styles were made. I just haven’t moved into 3D modeling (and I’m also a bad artist).

Not everything has to be intricately hand drawn to look good, and even elicit nostalgia.

What a weird, sweeping, broad brush claim. There are pixel artists of all levels of skill making pixel art inspired by all eras of technology, often a mixture of them, and sometimes not related to any historical limitation at all.

I played LOOM on a smallish 640x480 CRT from the 80s. The pixels are clearly visible. In particular, since the color palette is so restricted, a lot of large surfaces are dithered -- and you can easily see the grid of little alternating squares.

>As one of those people, I really don't like pixel art at all.

For a counter voice, as one of those people, I adore pixel art. I also hate how everything has to be 3D.

I love pixel art. For me is not only a hint at nostalgia but an art form in itself and that is alright. I like the aesthetics of it, I like the way it looks and I can admire the professionals that work with that kind of art.

I think you mean you hate BAD pixel art. Thing about the critical modern successes is that they try to recreate that feel for modern hardware. In the process that naturally means they use more resources to pull off the visual look because 1) there's more resolution so more work needed and 2) it's usually being applied to a modern pipeline (computational lighting, for instance. Something NES games lacked)

"Pixel art" nowadays is a very very wide term. There's huge variable and hundreds of different "art styles" within pixel art. There are games with fairly simple graphics like Stardew Valley or Terraria, games with much better art direction like Celeste, and games with "high res" pixel art like Owlboy. Just to say it's "pixel art" doesn't mean much anymore.

I don't know about GP but I just don't like pixel art. It's just not my thing, just like I don't care for certain movie genres or certain foods.

It doesn't have to be 100% authentic to the period to be genuinely nostalgic. Retrowave still 'sounds like' the 80s even though the cyberpunk 80s it harks back to never quite existed.

When I first played Super Mario Maker 2 with my 65" OLED TV, it was mind-blowing. Mario never looked this good. So much color, the graphics really pop off and help you with the platforming.

Maybe it's not nostalgia, but actually just looks very nice.

I happen to have gained considerable experience with TVs growing up.

Am able to take most vintage sets, align and calibrate them to perform much better than that image. In some cases, modifying the set does even more.

I love pixel art. Back then, I definitely saw the pixels.

Some of my sets were comparable in performance to what people seek for retro today, the PVR.

And I have a PVR, because they are cheap right now. Actually. I have two, but one will need service before I use it. Can still definitely see the pixels.

Not so sure about that - I had a Philips CM8833 MK II that was pretty crisp, certainly crisper than a TV.

I love pixel art! So much creativity squeezed out of such limited hardware.

As one of those people, I really don't like pixel art at all.

I don't like pixel art either. I assume it is easier to make pixel art than good looking sprites. I think the article touches on this.

but on on the barely 14" CRT in my bedroom. We didn't have huge pixely sprites, they were small and blurry.

This is true for consoles, but not really for arcade games of the era, which have very crisp, very pixelated graphics, like the Link on the left.

> This is true for consoles

Sure, but the author specifically mentions "People who grew up with Nintendo and Sega"

Sega and Nintendo both made arcade machines, too.

The Capcom Power System had games in arcades around the same time Sega was doing it as well.

The author also posts pictures of a Nintendo console game.

Yeah they were almost definitely talking about Nintendo and Sega home consoles, I just can't help being pedantic sometimes.

I think the pixel art in Thimbleweed Park looks fantastic

https://thimbleweedpark.com/

And the games it's evoking would have been mostly experienced with crisp pixels, since they were late enough in the home computer era that people had dedicated monitors rather than TVs.

I'm really excited for Heart Forth, Alicia, but it doesn't look like it's coming out anytime soon.

http://www.alonsomartin.mx/hfa/

Id also argue that pixel art is the default fallback for people who don’t like 3d engine graphics, which I personally can’t stand. I love to see evolution of 2d graphics using our latest and greatest tech.

That's happening too. Lots of popular 2d games aren't really pixelart. Cuphead, Hollow Knight, or Ori and the Blind Forest, Child of Light etc aren't going for a particularly pixelart look and really advancing the aesthetic instead. So there is plenty of non pixelart stuff too if you want. However, fidelity is expensive, and sometimes, a small creator has better things to invest in.

I think Octopath Traveler is a beautiful example of 2d pixel art reimagined.

Grrrr! People who like things I don't like are dumb and confused!

Pixel art is just a style like any other. I like it for the same reason people like pointillism or [insert art style here]. A lot of interesting art, music, and creativity in general stems from self-imposed arbitrary constraints. It's super lazy thinking to blanket disregard an entire sub-genre as people who are either confused about what it "should" look like given some viewing conditions, or simply blinded by nostalgia.

Unlike some of the others, I played on a TV with a wooden case, through an RF modulator, and I get the point you are making.

It's just a different medium and plenty of people love it nostalgia or not. I bet a ton of people who never grew up with pixel art games enjoy them today and there would be no nostalgia for them.

> The simple reason is that those Nintendo and Sega games weren't played on 27" 4k LCD monitors or 65" OLED TV's but on on the barely 14" CRT in my bedroom. We didn't have huge pixely sprites, they were small and blurry. It had a way softer look than todays pixel art does.

