Living Worlds: 8 Bit art animated with palette cycling (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Living Worlds: 8 Bit art animated with palette cycling (2012)

effectgames.com

336 pointsant6n59 comments

I found this website a few years ago and became infatuated with it. It's such a simple technique (in theory, I imagine creating this would be a headache) but it's possible of such powerful results. Not only is there simple animation, but it also supports different times of day using the exact same image. It's some of the best "retro" art I've seen. With this sort of artistry coming back into fashion, I can only hope other pieces like it are created.

I thought I was going crazy when the oldest version of this site was from 2012 in archive.org, when I distinctly remember seeing this in the late 90s. (like 1999 or something)

But I found the original artist, as far as I can tell, and this art was done in 87'-97'. The 8bit palette cycle is not new, you could it with a number of methods way back, but it's oddly still incredibly impressive.

https://www.markferrari.com/image-archives

I have the official Living Worlds app on my iPhone:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/living-worlds-mark-ferrari/id1...

My favorite $2 purchase, it's a masterpiece. My "go to sleep" routine is to watch it on my phone in bed until my eyes get droopy.

Heh, it's at #120 on the iOS Top Charts for Paid Entertainment. I just bought it, so it checks out - the HN effect is real.

This warms my heart!

For those who don't know, the heart-warmed commenter above, iangilman, is the creator of the original app 25 years ago as well as the new mobile app version! Incredible work Ian!!

I have it on Android. :D

Bought this today after reading it on HN. This is really cool, and I am glad to support it.

Just bought it.

I will try to put it on my iPad as a "picture frame" on my desk.

Regardless of if it runs nicely on my iPad setup or not, I'd wanted to support this beautiful work of art + programming blend anyway!

Ian Gilman (the Living Worlds developer) is on Patreon, btw! He makes really nifty stuff: https://www.patreon.com/iangilman & https://blog.iangilman.com/

I didn't write this demo (Joseph Huckaby did), but I wrote the original version that the demo is based on, and I wrote the new mobile version: https://pixfabrik.com/livingworlds/

> This new Living Worlds app is a modern recreation of a set of dynamic pixel art scenes first published in the early 90s as part of an "illustrated personal organizer" named Seize the Day, and seen as screenshots across the Internet since then. These scenes were created by Mark Ferrari, legendary artist from such classic games as Loom and The Secret of Monkey Island as well as the recent Thimbleweed Park. Now, 25 years later, Ian Gilman, the original software developer, has resurrected the Living Worlds, with Mark's support and additional code from Joseph Huckaby. There may be copycats, but this is the only authentic version from the original creators!

Wow! When I first saw this site a few years ago, I immediately thought the people involved have to be pixel art geniuses, but I didn't imagine it went this far back or had such an impressive pedigree. Legendary indeed...

For lots of info on the history and technology behind these demos, check out https://iangilman.medium.com/living-worlds-for-ios-android-4...

Another great artist worth looking at (and the creator of Pixel Art Academy) is https://www.patreon.com/retro

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

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

I'm very fond of this technique, I used it in the 90s when I was building video games with my friends at UNI, one of them was a complete genius about color cycling and made some wonderful animation, unfortunately I lost all the source material years ago (reminder to self: always make backups!).

Fast forward 2 decades, I'm also involved in Elixir community a bit, I was attending the ElixirConf in 2017 and when Boyd Multerer introduced his Scenic UI framework [1], my brain literally exploded and I immediately started to think of a way to use it for making video games (something that ended up not being completely possible, but not impossible!)

My first attempt was to recreate the iconic Shadow of the beast "walk in the park" scene, multiple levels of parallax and all [2]

My second attempt was, of course, recreating these same animation in Elixir! [3]

Then, as many of you already know all so well, life hit, I lost momentum and it never became something more polished or usable.

It still was a lot of fun.

Fast forward another 2 years, I was at ElixirConf again in 2019 and there was a talk about a GameBoy emulator written in Elixir+Scenic.

Never I would have imagined that my silly experiments would end up to inspire someone else to build something so cool! [4]

Kudos to him.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77FW-jrCyCs

[2] https://gitlab.com/wstucco/scenic-sotb

[3] https://gitlab.com/wstucco/scenic-color-cycling

[4] https://youtu.be/7WPJDmJJqf0?t=125

Don't forget to click "Options" and use the "Time of Day" slider. It adds even more atmosphere to these animations.

