4 ms·

If you can't avoid the "pixel" part and go straight to the "art" my eyes would appreciate it. If I want nostalgia I will play games that look pixelated for tech

If you can't avoid the "pixel" part and go straight to the "art" my eyes would appreciate it. If I want nostalgia I will play games that look pixelated for technical limitations now in the past, not for willingly decaying graphics pretending it has some artistic value. Even after just using a little bit of median filter it looks better: http://i.imgur.com/P4Dr9Kr.jpg http://i.imgur.com/P4Dr9Kr.jpg

Arkeus 14y ago
Complete disagree with you here. Like any form of art, it's completely subjective. I much prefer the original to the filtered version. I can totally understand people not liking pixel art, but saying it has no artistic value seems ridiculous.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
  That's what they are pretending; not that it has none. And this is for games where immersion is one of the priorities; those micro-squares just make think that my monitor may be using some low resolution settings and doesn't help a little bit to the credibility.
  - DoubleCluster 14y ago
    Honest question: how old are you?
    - jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
      24 but that's not a honest question. I have played and completed hundreds of old adventure games (almost all of them look pixelated) including Monkey Island 1, 2, 3 and 4 in their original graphics using a DOS emulator; the first two are the more pixelated and are far better than any other of the following but there is a reason why they decades later recreated the first one using less pixelated graphics. Those were the best for the engaging characters, puzzles and comic situations and it has little to do with the low resolution they have.
      - DoubleCluster 14y ago
        Alright, I was just wondering if you had experienced the origin of pixel art.
      - vidarh 14y ago
        It still means you grew up when pixel art was well past it's heyday. Yes, I'm sure you've seen lots of it, but when you give examples like Monkey Island as an example of "old adventure games" (which as a genre in itself is a bad place to look at to learn about pixel art), to me that explains why you do not appreciate it. Monkey Island is cartoon-art constrained by low resolution, but with weak enough constraints that the art did not have to be tailored to the medium all that much any more. We saw that transition begin with the advent of the 16-bit machines, where though there are some outstanding examples of pixel art, is also a lot "just plain art" that just happens to be pixelated - the visual quality had gotten to a stage where a lot of art was no longer specifically made to exploit the constraints of the resolution and colour constraints. And this is what pixel art is about, like chip tunes and 1K demos and what-not: Making art to constraints. A lot of art is made to artificial constraints, some more stringent than others. Bach spent a huge amount of time and effort composing within the heavily stylized and specific constraints of the fugue, for example. Not because he had to, but because he wanted to: The constraints guides you towards certain types of solutions that you generally would not pick otherwise. A lot of famous painters have done many of their most famous works within the confines of specific constraints (some defined by themselves, some by others) of style and form. Pixel art is a form of art very distinct from "just" low resolution bitmap graphics. It is generally easy to pick out vs. images that originated without the typical resolution and colour space constraints of the medium, and has been scaled down etc . Of course there is a blurry line in art made in low resolution, but straddling the line towards "just art" by not making use of the older techniques. For many types of pixel art you can even identify the platform it originated on by visual cues that go beyond basic technical constraints like colour choices, constraints on colour changes and into indirect constraints such as specific shading techniques and archetypes that occur in the images because they work well within those constraints.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - JumpCrisscross 14y ago
      I'm not old enough to have played these games when they were released. Nor am I likely to have played them if I were old enough. But I do understand that realism isn't necessarily the aim of art and find pixel art beautiful independent of its nostalgia. Perhaps age isn't the estimator you're looking for?
  - pekk 14y ago
    What kind of immersion is there in Street Fighter 2?
  - gbog 14y ago
    Resolution and all other superficial realism measures do not add anything to the immersion capacity of movies or games. Just take any black and white Hitchcock, and tell me you are not immersed in the story. But what can be further to realism than black and white?
- grakk99 14y ago
  >Like any form of art, it's completely subjective. My sides.
ANTSANTS 14y ago
I emphatically disagree, you just ruined Derek's pixel art. Are you the kind of person that plays emulated games with 2xSai/HQ2X filters? Here's some way more pixelated, color-limited, and dithered artwork. Would you blur or median filter it? Would you paint over it, vectorize it, turn the dithering into generic gradients? http://i.imgur.com/RSZvo.png http://i.imgur.com/RSZvo.png http://i.imgur.com/DVjGn.png http://i.imgur.com/DVjGn.png http://i.imgur.com/18YHG.gif http://i.imgur.com/18YHG.gif http://i.imgur.com/e9ZGH.png http://i.imgur.com/e9ZGH.png http://i.imgur.com/tj8fM.png http://i.imgur.com/tj8fM.png
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
  No, I would just fire the artist and hire someone who is not found on making thinks that look like GIFs, like: http://72dpi.cn/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Ryohei-Hase-599x600.jpg http://72dpi.cn/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Ryohei-Hase-599x6...
  - pekk 14y ago
    That is fine but it's a completely different genre of work (probably done on paper). It is nonsense to (say) criticize an ANSI artist because his work does not look like it was airbrushed in Photoshop, it's just a different type and style of work.
- mistercow 14y ago
  >Are you the kind of person that plays emulated games with 2xSai/HQ2X filters? I play emulated games with those filters, and the reason is simple: it makes them look more how I remember them when I played them as a kid. After all, old CRT TVs caused the sprites to get smoothed back in the day, so it's not like perfectly blocky pixels are really the "original" form. Beyond that, playing SNES games unsmoothed makes my eyes water, and HQ*X looks better than other smoothing algorithms. In any case, judging and mocking people for how they like to enjoy their games is pretty shitty. But I also appreciate pixel art that is designed for modern displays, and I agree that the medianed version of the Lucha Lawyer looks horrendous.
  - 14y ago
derefr 14y ago
Pixel art isn't just for games, and doesn't necessarily involve nearest-neighbor resampling up to ridiculous multipliers. Sometimes it's just the only way to make something identifiable at 16x16: https://raw.github.com/yusukekamiyamane/fugue-icons/master/all-shadowless.png https://raw.github.com/yusukekamiyamane/fugue-icons/master/a...
_quasimodo 14y ago
Imposing limits (low resolution, few colors) on your work can amplify your creativity.
- sgdesign 14y ago
  That's a good point, and in any case pixel art is not that far from pointillism or other mosaic-based artforms.
lifeformed 14y ago
Your filtered version is objectively bad. It's the worst of both worlds: a blurry mess with jagged edges. The original version has style; you've traded that for some misguided belief that higher-res or more-realistic is inherently better.
coldtea 14y ago
>If you can't avoid the "pixel" part and go straight to the "art" my eyes would appreciate it. If I want nostalgia I will play games that look pixelated for technical limitations now in the past, not for willingly decaying graphics pretending it has some artistic value. YOU will do that "if you want nostalgia". I, and many others, will happily play a modern pixel art based game. And it's not even about the nostalgia. It's a stylistic choice all by itself, just as black and white photography is. Today's pixel art is far more detailed and clean looking that any old low-res game -- to the point that it's not about mimicking low-res 80's games anymore at all. >Even after just using a little bit of median filter it looks better: http://i.imgur.com/P4Dr9Kr.jpg* http://i.imgur.com/P4Dr9Kr.jpg* You just turned it into a mediocre line drawing.
- networked 14y ago
  I think this does a good job at explaining what pixel art is and isn't: http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299&PID=139318#139318 http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299&#3...
roryokane 14y ago
This is irrelevant to your main point, but if you’re going to make the picture look more realistic with a filter, the HQX scaling filter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx) works a lot better on pixel art. Here’s the original picture scaled down and then scaled up again with HQ2x: http://i.imgur.com/w9RIK1p.png http://i.imgur.com/w9RIK1p.png. I think that looks a lot better than your median-filtered version, though I’m not sure whether I like it more than the original.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
  Interesting.

