A question about 'Selout'

[Helm]

Sure it'll be a worthy cause I think! Just to aid equilibrium.

[blumunkee]

Heh.

I don't think the Capcom artists were completely high. I think they understood that their sprites were going to be displayed on big blurry arcade CRT displays, and so they took some liberties with their style. Interestingly, about half the cast in this game is drawn with hardcore broken black outlines, the rest tends to keep it more conservative with the line breakage. I wonder if there wasn't some dissenting opinions on style amongst the artists.



But still, there are better ways to go about things.

[HughSpectrum]

I think the "blurry arcade CRT monitors" part is an important thing to consider.  Squint your eyes to make the sprite blur up and the selout effect is far less noticeable and gives an illusion of sharpness.  It's probably why selout doesn't work too well when we study it or use it because we have nice clean monitors to work with with 1:1 pixel aspect ratio and little blurring of said pixels.

[ptoing]

Arcade monitors are way more blurry than PC monitors, I give you that. But they are still pretty sharp all things considered. Last time I was in an arcade and checked I could def see the selout on stuff like the capcom games. Stuff like Metal Slug has none of this Selout business and imo looks much nicer on arcade crts as well.

Dunno, might be taste, but you can still see the selout in the arcade, maybe a bit less, maybe hardly at all given backgrounds and how subtle it is.

But those top 3 sprites blumunkee posted there, you would would have to have a fucking goddamn blurry screen, so blurry you could not make out the face on the guy before you would not see the selout (unless they are on ridiculously dark backgrounds of course.)

[Helm]

This is Gaussian blur 2.0 pixels, the least I could get it to before the selout wasn't noticable anymore. I think it's pretty clear that if one depended on this level of blur on their monitor before completely senseless choices like that selout worked, then why even bother to put any detail anywhere on the sprite, it's just lost.

[huZba]

Don't most of those arcade screens have heavy scanlines visible?

[ptoing]

Scanlines do not work like that tho you see. On lowres stuff usually only half the scanlines are used, so you get one with no pixels every other line basically, but shit bleeds enough due to the nature of light and all that it is not too harsh. But it's not like every other pixels goes darker or something.

[Ai]

Don't most of those arcade screens have heavy scanlines visible?

CRT TV-style scanlines. Which means there's plenty of bleed, as ptoing says. MAME has a reasonable emulation of the effect.

ptoing: 'one no pixels' meaning what? (blank scanlines?)

I'm feeling a bit confused now.

[ptoing]

"one with no pixels" I wanted to type, missed the with. But yes, blank scanline.

Pretty much all old arcade games (and old computers) have very low resolution, they do not need all the available scanlines the monitors can display. They just diplay on odd scanlines normally. (might be even ones, not that it makes a difference.) So this means that every other scanline does not hold ANY information at all.

Here is an example photo I just took from my C64 RGB monitor (which is the same technology as many Arcade RGB monitors basically)



You can see that every other line is not illuminated at all, this is not due to the monitor not being able to do so, but due to the C64 not displaying anything there. There is no scanline flicker between odd and even scanlines either. It's just stable even scanlines. And this is the case in pretty much all older arcade games as well, pretty sure about this. I played a fair share of games in the arcade the last few years when I was in London, and they all had stable scanlines, which indicates this phenomenon.

[Ai]

"one with no pixels" I wanted to type, missed the with. But yes, blank scanline.

Pretty much all old arcade games (and old computers) have very low resolution, they do not need all the available scanlines the monitors can display. They just diplay on odd scanlines normally. (might be even ones, not that it makes a difference.) So this means that every other scanline does not hold ANY information at all.

Here is an example photo I just took from my C64 RGB monitor (which is the same technology as many Arcade RGB monitors basically)



You can see that every other line is not illuminated at all, this is not due to the monitor not being able to do so, but due to the C64 not displaying anything there. There is no scanline flicker between odd and even scanlines either. It's just stable even scanlines. And this is the case in pretty much all older arcade games as well, pretty sure about this. I played a fair share of games in the arcade the last few years when I was in London, and they all had stable scanlines, which indicates this phenomenon.

rightright.. so this means the pixels look somewhat between square and rectangular, despite the displayed part being quite rectangular -- so really, rather than every other scanline of the original sprite being darkened, it's more like every other half-scanline of the original sprite is darkened and blended.