This is an interesting application of human thought, certainly, and aesthetically necessary for a lot of old games run on new emulators.
However, I often find art composed of unnecessarily-large pixels appealing: see, for instance, the favicon of bravemule.com, or the sprites from Spelunky.
Totally. The pixels were carefully composed that way on purpose. Don't mess with them.
I've always been a "pixel art" purist. It even bugs me when games try to use pixel art but get it subtly wrong. For instance, a game might use sprites that are scaled up at different scales at the same time and/or rotated in high resolution. This just ruins it for me.
Yes! They got it right! Amazing. Thanks for this, I can use it as an example next time I am discussing with game developers that don't understand what I am talking about.
The problem is that, oftentimes, you have to mess quite a bit with the pixels to make them look the way the pixels looked on the original hardware: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1755886
I've loosened up on my pixel-tolerance. Remember that a lot of old hardware will support multiple resolutions and sprite scales simultaneously. So while sticking to a single scale for all manipulation has a certain aesthetic usage, it isn't the one true way. It's just "whatever the platform can do."
I often find that when I'm playing an old game in an emulator that supports these filters I don't use them...even if they look stunning with the filters on, they games look "wrong" somehow (perhaps they don't fit my grainy memory of them so they don't ping the nostalgia button the same way). Inevitably I feel like I'm playing a vector art/flash remake.
Pixel art is also my favorite art style. However I worry if it is good for use in casual games made for an audience which might have not been exposed to retro gaming? Or is it a part of our culture that everyone now understands?
I'm somewhat shocked to discover that other scaling algorithms exist. I always assumed that there were only nearest neighbor + a set of scaling algorithms that would introduce blur to images other than photography.
I've tried[1] to use it to weasel-out from creating improved graphics for iPhone 4 display, but unfortunately it doesn't work well for graphics with anti-aliasing.
When I was in high school I tried to write a star control clone and I had a devil of a time with rotating the ships.
The first method I used would write the rotated pixel array back to the array I hand coded with the rgb values for the ship. Error quickly crept in, and while you were rotating, the ship would gradually shrink to a single pixel. After that, I used 2 arrays and it looked ok and nobody complained, but I was never truly satisfied with the result. I'm glad to know I wasn't the only one bothered by poor quality pixel rotations.
Ok, the infinite zoom is bullocks, but the keyboard thing might not be.
Mine does not beep though, but it makes click-a-di-clack with every keystroke, like in many movies (and keyboards back in the 80's).
It also has tactile feedback and n-rollover and was expensive as hell, but then again, I'm the kind of nut-case who learned Dvorak keyboard layout because I'm so damn lazy.
Is MovieOS like OSX? Does it come on proprietary hardware that includes a project in place of a screen, to beam the contents of the screen onto your face? Or do I have to rig up my own monitor/projector setup?
However, I often find art composed of unnecessarily-large pixels appealing: see, for instance, the favicon of bravemule.com, or the sprites from Spelunky.