Ah, thanks for pointing this out, because I couldn't understand why these were all pitch black and moody to the point of being unintelligible.

Fun fact: The rotating ball in the famous Amiga Boing Ball demo, is actually a single static image, with the rotation effect created using palette cycling.

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

Oooh, there's also a daytime adjustment which uses the palette to alter the time of day. I was confused when I got to the desert one where nothing was animated, but then you hit the options and find the time slider.

Oh my goodness. Even just the first one's time of day is incredible. The light actually rolls across the scene making it look 3D.

Reminds me of all the neat 8bit hacks people had to do back in the day. Glad there's still people doing stuff like this :)

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

...if you haven't.

These are nicely sophisticated - didn't we all love doing this kind of animation with Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. Nice to see that this still is a thing, or at least was 10 years ago!

I share this with my students when I talk about paletted display modes on the Gameboy Advance. A couple of students actually made use of it this semester on their projects.

I've always been told that no matter what you do, this type of artwork must be done by hand. If you take a video clip and try to quantize it, it just won't look the same. Same with all pixel art. Cannot be automated even though it is tempting to think it can be. How true is this?

Try :) Take a video and quantize it.

From my experience: very true.

I actually find tech like this kind of depressing.

It's such a lovely art form... but such an anachronistic one.

It's funny, you could say the same about all real-world art forms too, but somehow hand-crafting things don't bother me on the same level as this kind of tech.

With things like the pi zero, the cost of a machine that can endlessly run full video is vastly eclipsed by the screen to present it on. So simple palette animations are now pointless. Filesize? My phone has over 100GB. Bandwidth? Streaming is everywhere.

But I love this stuff. I love the aesthetic, the limitations, the tech that is simple-enough I can fit the whole concept into my head until I see the hellscape of optimizations that it took to squeeze out every last iota of performance on old machines that shouldn't be able to do this.

>With things like the pi zero, the cost of a machine that can endlessly run full video is vastly eclipsed by the screen to present it on. So simple palette animations are now pointless.

it's not pointless -- constraint often produces beauty in unexpected ways.

Piet Mondrian's art wouldn't have been improved by access to millions of colors and microscopic detail; the rigorous constraints are what produced his entire style.

plus as a developer the idea of using the least amount of machine to accomplish something is incredibly appealing to me; it's like a more extreme version of code golf.

As long as there's people who can appreciate the art for what it is, isn't it serving its purpose?

It doesn't have to serve a utility. It's a beautiful, clever intersection between math and visual art, and that's all it has to be.

Something about art is that it doesn't cast its aspirations into the future (as is typically the case when thinking about tech) because it's here to make a statement now.

That grounds it in the moment, and in its own way justifies the effort.

Popular ideas about art often get unhealthily fixated on the idea of production; there are always standard ways of doing things that give a consistent result, and when you layer them all up you get a pretty picture. And the average "pretty picture" one sees throughout social media is built on applying just those things. But that kind of default is an example of a normalization - if everyone has a guitar, you get a lot of guitar music, yet not every guitar player is really aiming for mastery of guitar specifically.

It's stylistically more important to actually settle on a medium with a definite spec and then work through how to optimize it, like how a speedrunner gradually learns the intricacies of a game. Then you can make that definite statement.

I think this stuff looks beautiful on its own merits.

I always thought there was something aesthetic about older games - and I think the limited tools they had to work with was a big part of it.

I'd play the hell out of a modern game that looked like this.

There are quite a few nice modern games that look like this and I have had lots of fun playing them on Steam. Wadjet Eye's adventure games, Blasphemous, The Messenger, CrossCode and more!

Cross code looks really nice from the trailer - part of it looks like Chrono Trigger (still one of the most beautiful games of all time IMHO)

By all means go to Steam (or another digital storefront like the Nintendo e-shop) and check the 'indie' category. There's a revival of pixel-art games going on to the point some people are completely fed up with them. Even then, since 80% of everything is crap you can't expect every game to live up to your best memories, but if you want pixel-art you can get it ;)

Don't be depressed. The demoscene is still going strong - check out https://www.pouet.net :-)

I make furniture by hand sometimes. Plane the lumber, hand cut dovetails, 100+ year old molding planes for trim, hand forged square nails when I need fasteners, antique planes too for young and groove boards.

