Official Off-Topic Thread

[Rosse]

Found an interesting article from the inventor of the "pixel":

Squares was the logical thing to do,” Kirsch says. “Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility … but we used squares. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.

He proposes a different form of "pixels", similar to what some do with C64 characters to create pictures.



http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/06/smoothing-square-pixels

[Helm]

Fascinating reading. It's interesting he thinks the pixel was a mistake. All I can say is: thank you for your mistake!

[Jakten]

What else could they have used? I can't imagine using circles because how would you fill in the empty spaces, though rectangles would work its essentially long pixels. Maybe hexagons? I thought about this before and I can't see how you could use anything else without having weird problems, at least on low resolutions (good luck drawing a L on a hexagon grid).

It's weird that he hates the square pixels so much but the program he made is pretty awesome and it's funny because the result reminds me a lot of some of your (Helm) and Ptoings pixel art. The way you drew the recent Nietzsche portrait looks pretty similar to this only more refined. I wish he released the program because I'd like to play with it. It would be interesting to see how it interprets some of the pixels I've done.

[ptoing]

I guess with clever masking and small enough fields of phosphor or LEDs or whatever you could make groups of 4 triangles arranged in a square like X, that way each square could have 4 different colours if needed and they would be sharp, but it could also be used in a pixel like way.

All in all I do not see the problem with pixels whatsoever, especially now that resolutions are so high that you pretty much do not even see them most of the time at 1x for anything else than pixel art.

I like my pixels.

[Jad]

I like my pixels.

Me too! I like you also. I like this forum dedicated to the pixels I like.

mmm circlejerk

[Tourist]

I goofed with this a bit.  It's difficult to compare using more dots vs trying to encode a shape parameter.  The image posted above has one image with 6x6 blocks of one color vs one image with 6x6 blocks containing 2 colors and a shape.  One simply has more data than the other.

The idea of trading off color data for shape data is interesting.  It's what pixel artists already do to deal with jaggies (AA and clean lines).  Something like this would store that information directly.  Or maybe just process source data with an eye towards removing the jags. 

Here is something trying to go the other way.  It's a sprite from Ultima IV.  The image on the right looks worse, but it also uses less data, so it's hard to compare properly.  With 12 extra bits of info available, there could be a third color in each large block, or quite a few more shapes.



Tourist

[Rydin]

I want to see what a really high resolution image (at least wallpaper size or bigger) would look like with these dynamically shaped pixels.

[Tourist]

@Rydin: I think it would look something like the face in the image above. 

I worked on the sprite a little bit more, chopping down the color count, generating a second image that was offset from the first, and then combining them (which bumps the color count back up).  The result is not that good.  I think I'm done with this. 



Tourist

[Mathias]

I hate it

[Conzeit]

mmm squarejerk

fixeded


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