Pixel integrity?

[Treadlight]

I've been hearing about this game for a bit and whenever a game markets itself as using pixel art I get very wary, because often you get stuff like Magicite where the very concept of pixels seems not to exist to begin with. I watched one of the trailers and it actually looks like this game maintains it! That really excites me, but I want to be absolutely sure before I think about supporting it.

From the trailer I saw pretty clearly that rotations don't break integrity, but I can't quite tell if the physics are locked to the pixel grid or not. Additionally, I don't know if stretching causes any issues, or even if it's used at all.
My last question is if the game uses post-processing to take 2D or 3D models and applies a filter over them, or actually uses proper sprites all the way down through its engine. This last part doesn't matter as much, although it would mean that spritework may not actually be used at all.

[Xerberus86]

one of the devs already applied to that, it is actually 3D models which are pixelated. the game can be played in window mode and stretched out, it will scale to the window size and increases the overall size of the visuals without stretching them out to become blurry or ugly.

[Darkness]

Check this out, it shows how it's done:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=59381.msg1312021#msg1312021

[Treadlight]

Originally posted by Darkness:

Check this out, it shows how it's done:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=59381.msg1312021#msg1312021

Oh, sweet! According to this, it does indeed use proper sprites,
simply using the 3D models in the creation process rather than a filter during post--processing.
Like what Iji did.

Originally posted by Xerberus86:

one of the devs already applied to that, it is actually 3D models which are pixelated. the game can be played in window mode and stretched out, it will scale to the window size and increases the overall size of the visuals without stretching them out to become blurry or ugly.

Wait, now I have two people saying contradictory things. Is it rendered in real-time with a post-processing filter or not?

[mrbohnke]

The answer in the link is an "official" answer from one of the devs, although the other answer doesn't totally contradict, it's just not entirely accurate.

[Illumina]

So is it 2D sprites of 3D models?

[mrbohnke]

Taken from Carduus answer here: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=59381.msg1311799#msg1311799

The first step is to draw a very basic 2D pixelart model sheet. I use this as a model to make the character in 3D and its skeleton (with 3DS Max), this is then exported in fbx format. A little homebrew program, developed for this very specific task, will then render the mesh in a very small size and without antialiasing, giving us that pixelated look.

At this point, most of the work is done. We export each frame of the animation we made with the 3D skeleton to a .png (I just don’t have the time to hand draw the sprites, to my great regret). Each frame is also exported along with its normal map, allowing us to render the volume using a basic toon shader.

This method gives us several advantages: the animation I do for a character can be reused for another one. Retakes are super quick and easy. And finally, we can hit 30 Fps for the animations, which doesn’t cure cancer, but at least helps a bit with the flu (as everyone knows).