My GB/GBC/GBA games were very rarely played on a 14" CRT.

> To me, the whole pixel art craze looks like false nostalgia. People longing back to something that never existed that way.

Its certainly could be helped by nostalgia, but that pixel art never existed because you only saw it on a blurry CRT? Yeah keep burying your head into the ground like only your taste existed.

If you run your games on an emulator you can throw on an NTSC filter (even with CRT curved distortion if so inclined!) and you get a little bit closer to to that old experience.

That's exactly what I do on ZSNES, and the graphics look so much more authentic. Though I'm not sure if I had found any setting for distortion.

Yeah, add B&W TV that everyone around me used, we did not really saw those colours :)

I think you had a maladjusted TV or something. On a good TV or composite monitor, pixel art should have fairly sharp edges. Most televisions had adjustment controls for various thing (sharpness, contrast, tint, color, etc); so many people didn't know how to properly adjust them, though.

My first video game system was a cheapo b/w pong clone knockoff thing from radio shack. My second was an Atari 2600. Later my parents bought me a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 16K (which eventually got upgraded to 32, then 64K), and then still later a Color Computer 3. An NES was in there somewhere, and I played on friend's Sega Genesis systems and C=64 computers (plus Apple IIe, PCjr, and others).

Pixel art (back then, they were just "sprites" or "tiles" to us - I'm not sure if the term "pixel art" was a thing then - I never heard it, but it doesn't mean it wasn't) wasn't fuzzy or soft, unless things weren't adjusted right.

The only other time it might be a little funky was if the machine in question was trying to use artifacting in some manner:

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-overlooked-a...

As you can see - artifacting could introduce a certain level of "fuzziness" to graphics; but scroll to the bottom of that page, to see what the CoCo 2 could do in the hands of someone competent with the effect.

The CoCo 2 got 4 colors on an effectively black/white screen mode by interleaving black and white values - spaced close together on the screen, the NTSC system would render alternate colors - red/blue instead, depending on certain other factors - there was an alternate color mode (green/black) that got you purple and grey or something like that as well - this kind of thing didn't work with PAL CoCo systems (or Dragon 32 - also PAL).

The CoCo 3 could simulate certain "extra colors" on a TV or composite monitor if you dropped into the 640x200 screen (4 colors) and played with pixel patterns. What wasn't widely known then (one guy figured it out - but published his results in Hot CoCo magazine, which wasn't as widely read as The Rainbow magazine was - and so his efforts went mostly unnoticed!) was that with the right pixel patterns over 4 pixels (thus reducing the actual resolution to 160x200 - an almost square "screen"), and using the 4 grayscales available on the CoCo 3 (black, white, and a dark gray and light gray) - you could generate (again, using NTSC artifacting) hundreds of colors!

http://www.coco3.com/community/2009/12/composite-artifacting...

http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-little-known-color-c...

This was rediscovered long after the CoCo 3 was out to pasture so to speak - in the 2000s; it's kinda sad, as it is almost the rumored (likely false) "256-color" mode in practice, and might have done wonders for games back in the day had it been fully utilized, vs the 320x200 16 color mode that was available (there was also a 160x200 16 color mode); these modes were out of a total of 64 colors (which could also be displayed simultaneously if the processor was doing nothing else, by swapping the palette on the horizontal retrace at the right moments - but it wasn't used for more than still images at best; some image displayers for digitizers also used it to swap r/g/b patches of palette on the vertical retrace to get a very flickery form of high-color for special digitized pictures - also, there was a similar way of doing things on the CoCo 2 to get all 8 of it's colors onscreen at once in one of the "mid-res" modes - it was used for a game called "DragonFire":

http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/dragonfire.html

Lately, people have used these tricks and such to do some weird stuff with the CoCo:

https://hackaday.com/2011/04/21/tandy-color-computer-coco3-c...

Then of course, you also have the possibilities offered by CGA on a composite monitor:

https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...

Which is also a good primer on artifacting itself. And of course:

https://int10h.org/blog/2015/08/8088-mph-final-old-vs-new-cg...

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65371

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

Ok - enough of that - downvote this nostalgia trip - I'm sorry...

For me, pixel art is a technical limitation. I don't see the point of romanticising a technical limitation. What limitation are we going to do next? Retro low-poly 3D models? A soundtrack consisting of six songs only? Distributing the game on 13 floppy disks? Games that never get updates? Low quality collision objects? Null-model cable multiplayer? game_demo.exe file download from CNET.com? Anti-piracy methods by having to look up words from a book?

low-poly (and often untextured) 3D models is already a style being used in indie gamedev, seeme like it came into vogue a year or two ago.

chiptunes are also a stylistic choice some games make over full hi def sounds and music.

Lopoly and pixel art also has the advantage of being cheaper and faster to produce at an acceptable quality. Indies cannot produce AAA quality assets.

They also tend to age better because they never tried to look realistic in the first place. Cartoonish remains cartoonish, but realistic becomes dated.

