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Upgraded 2D (pixel) art

PostPosted: 01 Aug 2013, 20:31
by Julius
Recently there seems to be a trend of retro games intentionally making games look 20 years old, but then there are those that turn this on it's head and take those 2D art and make awesome looking modern games out of it, by adding 3D lightning and effects.

Some cool examples (closed source):
http://www.robotloveskitty.com/LoD/
http://www.wingsofstnazaire.com/index.html (check the vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTcHSGn2h1s the enemies are 2D sprites!)

And there is also this cool advanced open source 2D engine (no linux port sadly):
http://ethanonengine.com/

But basically and OpenGL engine will do, and many 2D engines are OpenGL powered these days.

So besides looking mighty cool, this could be an awesome way of upgrading the graphics of rather old looking 2D open-source games (which is often the main complaint by non-enthusiasts).

For example "pimping" Abuse (http://abuse.zoy.org/) like that would be mighty cool, or maybe the Ur-Quan masters etc.

Re: Upgraded 2D (pixel) art

PostPosted: 02 Aug 2013, 09:21
by devnewton
I find this retro style trend a little hard for the eyes...

Image

I prefer "16 bit" retro style:

Image

Re: Upgraded 2D (pixel) art

PostPosted: 02 Aug 2013, 18:54
by charlie
They're different colour depths and probably aimed at different platforms.

Re: Upgraded 2D (pixel) art

PostPosted: 06 Aug 2013, 18:25
by Julius
I doubt it... they probably both need an i7 to run :p
It's about replicating a retro style, not actually working with platform-limitations (except for maybe iOS/android).

I am currently thinking to test out a way of combining pre-rendered sprites (as in the enemies in Doom/Duke3D etc.) with more modern character animation and surface shader features. The main idea behind that is to make it much easier to create (somewhat) cool looking models as a lot of the complexity is removed. Might turn out to be quite cool, but I am still looking for the best FOSS engine to try it.
Surprisingly there are upgraded versions of the Duke3D, Doom and Marathon 2.5D engines that support pixel-shaders and so on ;)