#retro look

[animeglitch]

[vertigoartgore]

2024's Action Comics Vol.1 #1067 cover by artist Eddy Barrows, inker Danny Miki & colorist Tomeu Morey.

[alkalinetrios]

rowing 🚣‍♂️🚣‍♀️

yashica 35-me, on kodak color plus 200

[tilbageidanmark]

Young Princess Diana playing tennis

[kpop-bbg]

[denim-bias]

[cronicasdeunafashionista]

[itscodebaby]

f l y i n g h i g h

[givetheanarchistthecig]

[eula93]

💜 Retro. Love. Pink. 🩷

[animeglitch]

[alkalinetrios]

olympus trip 35, on kodak gold 200

[gtg3000]

Oh boy, here I go ranting again.

So I went in to play Cultic finally, and while it's a great game with awesome atmosphere, it has done the cardinal sin of having my pet peeve in it and so I must rant.

The game front-loads the "they used to have less colours" shaders, and it kinda made me overly negative on it for the first minutes until I realised that a lot of textures are just pixel art and what *is* stock textures that were crumpled down mostly look fine.

So, what's my beef with these two options? Here's a screenshot of the game, without them:

And here's them turned on, with and without "dithering"

Note how, just how they are in the options menu, they are applied one after another - which makes dithering into little more than just a texture applied over top, you can still see the banding with perfect clarity. I get that GPU dithering is... Difficult, to say the least. Here's a forum post by Lucas Pope describing how he arrived at making dithering in Obra Dinn work. And that's just black-and-white dithering. You can do it by dithering the colour channels separately, but I digress. Dithering is a tool that's supposed to help you get *rid* of these banding artefacts - by mixing together pixels where you can't have an intermediate value. A shader will still have bands, true, but you can make them look significantly smoother while still having the same limited palette. Here's a kodak standard testing image of parrots.

Here it is, ran through a toy ditherer I have written, it's palette extracted and merged by distance, no dithering.

Here it is again, same toy ditherer, same palette, but with dithering enabled.

Looks quite a bit nicer, doesn't it? This kind of dithering lets you keep more image detail by trying to compensate for the error of down-sampling - in this case, literally picking nearest colour, checking what the error is, and then distributing it to the nearby pixels. This exact algorithm produces nice results, but is inherently linear so it can't be put into a shader. You can still make a shader that represents the intermediates with a different mix of two nearest shades - like this cool demo demonstrates. But you can't do it if you first strip the colours out and *then* dither it. So, what I want to rant about is - if you gonna go for a limited palette look with dynamic lighting, the part that does dithering should also be the part that does palette reduction.

[ldagence]

★彡𝓛𝓓ミ★

[denim-bias]