No CRT filters in a pixel art game... WTF

[Martin]

Why devs lately don't include proper filters in pixel art games? I guess Reshade it is... Raw pixels look terrible on a TV

[@#$%&]

dirtygregory eredeti hozzászólása:

I asked for a refund,
we shouldn't have to use a third party program like Reshade for a 22€ game.

Well, I guess you showed them. I'm sure they are gonna be hurt by losing your little $25 dollars, compared to the thousands of copies this game sales. SMH

[Tanooki]

Looks fine how it is, not everything needs to be ruined with CRT blur where it's like you put a fine paste spread of vaseline on your screen. Sheesh, just enjoy the game.

[Zeikar]

Axelhander eredeti hozzászólása:

This reminds me of audiophiles who swear on their lives that their overpriced Monster cables sound better than cables that are much cheaper.

I seriously hope that if the devs do address this "concern," it's just minutes of straight up laughter.

I don't think a person's visual preference at all equates to the cabling someone uses on a sound setup. Nor should a visual preference be mocked. That's like telling people they can't use a different video resolution and they are nuts for it not being 1080p or 4K standards.

[MAME-FAN]

It looks really bad close to my 49" 1080p screen, which is how I play on my arcade cabinet. The people that think it looks fine must be farther away.

[Martin]

I'm playing the game and it looks terrible on a big screen. There's no way around it. pixels look HUGE. When I stream it to my phone with an OLED screen it looks much better. The same thing happens with other pixel art games without filtering options like Cosmic Star Heroine and Phantom Breaker Battle Grounds.

Pixel Art IQ 101...

Fixing it with Reshade is fine and all but this was quite a big profile release for a retro game. Should have been released with those options available from day one. Smaller games from the same genre like Fight N Rage have them. Its not like retro pixel art games are a new thing in 2022. Quite the oversight. Hopefully filters are added down the line.

[Coffee]

Connect your computer/Steam Deck to a CRT screen... BE A MAN!

[JJ]

game looks fine as is, a set of CRT filters options would make for a cool update though. always a nice option to have

[Knightingale]

Axelhander eredeti hozzászólása:

I like that old SNL sketch where whenever Elisabeth Taylor appeared she had absurd amounts of screen softening to hide her age.

Don't ask how I know, but you can recreate that effect by putting petroleum jelly in your eye.
Pixels blurred.
Problem solved.

[Froh]

Axelhander eredeti hozzászólása:

This is called hearsay. You have no evidence, at all, that the red pixel in Dracula's eye was designed for CRT bleed.

Again, this is the third time that I'm saying this (in 3 posts), it's not design FOR CRT bleed, it is designed WITH CRT screens, as thoses were the tools at the time. So the evidence is 4K didn't exist when it was designed. They were working on thoses screens. So they did not work the pixels saying "Yeah, let's use that perfect CRT bleed", they just worked on the screen and did have the render on thoses screens (hence the more interesting shadows, etc). There are numerous others examples ( https://i.redd.it/gc0vsn8zqky11.jpg ).

So yeah, ALL pixels games should probably not "CRT filter" its pixels, as the newest ones, are worked with 4k screens and therefore, are the render that the artistic direction wanted.
(but again everyone is free to do what they want with any filter they want)

[Radical Rat]

Reshade is the way to go. New build has something like CRT Pixie - it looks really decent with small tweaks

[bickman14]

Kenosha Kid eredeti hozzászólása:

First off, 8-bit and 16-bit games back in the 80's and 90's were certainly made with CRT's in mind. There are a lot of fake transparency effects done on the Genesis and Sega Saturn that only look good on a CRT/CRT filter, and the Genesis used the natural CRT blurring of pixels to create the illusion of more colors than was possible on the Genesis. There is no argument to be had on that front.

Second, I found out that if you leave the pixel height and width at the default 320x240 using the ReShade CRT filters, the scanlines don't exactly match up with the pixels. Instead, change the CRT res to 480x270 for perfect scanlines.

just messed with it onReShade and I think it looks perfect at 496 x 279 on this game.
I'm using GaussianBlur:
Radius 1
Blur Offset 0.715
Blur Strenght: 0.597

CRTLottes2:
Enable Tonemapping
Shadow Mask
Scanlines 0.700
Horizontal Blur -2.500
Shadow Mask Intensity 0.600
Res: 496 x 279

The in game res is set to exclusive fullscreen 1080p.

Here's some comparison with the default sharp pixels from the game versus my ReShade setup:

https://i.imgur.com/qnOFWh7.png

https://i.imgur.com/aaZvy6q.png

The pixel art is really amazing but the filter makes it look way better IMO!

[atomic.flip]

Axelhander eredeti hozzászólása:

1.21 GigaWattson eredeti hozzászólása:

The ones that don't fully understand or care about scanline filters on pixelated games, tend to be young folks who didn't grow up in the 80's or 90's, using tube television sets.
So to them, unfiltered pixelated game art "is beautiful" as is, which is so bizarre to me.
People embracing it as if "tHaT's HoW iT iS sUpPoSeD tOo lOoK!".

In fact, 8-bit and 16-bit (as well as 32-bit) games were designed around CRT technology. Some of the more graphically experienced developers would do specific pixel color tricks that they knew would translate differently when the game was ran on standard tube televisions, creating an illusion of smoothness or realism or even some transparency effects, etc.

Yeah, this is noise. I was born in '79. My first game was Kangaroo on Atari 2600. I live and breathed CRT televisions well into the Playstation 2 era. And the only thing on my mind when I upgraded video quality, first from RF to Composite, then to Component and HDMI, was how much better the games I grew up with finally looked.

This "buh buh it's how the devs am are ALWAYS INTENDED" is BS, made up by elitists pushing nonsense because they want to feel smug over looking at terrible graphics.

Regardless, I hope the people in this thread who were looking to make the game look like trash got what they wanted. One of the beauties of 2022 is that, thankfully, I have to neither share an arcade monitor nor smell such folks.

Oh man... born in 78 here and you missed the big one that only some of us got to play with... S-VIDEO lol Remember that mini DIN port that had the exact same layout as a PS2 keyboard cable port/plug. lol 500 whole scan lies baby!!!

Ah yes the days just before component video... playing on a 27 or 32" Sony trinitron pseudo flat CRT,,, memories....

[Telmo]

I used Reshade with the CRT filter it has by default, and used a high resolution, so I have smaller scanlines that do not lower the game's resolution (similar to the look of a Dreamcast with a VGA Box, remember those?). Looks way better that way.

[Marmo]

@#$%& eredeti hozzászólása:

dirtygregory eredeti hozzászólása:

I asked for a refund,
we shouldn't have to use a third party program like Reshade for a 22€ game.

Well, I guess you showed them. I'm sure they are gonna be hurt by losing your little $25 dollars, compared to the thousands of copies this game sales. SMH

and this is the kind of mindset that usually gets you fired from a game development company lol. Sales are of the utmost importance for indie devs and they take refunds very seriously.

If the publisher department catches someone from the development team belittling refunds like that on twitter, that guy is fired within the next few days. Seen it happen numerous times. So i just hope you're not planing on joining the game development business with that mindset. You would've failed on the first try ;)

[Zeikar]

Slow clap