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Dragon's Lair


Tursi

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I spent a fair bit of time this weekend working on a new dither concept. Along the way I made some tweaks to the older ones and now I find myself unable to decide which I like most.

 

If you have a moment, please take a look at this video (go to YouTube and watch it in the highest resolution you can get, since lower resolutions will blur the dither and that kind of defeats the purpose). Let me know whether you think top left, top right, lower left or lower right looks best?

 

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The two on the right seem the most pixelated and to me, least pleasing to the eye for motion.

 

The lower left seems to have fewer black, single pixels resulting in a what I perceive as a smoother color/surface when compared with the upper left. This did seem to result in a few darker areas even so, at the moment I would favor the lower left video ever so slightly.

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For the most detail, the upper left, to me, appears to have it. However, I prefer the lower left. It loses some of the detail but more often than not, looks to flow the most smoothly since there aren't as many alternating black pixels as in the top 2. The bottom right is the least pleasing to me.

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Lower left has the least amount of pixel shimmer, upper right has more detail but is more noisy, probably for that reason. If you were playing a game long term, lower left would be less fatiguing on your eyes.

Agreed... I was stuck between the lower right and the upper left, but the the upper left looks a lot more pleasing to the eyes. The upper right looks like a great version for the spectrum computer. :)

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Are you accumulating the dither error between frames in any of those, or is each frame dithered independently?

 

I've almost got enough votes to discuss what I had in mind, but I don't want to skew opinions. But the dithering is frame independent, I don't think the frame rate is high enough for temporal dithering.

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I think I liked the Top Right best, followed by the Top Left. I found the ones on the bottom to be very flickery. I am not a huge fan of the dithering / color shifting as my eyes really have trouble with the colors and I can't focus well on what the content is. Any effort to minimize that, especially when combined with color changes. If only the TI had a decent palette (sans 9918A).

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Okay, so over the weekend I worked on an idea I had on the plane to Chicago, to try and blend the color mixing of the atkinson dither with the sharpness of the ordered dither. I'd pre-calculate a full screen of every solid color (I went with a 12-bit palette), and use it as a lookup table to render. It took my machine about 4 hours (twice) to generate the 50MB lookup table. Unfortunately, the concept didn't play as well as I hoped with color clash. The result of that long experiment was the lower right -- very noisy.

 

However, it led to two other tweaks that I did like. The first was that I gave the standard ordered dither a darkness adjust. It always seemed to make images too bright and washed them out badly, so the old "ordered2" option subtracted half the pattern to darken it. That sometimes looked better but often caused severe color shift. I made it a slider and attached it to Ordered mode (since '2' was the new approach). By setting it to subtract just 2 units instead of 8, I got the results in the lower left.

 

Upper right was the other tweak I made. Technically its very comparable to the upper left, which is the original dither. I shifted the error distribution slightly, and rather than random dots, the dither pattern more closely resembled diagonal lines in most areas. I found this "cross-hatching" more pleasing than the random dots, and was hoping people would agree.

 

However, seems not to be the case. While the lower right was rightfully thrashed (and I threw it in there really only because I had space on the video - though it probably worked better than it deserved to ;) ), the largest preference is the lower left - the ordered dither. This does provide the most stable patterns but also loses the most detail, so I'm kind of disappointed. Second place was the original dither with half the votes, and my new upper right got half again.

 

None of them are awful, I admit, and the ordered dither pleases me due to its sharpness, I just wish it was a bit more contrasty. But the lack of contrast is probably what helps it look less noisy.

 

There's one more experiment I want to run, and in a week or so I may ask one more vote. After the one comment above I want to try and reduce the temporal jigglies by locking the colors down a bit better, IF that works I might post a second test to see what people think.

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