Official Off-Topic Thread 2014

[Mathias]

Heh. Just being an idiot. But seriously - good stuff, Carnivac.
While the scanlines seem to add a "dirty" noise to the overall impression, they do also lend a neat old school-ish feel. I wonder if playing an entire game like that, with such visible scanlines, would become an annoyance after a while. Not sure.
Also, how would it even be achieved, technically?

Crop of last pic


Scanlines going both ways. It is just a transparent pattern overlaid on top of everything - just a bunch of transparent black pixels?


___


As for all the scaling algo's - how would a simpleton, non-codin', graphic designer like myself put them to use in his own work?

[Ai]

Looks reasonably CPC-true to me, maybe a little more arcade-monitor-ish.

If you want to try these filters on your images, check out
https://code.google.com/p/2dimagefilter/

I despise .NET, so I didn't bother; but, it does implement virtually every scaling filter available in emulators, and provides a simple tool to apply them to whatever image you want.

[Conzeit]

a while ago we had a topic with PixelPileDriver examining the possibility of shading pixelart trough normal maps. Well there's a game called "Swapper" that does that but with stopmotion graphics, and it looks pretty darn good.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/how-the-swapper-created-horror-out-of-clay-and-found-objects

Thought some of you guys would like to know....I'll leave you guys to geek over the sweet scanlined Carnivac art now =)

[PixelPiledriver]

there's a game called "Swapper"

Cool!
Very clever way to build normal maps from photos.
Looks to be a decent game as well.

a while ago we had a topic with PixelPileDriver examining the possibility of shading pixelart trough normal maps

Haven't  touched that shader since then.
It was a good side project.
Maybe I'll put some time into that.

[Carnivac]

While the scanlines seem to add a "dirty" noise to the overall impression, they do also lend a neat old school-ish feel. I wonder if playing an entire game like that, with such visible scanlines, would become an annoyance after a while. Not sure.

I don't really 'notice' them all.  In fact the lack of scanlines bugs me a lot more.  I don't like to play low res games without them.

Scanlines going both ways. It is just a transparent pattern overlaid on top of everything - just a bunch of transparent black pixels?

I think I mentioned in a previous post it's just two images of black lines.  One with them going horizontal and one with them vertical and they can each have their transparency adjusted from 0 (being off) to 10 (being full black) with various degrees of transparent in between.  I personally prefer the horizontal ones being on full black and the vertical ones being off. 

[tim]

a while ago we had a topic with PixelPileDriver examining the possibility of shading pixelart trough normal maps. Well there's a game called "Swapper" that does that but with stopmotion graphics, and it looks pretty darn good.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/how-the-swapper-created-horror-out-of-clay-and-found-objects

Thought some of you guys would like to know....I'll leave you guys to geek over the sweet scanlined Carnivac art now =)

Very interesting, thank you.
Seems like I won't be the first to have full dynamic lighting in 2D using normal maps.

[Carnivac]

sweet scanlined Carnivac art now =)

I never know if being sarcastic but thanks in case you ain't.  I just thinking the CPC type stuff only really appeals to myself and other fans of the nearly three decades old computer but hey it keeps me busy and not going crazy and I'm enjoying what I'm doing despite or perhaps because of the limitations.

Have switched from 8x16 tiles to 4x8 to save memory as I realised at that size there were a lot of duplicates in the smaller size (like when you round off a platform tiles corner variation) and the tilesheet has now cut down to a third and found some of the smaller pieces even work in other places I hadn't thought of before giving much more flexibility and possibilities with the tilesheet.  And now I've redone the wooden doors in a way that their tiles are able to be used for any size of door, the fences, wooden crates and the flooring of the building interiors too.  Windows have been enlarged (using tiles already in on the sheet) so I can fit sky tiles in them for the interiors to make it look like there's an outdoors scene through the windows.  One bad thing about the smaller tile size is they're even more fiddly to place down in Game Maker's room editor and the rock tiles are somewhat confusing on the tilesheet.  That thing really needs some copy/paste groups of tiles.  But at least they added a zoom function in recent versions so I don't have to squint so hard.

Interiors look something like this quick mock up http://carnivac.co.uk/temp/interiortest2.png but obviously the screen ain't big enough to show all of that.  Some interiors will be multi screen and even function that way to be the correct route through a stage (like if there's a wall you can't get by in outdoors and the building goes by that wall so you go in one door, through the building and out the other door to be on the other side of the wall.   That elevator looks a bit out of place as it's from the more sci-fi set later on but I haven't designed a wooden elevator yet.

[Conzeit]

lol, I was not sarcastic at all, love your stuff. I'm a scanlines geek too (dont play zsnes without them) I just didnt have anything to add to the discussion :p

[Chris2balls]

My brother mentioned an idea he's been toying with, which I'd like to share with you: would a website made solely for job offers revolving around pixel art/digital art be of any use or an improvement over the current system used in the Pixelation forums?

[Crow]

My brother mentioned an idea he's been toying with, which I'd like to share with you: would a website made solely for job offers revolving around pixel art/digital art be of any use or an improvement over the current system used in the Pixelation forums?

Planned as a separate feature already, actually, since threads for offers and portfolios are sort of.. meh-ish.