Thanks for the flowers, guy 'n gals! I'm glad you enjoy watching some of my
(random) stuff while you guys are working on your games, which are truly
awesome at times esp. looking at the lasted from ConvenientBox, Shwip, so
thrilling just by watching. :+
I just dug down and found your post about Quaternions and bookmarked it.
Bummer that you don't have the time to write more about the stuff going on in your mind. It definitely is filled with a lot of useful information.
Do a write up on that dithering technique some day willya?
I've a lot of information on old-school rendering techniques. At times I wish
I could write a book about it (have even started one a couple of years ago),
about retro graphics showing all the cool stuff incl. algorithms etc., since
many books (even Computer Graphics Principles and Practices, the Bible if you
will (only the old ones)) do miss some of the fine technical information about
rendering, shading techniques, and image processing used in old video games or
art creation. But who would kickstart such a book? Even if founded
successfully the return of any investment would converge to zero if you can't
sell thousands of copies. Given the audience, it's not very likely to sell
that many. Pricing the book high won't help either, it would/will be pirated
right away. And driving the kickstarter high is also not an option because it
becomes implausible since many people simply don't know how much work it is to
actually write a very good technical book no matter what you are telling. And
those who does aren't likely that many. I mean, what to offer as rewards for
the supporters than just saying "Thank you." or giving them the book straight?
So I've put the book aside and leave it until I'm in smooth water so to speak.
However, I haven't given up on all the techniques and stuff. That's what the
Retro Engine is for and is where I put all these cool little things into. One
thing am dying for is doing 3d shaded graphics out of a fixed color table (256
colors and less). However, instead of wasting the entries to give shades to
some predefined colors (as was done most often back in the days) I want to
compute specific shade(-table)s out of this fixed palette and use those for
shading and dithering etc.. This will produce some fine subtle wrong-coloring
effects in the shades of an object being lit. I want to use that in may game
Superstall.
I think there are many artistic advantages working out of a fixed color
palette plus their algorithms. Many of these techniques are still unexplored
in computer graphics and/or video games. They never took off due to the advent
of the graphics accelerators pushing their true colors and associated
algorithms into the limelight, which is good, mind you. However, said "fixed-
techniques" never had a change to be explored under today's computational
performance and storage metrics, nor were they ever applied to 3d just for the
simplest case. But with today's performance and storage capacity we can even
enhance upon these techniques way beyond what was possible back in the days.
I think the love for simplistic 3d retro graphics (incl. limited texturing and
coloring), see
Low poly love, are just the beginning.
One of the things that really plays in favor for such sort of graphics is the
ever increasing display estate. As more estate you have, as better the retro
effects can be made, since you can trade resolution for quantization levels.
