When you said "you don't draw, you set attributes" I remembered the point of Tilengine. Those consoles didn't have expensive chips to hold frame buffers, you don't have the ability to draw individual pixels, you do everything with sprites and tiles and layers and using the scanline interrupt for effects. So Tilengine is a 2D engine that gives you support for sprites, tile layers, etc. like other 2D engines, but, it works like those old systems did, allowing you to easily recreate those scanline effects. And colour palette stuff. No other engines do either of those things.
I knew when I was going the route I was with Kha, that I was recreating things that already exist in Tilengine, but I think at this stage in my personal development, creating things in Kha using shaders was a good step for me even if just to learn shaders and drawing with the GPU in a way that takes advantage of it, instead of constantly avoiding it. Even if I use Unity or UE4, the option is there to write powerful shaders, so the knowledge will always be super relevant.
But, I've decided that I owe it to myself, and Tilengine, that I have to at least attempt implementing Tilengine on top of Kha to see what it's like to use in that way. Once I've used just Kha, and then Tilengine on top of Kha, I'm going to decide which path I'll take for my next pixel art project.
Oh man, don't get me started! People using inconsistent pixel sizes has bothered me for years, everything from mixed sizes, to arbitrary scaling. Half the time I bring it up, people are like "Oh it's just an art style, let them be"... it's like nails on a chalkboard to me. I would never mistreat my pixels in this way.
Actually if you watch the video I linked, in the 2nd half I demonstrate exactly this, with my Kha project. It's about how I can control the scaling process, having the whole game render to a "native resolution" frame buffer, and then the code that scales that up is completely seperate, and it tries to stick to whole integer scale values, and when it can't, it scales up to the nearest without filtering, and then scales up again to the target resolution using filtering, which applies just enough to gently hide odd sized pixels but still look sharp. Something I read that Sonic Mania does.
Cool, let me know what you think! I think it provides a much more portable layer than SDL ever would, and it would be my choice when I use Tilengine. I could provide a "how to" article for your site when I do!
I'll definitely keep you updated.
I knew when I was going the route I was with Kha, that I was recreating things that already exist in Tilengine, but I think at this stage in my personal development, creating things in Kha using shaders was a good step for me even if just to learn shaders and drawing with the GPU in a way that takes advantage of it, instead of constantly avoiding it. Even if I use Unity or UE4, the option is there to write powerful shaders, so the knowledge will always be super relevant.
But, I've decided that I owe it to myself, and Tilengine, that I have to at least attempt implementing Tilengine on top of Kha to see what it's like to use in that way. Once I've used just Kha, and then Tilengine on top of Kha, I'm going to decide which path I'll take for my next pixel art project.
(07-20-2021, 04:04 AM)megamarc Wrote: I've seen many "retro" 2D games developed in Unity and Game Maker Studio that have a wrong concept of pixel. Authors end up mixing assets of different "pixel sizes" on a Full HD framebuffer, having for example 4x4 and 5x5 macro-pixels, moving at 1 pixel granularity of the final framebuffer. This is totally wrong, producing "unaligned pixels" that ruin any attempt of using a post-processing CRT filter that require a low resolution source. A pixel doesn't have size, it is not a square but a dimensionless point. And I've seen those faults in several commercial games. You must be careful with this. Tilengine does this right, as only the final framebuffer gets upscaled with all pixels having always the same size and alignment.
Oh man, don't get me started! People using inconsistent pixel sizes has bothered me for years, everything from mixed sizes, to arbitrary scaling. Half the time I bring it up, people are like "Oh it's just an art style, let them be"... it's like nails on a chalkboard to me. I would never mistreat my pixels in this way.
Actually if you watch the video I linked, in the 2nd half I demonstrate exactly this, with my Kha project. It's about how I can control the scaling process, having the whole game render to a "native resolution" frame buffer, and then the code that scales that up is completely seperate, and it tries to stick to whole integer scale values, and when it can't, it scales up to the nearest without filtering, and then scales up again to the target resolution using filtering, which applies just enough to gently hide odd sized pixels but still look sharp. Something I read that Sonic Mania does.
Quote:I didn't know about Kha you mention, I'll take a look to guess where it fits and what does it offer.
Cool, let me know what you think! I think it provides a much more portable layer than SDL ever would, and it would be my choice when I use Tilengine. I could provide a "how to" article for your site when I do!
I'll definitely keep you updated.