_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Surface-Stable Fractal Dither on Playdate
cubefox wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering - 182 points by bj-rn 29 days ago:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42808889
montag wrote 5 hours 23 min ago:
This is a cool novel technique for sure, but for some reason Iâm just
not aesthetically in love with it. The fact that the pattern is surface
aligned justâ¦doesnât add anything over dithering in screen space.
And I really loved the dithering in Return of Obra Dinn. Is it just
me?
chpatrick wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
I agree with you, it's technically very cool but Obra Dinn just looks
better.
turnsout wrote 1 hour 12 min ago:
Thought the same thing when the original Surface-Stable dither link
made the rounds. There's just something off about 1-bit dither with
perspective applied, but constantly shifting scale on different
parts of the model.
Super interesting thought experiment (and this version is an
impressive exercise in optimization), but the aesthetic of Obra
Dinn is in another league.
stuaxo wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
This was a great read. I'd like to see Elite (or just a scene from it)
rendered with this, I reckon that would be pretty interesting on the
play date.
Using the handle to rotate your ship on the way into dock would be very
cool.
WithinReason wrote 10 hours 18 min ago:
This looks bad since the resolution of the dither pattern is too low.
Maybe mipmapping it would help?
cubefox wrote 4 hours 53 min ago:
The dither pattern is not really aligned with the screen pixels. So
you can't have just one black or white dot per pixel. The alignment
is only approximate, so you have dots that are much larger than
pixels.
diffuse_l wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
You can estimate mip levels per triangle and subdivde them based on
the wanted mip level across z lines, instead of doing the calculation
per pixel. It's a bit wonky, but can work, at least for the bigger
triangles.
I've linked some code that does something along those lines for
mipmapping [1]
URI [1]: https://github.com/Gil-AdB/REVIVAL/blob/0da65f18a34b74575a89...
WithinReason wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
yeah I was wondering if you could use blue noise mipmaps, trilinear
sample from it, then round to 0 or 1. With the right mipbias it
feels like it should look OK.
diffuse_l wrote 6 hours 19 min ago:
Trilinear might be possible, but then you'll still need per pixel
derivatives, no?
bjconlan wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
Yeah I agree. The dithering effects in Everybody wants to crank the
world[0] are much more visually satisfying but as you pointed out
perhaps it's the levels of the textures that make it feel... Well
like textures.
[0]
URI [1]: https://aras-p.github.io/demo-pd-cranktheworld/
qingcharles wrote 9 hours 48 min ago:
This definitely seems like the wrong platform to experiment with this
technique. It's a lot of work to have such a poor result when there
are other solutions which would produce much nicer results with less
effort.
Plus it is doing a wild amount of per-pixel computation for this.
I don't wanna knock the author too bad, though. He put the hours in
and he documented every step in serious detail, so mad respect for
that.
madeofpalk wrote 59 min ago:
I'm sure doing it on the Playdate was the point.
gyomu wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
> This definitely seems like the wrong platform to experiment with
this technique
As an owner of a playdate, itâs kind of the wrong platform forâ¦
everything. So in that sense itâs right at home.
You have to respect the vision, execution, and the commitment to
the product - the hardware looks great and feels great.
The games are all kinda gimmicky and obviously limited by the
platform though. Falls squarely into the âI want to love this
thing so bad, but I just canâtâ camp.
mobiledev2014 wrote 2 hours 38 min ago:
Itâs definitely not for everyone but I feel like, of the people
who were intrigued enough to buy one, youâre probably in the
minority. I would have found it worth it just with the first
season of games. It has exceeded my wildest expectations
brianpan wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
His Game Boy Advance was probably out of batteries. Sometimes you
gotta make do.
sneak wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
TIL playdate has no GPU. i had assumed part of its appeal was being
able to do intense modern graphics processing on an otherwise-retro
display.
ant6n wrote 8 hours 54 min ago:
Well it has a 168MHz arm, so assuming 20fps, you got 80 instructions
to work with per pixel drawing - thatâs a bit tight, but not overly
so. In the 90s, games (like Quake) worked with much less.
But this assumes that wait states of the memory or a funky way to
access graphics donât screw you over. I did a quick search, and
couldnât find detailed hardware specs (like pano docs for game boy,
or gbatek for gba / Nintendo das).
yzydserd wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
It has a Cortex M7 180 MHz MCU. No real SIMD. Reasonable memory at
16MB but it is slow to r/w at about 30MB/s. DTCM 30x faster but you
donât get much to address, e.g. the stack is just 10KB.
Framebuffer 12KB. System reserves the rest of the 64KB TCM.
Thereâs just a 4KB cache. So the limiting factor is often memory
access not cpu. The 400 x 240 1 bit Sharp Memory LCD has to be
carefully addressed in horizontal strips of 32 bit words with weird
endianness if you want high performance. Itâs very possible to
work at the maximum 50fps per full frame and do per pixel work and
prep for blit in sub 15 percent of CPU. Almost all devs aim for and
achieve 30fps. You can have effective 200fps if you like since not
all rows need to be refreshed per frame. An interesting situation
is the device had an earlier Rev A before the Rev B that 90% of
users have, and with Rev A up to 30-50% slower you have to develop
for the base device specs if you want to be inclusive. It makes you
wonder about Rev C decisions. All that said, most games are written
in Lua which runs 50x slower than compiled C on the device, yet
many very fun games have been released. You can compile ARM
intrinsics/asm but itâs a rare situation if you can beat the
compiler. Working within all these constraints is part of the charm
of developing for it. It necessitates a discipline of writing tight
benchmarked code, even inspecting compiled instructions, if you
want to push it.
karlgkk wrote 9 hours 26 min ago:
Its appeal is that you have a target to build simple games against.
Itâs limiting, but on purpose.
DIR <- back to front page