Slow as hell to make, hugely pleasing to the soul. My metrics are that in the end, not efficiency.

Love these. They remind me of the physical signs for beer or food that would have a single animating element coming from a spinning light or shutter inside — a waterfall is easy but also ripples in a pool, light sparkling on a glass etc.

> “It's a beautiful, clever intersection between math and visual art”

The Amiga Graphics Archive

http://amiga.lychesis.net/special/ColorCycling.html

> “It's such a lovely art form... but such an anachronistic one.”

Christensen

Perpetual Motion Machine & Watches

https://www.randelshofer.ch/animations/anims/christensen/thu...

Were there actually any/many 8-bit machines that supported palette-based color?

I think of this as more something from the Atari ST era; in fact, I think I distinctly remember the waterfall effect from the NEOchrome examples: https://www.retroshowcase.gr/index.php?p=article&artid=3

C64, vic20, not really. Maybe limited in some ranges. E.g. grays.

8bit Ataris kinda... not palette indexing but enough colors to make it happen. Though scarcely enough memory :)

Amiga(16bit), yes.

VGA (8/16/32 bit). Huge yes. Underrated. E.g. mode 0x13 had 256 palette registers!

You could simulate it on a VIC-20 or C64 but it's not really color cycling because you'd have to change the color RAM. The background color could be cycled but cycling one color isn't very useful.

The Atari 8-bit computers can display and cycle 4 out of 128 colors, which is quite limited.

The NES, Master System and MSX 2 all did though they could not produce images like those in the showcase. They'd need a lot more colors, so we're talking Amiga / VGA tier graphics at least.

I think "8-bit" refers to "8 bits per pixel" in this case, not "8-bit platform".

This seems correct. If you click on "Show Options" it shows the palette w/ 256 colours (i.e. 2^8 bits). Each pixel is just an index into the palette.

The Atari 8-bit computers can but only with 4 colors chosen from 128.

The Amstrad CPC computer can with 16 out of 27 colors. The Amstrad CPC Plus models can with 16 out of 4096 colors.

I believe the MSX 2 and 2+ models can as well as they have 4096 or more colors.

Other possibilities are the Enterprise 64/128, Thomson TO8, Fujitsu FM 77 AV, and Sam Coupe. I mentioned these because they all have 128 or more colors but can only display a small subset of them so changing the palette should allow color cycling.

This was one of the best bits of palette chicanery on the CPC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huHwm1Vx0NU

The perspective scroll is achieved by having a colour for each 'column' of the text. The letters are then drawn by setting the palette at the start of each scanline. So for a letter T, you'd have a few scanlines with ink 1, 2, and 3 all set to green; then the remaining scanlines with ink 1 and 3 set to black, and ink 2 set to green.

Later on it varies the technique by using different shapes, by changing the colour selection per line, and so on.

GBA and DS totally used palette with their hardware tiler.

I've been meaning to create one of those ever since I saw it for the first time. Back then I was more of an artist than a programmer, but I think now I have the skills to try. I find these art pieces very relaxing.

I guess it doesn't make sense to increase the number of bits in the palette to get a more refined effect since, at the point, you can just change the pixels in the frame buffer like a normal animation would.

it makes sense, you could potentially remaster all of these in 16 bit and the benefit would still be that you get nice varied animation from manipulating the relatively small color table

You can see more pieces here http://effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

This looks like so many games made by Sierra (Kings Quest, et Al). Thanks to Roberta Williams for inspiring creativity in my childhood.

I would love a way to turn an image into something like this, or just quality pixel art in general.

These little scenes are incredible.

This is some of the most beautiful pixel art I've ever seen.

palette cycling! major amiga nostalgia.

Although the Commodore 64 had a fixed palette, some creative hackers managed to create "impossible" colors by alternating between two colors. Not really palette cycling, but pretty awesome nonetheless.

https://www.aaronbell.com/secret-colours-of-the-commodore-64...

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