"Blown away" i think the coma eat it up. I'm no more sure about the word  

I guess "being blow" has a vastly different signification?  

You did it on purpose and you know it. Stop trying to weasel your way out of it.

Yes, and there's much more misunderstanding about evolution than there is about mushrooms.

Fortunately . That's because people can be easily explained that mushrooms can in fact be toxic. Evolution is not intuitive or easily explained.

Eh, I think we should all do our part to kill misunderstanding.

Well, the best way to do that is - as was already said - to make an accessible game that showcases what biological evolution works like. Fortunately there is no need for million-year scales to achieve this. Gunmaggot's idea is absolutely amazing.

If anyone ever wants to make an evolution/biology/genetics related game, I volunteer as a consultant. To boot, I will do it for free in the interest of science.

Aw shuuuchks. We can't have fun for nuthin'.

You guys our not fun at all.

But I wonder if anyone has or would be willing to try doing something with cel-shading at low res and zoomed in to achieve a convincing pixel art effect?

Well I would be willing to TRY SOMETHING, but I suspect you will need some vertex shader voodoo before true pixel art can be achieved, which is currently beyond my scope...

Now let's tackle this one step at a time. Your image and the black line outlying the girl gives me an idea. First we will need a way to get edge lines exactly one pixel wide between objects. I would go about this by looking up the z-value of every pixel and, where ever a pixel has a z-difference (with at least one of its 8 neighbours) greater than a threshold value, the pixel is an "edge" and is substituted by an "edge color". This would be applied only to the pixels who have SMALLER z's than 1 or more of their neighbours, so that the "edge line" is a property of the object sticking out. Combining sharp 1-pixel edges with cel shading would be a good first step towards a pixel art shader.

This is very nice! Music and visuals really capture a proper "feel". I particularly like those old movie reel effects.  I did a pixel shader recently that does basically the same thing so it's a matter of interest to me.

I can see that in addition to thick moving brown lines there is also some fluctuation in the image I just can't put my finger on. Might I ask how you achieved this?

Voxel thickness depends on zoom level, so I don't see this as applicable. One voxel can correspond to 0.0001, 1, or 100000 pixels based on the distance from the camera.

I still think that the correct way to go about this, if it is possible at all, would include PIXEL level processing. You need to be able to transform the scene into pixels and then work your magic at the pixel level. Of course the geometry pipeline can and should be tweaked to ease this process.

To do ANYTHING with this topic that isn't empty talk and theorizing, we must first define what pixel art is, i.e. the mathematical principles behind "good" and "desirable" pixel art.

Any takers?

Ah, I see. This is actually a valid concern. Video games have a far reaching audience and a lot of that are children or young people. Evolution (as in selective adaptation and differentiation of species over a period of time) is often misrepresented and misunderstood, and there are people who do not accept the theory. It could indeed be possible that overusing the word in a clearly wrong context might contribute to strengthening these negative predjudices. But the responsibility of this one doesn't lie with games. Games are full of all sorts of ridiculous stuff. Pokemon "evolution" is as ridiculous a concept as eating suspicious looking mushrooms to gain giant growth (I'm looking at you, ). I think it should be the job of the education system to make students identify the ridiculousness of the concept, not the job of games to watch if they use strict scientific terms in potentially harmful ways.

(aimed at the previous 4-6 posts in general)

Oh wow, you guys are EVIL  . And here I was concerned I went overboard in that other thread.

BTW whats your web sites URL. Id like to see what you have made.

Sure, if it will help you sleep tonight , you can find some screenshots of my games in this forum post. I would tell you more but you know how it is, I like to keep details secret in hope it will boost the revenues from my (freeware) games. Now you know I can code, can I continue posting in this topic now mr. UOK Games? 

[thinking]

Huh. All that huge list and I don't see that magical number "100%" anywhere in the 8 years of development.

Well, you are thinking big, there's no dispute there.

Also:

Several FPS games created 90% bug free.

You are aware that "90% bug free" means that you will have 1 bug on average in every 10 lines of your code, right? That means roughly 10.000 bugs for any decent-sized project...

But you all seem to think your ideas our working. So Ill let you keep thinking your stragy works lol

Coming to a forum and and offering your superior wisdom to people, instructing them how to get rid of their stupid ways, has always been a good way to get lots of applications. Keep going, chief.

[game]

Oh my god I am now completely overwhelmed by a desire to purchase your [ ]game/[ ]games/[ ]vapourware which [ ]may/[ ]may not exist (created on hardware you [ ]purchased from your company's discarded pile/[ ]"misplaced" from your day job), based solely on the fact you are not telling us if you made any games or not.

YOU ARE A: [ ]MARKETING GENIUS/[ ]A FEW CARDS SHORT OF A FULL DECK
Regardless, here is your award statuette:  

All the ascii is in a single .bmp texture and I every letter is added as a separate sprite with its own color and alpha values.