Going off on a tangent, I'd really love to see a game that pushed production values within the artificial constraint of zero texture, just flat shaded geometry, while maxing out modern hardware. That would be the computer graphics style I dreamt of while growing up between X-Wing on the PC and Money for Nothing on MTV.

If you've ever watched any of the "Mind's Eye" CGI videos (which were just older CGI of the 70s, 80s, and some early 90s set to music) - you can get an idea of what your fantasy might look like in full motion.

Most of those old systems and animations didn't use texture mapping and relied on heavier polygon usage, because that's what the hardware could do, while still generating a frame in a reasonable time for transfer to film (still - we aren't talking any kind of "real-time"). While texture mapping was known how to do (sometime in the late 60s or early 70s - can't recall) - doing it with the hardware at the time was extremely slow, so it wasn't used much (IIRC, one of the first CGI films to use it was Sunstone).

Instead, most used hardware that could either do flat-filled polys, or some form of shading (Gouraud, then later Phong). So to make things look good they relied on more detail (more polys and colors) and less on textures (which can hide low-count vertex polys).

The original Tron might also be a good approximation (though from what I recall, it was hand colored from black-and-white computer rendered cels - not sure)...

Sure.

https://gamasutra.com/view/news/248019/How_5_years_of_burnin...

A technical limitation itself is insufficient, but a lot of art is on purpose limited in order to force focus on certain things.

E.g. black and white photography is often used to emphasise composition and lighting more. Specific palettes. Specific sets of instruments - a classical composition will not usually be for "some random number and set of musicians" but written for or arranged for, say, a quartet or a symphony orchestra. Both visual art and music tends to follow a whole range of rules to match certain styles.

And yes, reducing size is also a choice - the demo scene takes that very seriously for a good reason: it again forces a different focus. A non-size constrained demo category emphasizes cooperation and teams working on different parts, and project management and is a totally different thing than, say, a 4K demo where you have to focus on reducing a single concept to its essence.

A direct size constraint may not be that important for most games (though for some it is: people still develop cartridge games for the Commodore 64 for example), but resolution and palette constraints do act as implicit size constraints too to a great extent.

Well done pixel art is just a form of minimalism in art that focuses on shading and composition and exploiting patterns and how we interpret pictures. Just reducing resolution of a picture almost always produces bad pixel art. E.g. r/pixelart on Reddit includes this rule:

    Art must be comprised mostly of pixel art using pixel-level manipulation.
    Color reductions, index painting, computer generated, oekaki, aliased
    digital painting etc. are not permitted unless they have been cleaned up
    by hand afterwards or were posted with the [WIP] tag.

And people there get very picky about this, to the point that some people object to even fairly basic paint application tools (I've argued with people who claimed that a pixel based "spray" tool is not suitable for pixel art, for example, because there's not sufficient thought behind each pixel placement; I don't agree with that, but I do agree with the overall idea that you need to pay attention on a pixel level, and tweak things that does not look right). Taking e.g. a photography and color reducing it and reducing the resolution does not result in good pixel art - it results in pictures that are messy and unclear and that often lose a lot more detail vs. a proper pixel art rendition of the same scene.

Similarly reduced palettes forces much more conscious thinking about composition to make it make sense.

Modern pixel art, like modern chip tunes of course have different motivations from "authentic" art made because the constraints were real constraints of the hardware, but it's really no different from people who e.g. choose to compose for piano even though they could compose for a synth and be free to include sounds no piano can reproduce. We have not entirely abandoned piano music just because we now have more flexible instruments available.

There's a major gap between 'technically superior' and 'subjectively superior'. You sound pretty out of touch here in a time when LPs and casettes have made a comeback, chiptunes are pretty hip, some artists have literally released albums on floppy disk, and, as already mentioned, contrary to your own sarcasm low-poly graphics are already a an indie game trope.

Just because something has more impressive metrics doesn't make it fun.

That's like calling a book a technical limitation compared to a movie.

Art is not functional. All things you listed are things no one is bringing back. If linen became obsolete hundreds of years ago why do people still wear it?

True, but that technical limitation inadvertently created a "style" and some people like that style even if the technology now exists to make art with more detail.

For example, just because the technology exists to make a virtually unlimited range of sounds and effects doesn't mean that we should abolish simple acoustic music... some people like that style, which originally existed because that's all the technology that was available.

Some limitations are very useful for creating innovative art styles.

If Muslim artists weren't restricted from painting people and animals they wouldn't create the decorative motives they created. If early sound chips in personal computers weren't restricted chiptune genre wouldn't be created. And you can certainly make art using restrictions that aren't enforced on you - restrictions often inspire people and make it easier to create.

That being said while I love chip tunes and I like some old games made with pixel art I don't particulary like it in the new games, but that's just my opinion, lots of people have different preferences.

Also from gamedev POV pixel art allowed many modern indie games to be created which wouldn't be created otherwise. That's a plus in my book.

> Low quality collision objects?

Funny that you mentioned this - some collision detection bugs in starcraft 2 were introduced on purpose to mimic bugs in starcraft 1 because these bugs increased the skill cap (people learnt to abuse them to get ahead of their opponents and community liked that because it was another thing you had to learn to master the game). See "mineral walk" :)

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