Arkeus 14y ago

Complete disagree with you here. Like any form of art, it's completely subjective. I much prefer the original to the filtered version. I can totally understand people not liking pixel art, but saying it has no artistic value seems ridiculous.

jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
That's what they are pretending; not that it has none. And this is for games where immersion is one of the priorities; those micro-squares just make think that my monitor may be using some low resolution settings and doesn't help a little bit to the credibility.
- DoubleCluster 14y ago
  Honest question: how old are you?
  - jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
    24 but that's not a honest question. I have played and completed hundreds of old adventure games (almost all of them look pixelated) including Monkey Island 1, 2, 3 and 4 in their original graphics using a DOS emulator; the first two are the more pixelated and are far better than any other of the following but there is a reason why they decades later recreated the first one using less pixelated graphics. Those were the best for the engaging characters, puzzles and comic situations and it has little to do with the low resolution they have.
    - DoubleCluster 14y ago
      Alright, I was just wondering if you had experienced the origin of pixel art.
    - vidarh 14y ago
      It still means you grew up when pixel art was well past it's heyday. Yes, I'm sure you've seen lots of it, but when you give examples like Monkey Island as an example of "old adventure games" (which as a genre in itself is a bad place to look at to learn about pixel art), to me that explains why you do not appreciate it. Monkey Island is cartoon-art constrained by low resolution, but with weak enough constraints that the art did not have to be tailored to the medium all that much any more. We saw that transition begin with the advent of the 16-bit machines, where though there are some outstanding examples of pixel art, is also a lot "just plain art" that just happens to be pixelated - the visual quality had gotten to a stage where a lot of art was no longer specifically made to exploit the constraints of the resolution and colour constraints. And this is what pixel art is about, like chip tunes and 1K demos and what-not: Making art to constraints. A lot of art is made to artificial constraints, some more stringent than others. Bach spent a huge amount of time and effort composing within the heavily stylized and specific constraints of the fugue, for example. Not because he had to, but because he wanted to: The constraints guides you towards certain types of solutions that you generally would not pick otherwise. A lot of famous painters have done many of their most famous works within the confines of specific constraints (some defined by themselves, some by others) of style and form. Pixel art is a form of art very distinct from "just" low resolution bitmap graphics. It is generally easy to pick out vs. images that originated without the typical resolution and colour space constraints of the medium, and has been scaled down etc . Of course there is a blurry line in art made in low resolution, but straddling the line towards "just art" by not making use of the older techniques. For many types of pixel art you can even identify the platform it originated on by visual cues that go beyond basic technical constraints like colour choices, constraints on colour changes and into indirect constraints such as specific shading techniques and archetypes that occur in the images because they work well within those constraints.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - JumpCrisscross 14y ago
    I'm not old enough to have played these games when they were released. Nor am I likely to have played them if I were old enough. But I do understand that realism isn't necessarily the aim of art and find pixel art beautiful independent of its nostalgia. Perhaps age isn't the estimator you're looking for?
- pekk 14y ago
  What kind of immersion is there in Street Fighter 2?
- gbog 14y ago
  Resolution and all other superficial realism measures do not add anything to the immersion capacity of movies or games. Just take any black and white Hitchcock, and tell me you are not immersed in the story. But what can be further to realism than black and white?
grakk99 14y ago
>Like any form of art, it's completely subjective. My sides.