Tiles are not packed by ascii code alone, they contain a lot of other data such as collision solidity, self-lighting, material info placeholder for future deformability or flammability, etc. Most of the code accepts string parameters for sake of ease, for example:

Code:

insert_string(300, 24,  "------=====-----/"
"-------===------/"
"-------===------/"
"------====.-----/"
"------====..----/"
"=-----.===.....-/"
"=..-...===....==/"
"=......===....==/"
"=......===....==/"
"==............==/"
"================/"
"You can also jump off walls",
0xffffff, 0.0f);

is a call lifted straight from my code. The function then converts all the "-" into invisible tiles, "~" into water tiles, all the dots into non-collideable tiles with darker color (background), etc. You can define other rules as well so basically it works by you preparing the rules beforehand and then pasting chunks of ASCII, and letting the rules post-process the inserted ASCII.

Objects such as the moon are stored in a .txt file but every other character contains the index of the color as defined in a palette defined at the top of the file.

They should really find a way to make it dynamic, even if it means a separate, more inefficient pipeline for the dynamic objects.

Static geometry is useful only to a degree. I was primarily looking forward to this because I do a lot of abstract and particle-based stuff; without moving parts the whole concept kind of falls apart.

where? the only girl i see @5:18 is "an ugly example of polygonal rendering".

Oh, I was under the impression she was there to showcase this technology. Well, my bad then. In that case it doesn't seem they have the animation down very well. Either way, I think this would work best if, like you said, they hybridized it. There are some tried and useful techniques, such as geometry instancing, animation sets and stuff, which would just make no sense reinventing from scratch.

this is why i would not try to just use some shaders to emulate the pixelation process. I think one has to feed the rendering pipeline with additional information like palettes, edge properties (draw a line only when it is an outline, allow to draw it inline, allow to antialias) etc.

In a sense most of that CAN be crammed into shaders. For example with cell shading you forward the "gradient" you want to use as a 256x1 texture, essentially a palette.
But yeah, not all of it. And one would first need to quantify and define mathematically all these properties that pixel artists use and frankly I am not even sure if it's possible.

MAYBE it could work with a fixed-angle orthogonal projection camera and carefully textured materials, but in that case, actual PIXEL ART would do just as well. Variable camera angles and full 3d... I don't know, sounds like science fiction to me. Unfortunately.

Of course this is just a PR video and there's a ton of stuff they are not telling us. I would fully expect the technology to be full of arcane hacks and shortcuts and work poorly. But the technology is still in its inception, and rendered on CPU power alone to boot. Remember what polygonal 3d was like when it first appeared? Didn't we see a human-oid girl move around though? Of course she is made in 3d software and not an actual human model, but I don't see why that wouldn't be possible. If anything I'm guessing bone animation and skinning should be much easier with voxel-like technologies.

I say give it a few years and the first ATI and nVidia cards will start supporing this... then add in Voxel and Pixel shaders... a few tricks such as "vertex mipmaps" (dynamic level geometry etc.) and I think we're set.

But we digress from pixel art stuff. I don't think you can make "proper" pixel art from 3d models no matter how hard you hack the shader pipeline. The problem is that pixel art is painstakingly drawn - well, pixel by pixel  - and it doesn't always follow the underlying 3d geometry. Pixel art owes much of its appeal to clarity and it achieves this by sticking to fixed angles of lines and shapes.

This is unlike, say, cell-shading, which is perfectly possible because it fits extremely well with 3d geometry and shader stuff.

I would LOVE to be proven wrong on this though. I adore pixel art.

Looks solid for start, but it employs slippery slope mechanics, which are generally frowned upon. Once something crystallizes, it becomes easier for subsequent enemies to do the same and it makes the player's manoeuvring much more difficult.

Take Tetris for example. When you miss a piece or perform subpar, you will get a row with a few empty spaces "trapped" in it; this will reduce the time the other blocks have to fall thus making the game more difficult. However, in the case of Tetris you can remove this difficulty by performing well, sinking upper rows and getting to the "hole".  Your game is equivalent to a particularly tall Tetris where you can't go back to fill the empty tiles. Not saying this is bad in itself, just thought I'd give you a heads up.

I especially like the way manoeuvring close to the center is much more rewarding, but also much riskier. 

This, perhaps?

Oh wow.
So am I the only one who's switching to this the second the SDK comes out?

but i agree with derek that there's nothing wrong with such games, and you shouldn't feel embarrassed to make them, the same reason you shouldn't feel embarrassed if you were a porn director or something.

That's a rather... unfortunate juxtaposition.

To be fair, just because there are SOME movies who are ... erm... adventurous as Equilibrium, it doesn't mean ALL movies are like that. On the other hand, what was said about games still applies to 90% of all the games. And I would personally welcome gun-kata like mechanics into games if that would make people rethink some other, more immersion-breaking stuff.

(stuff)

Very finely put.