[HN Gopher] Living Worlds: 8 Bit art animated with palette cycli...
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Living Worlds: 8 Bit art animated with palette cycling (2012)
Author : ant6n
Score : 92 points
Date : 2022-05-16 19:54 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.effectgames.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.effectgames.com)
| Pxtl wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| 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.
| syntheweave wrote:
| 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.
| serf wrote:
| >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.
| devindotcom wrote:
| 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.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Fascinating talk from the artist who made the original art about
| how it was done: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| 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
| waynecochran wrote:
| 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.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| 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
| chillingeffect wrote:
| 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!
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| 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.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I would love a way to turn an image into something like this, or
| just quality pixel art in general.
| FargaColora wrote:
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| 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
| aquova wrote:
| 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.
| Pxtl wrote:
| 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.
| spicybright wrote:
| 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 :)
| Cockbrand wrote:
| 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!
| daenz wrote:
| Don't forget to click "Options" and use the "Time of Day" slider.
| It adds even more atmosphere to these animations.
| thom wrote:
| 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.
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