ANTSANTS 14y ago

I emphatically disagree, you just ruined Derek's pixel art. Are you the kind of person that plays emulated games with 2xSai/HQ2X filters? Here's some way more pixelated, color-limited, and dithered artwork. Would you blur or median filter it? Would you paint over it, vectorize it, turn the dithering into generic gradients? http://i.imgur.com/RSZvo.png http://i.imgur.com/RSZvo.png http://i.imgur.com/DVjGn.png http://i.imgur.com/DVjGn.png http://i.imgur.com/18YHG.gif http://i.imgur.com/18YHG.gif http://i.imgur.com/e9ZGH.png http://i.imgur.com/e9ZGH.png http://i.imgur.com/tj8fM.png http://i.imgur.com/tj8fM.png

jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
No, I would just fire the artist and hire someone who is not found on making thinks that look like GIFs, like: http://72dpi.cn/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Ryohei-Hase-599x600.jpg http://72dpi.cn/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Ryohei-Hase-599x6...
- pekk 14y ago
  That is fine but it's a completely different genre of work (probably done on paper). It is nonsense to (say) criticize an ANSI artist because his work does not look like it was airbrushed in Photoshop, it's just a different type and style of work.
mistercow 14y ago
>Are you the kind of person that plays emulated games with 2xSai/HQ2X filters? I play emulated games with those filters, and the reason is simple: it makes them look more how I remember them when I played them as a kid. After all, old CRT TVs caused the sprites to get smoothed back in the day, so it's not like perfectly blocky pixels are really the "original" form. Beyond that, playing SNES games unsmoothed makes my eyes water, and HQ*X looks better than other smoothing algorithms. In any case, judging and mocking people for how they like to enjoy their games is pretty shitty. But I also appreciate pixel art that is designed for modern displays, and I agree that the medianed version of the Lucha Lawyer looks horrendous.
- 14y ago

derefr 14y ago

Pixel art isn't just for games, and doesn't necessarily involve nearest-neighbor resampling up to ridiculous multipliers. Sometimes it's just the only way to make something identifiable at 16x16: https://raw.github.com/yusukekamiyamane/fugue-icons/master/all-shadowless.png https://raw.github.com/yusukekamiyamane/fugue-icons/master/a...

_quasimodo 14y ago

Imposing limits (low resolution, few colors) on your work can amplify your creativity.

sgdesign 14y ago
That's a good point, and in any case pixel art is not that far from pointillism or other mosaic-based artforms.

lifeformed 14y ago

Your filtered version is objectively bad. It's the worst of both worlds: a blurry mess with jagged edges. The original version has style; you've traded that for some misguided belief that higher-res or more-realistic is inherently better.

coldtea 14y ago

>If you can't avoid the "pixel" part and go straight to the "art" my eyes would appreciate it. If I want nostalgia I will play games that look pixelated for technical limitations now in the past, not for willingly decaying graphics pretending it has some artistic value. YOU will do that "if you want nostalgia". I, and many others, will happily play a modern pixel art based game. And it's not even about the nostalgia. It's a stylistic choice all by itself, just as black and white photography is. Today's pixel art is far more detailed and clean looking that any old low-res game -- to the point that it's not about mimicking low-res 80's games anymore at all. >Even after just using a little bit of median filter it looks better: http://i.imgur.com/P4Dr9Kr.jpg* http://i.imgur.com/P4Dr9Kr.jpg* You just turned it into a mediocre line drawing.

networked 14y ago
I think this does a good job at explaining what pixel art is and isn't: http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299&PID=139318#139318 http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299&#3...

roryokane 14y ago

This is irrelevant to your main point, but if you’re going to make the picture look more realistic with a filter, the HQX scaling filter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx) works a lot better on pixel art. Here’s the original picture scaled down and then scaled up again with HQ2x: http://i.imgur.com/w9RIK1p.png http://i.imgur.com/w9RIK1p.png. I think that looks a lot better than your median-filtered version, though I’m not sure whether I like it more than the original.

jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
Interesting.