Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

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psycopathicteen
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Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by psycopathicteen »

http://www.dkc-atlas.com/maps/dkc/layer ... in/1-1.png

You can zoom in on MSPaint and look at the actual pixels.

I've been trying different ways of "porting" DKC to NES and Genesis to see how it looks like on systems with a smaller color palette. When your looking directly at the tiles themselves, you can see a lot of attribute clash problems. Colors themselves look a little dull on emulators too.

I'm not exactly sure, but I think the later DKC games did a little better with color palette choices.
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tokumaru
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by tokumaru »

The most serious problem I see with DKC is that the anti-aliasing of the graphics doesn't go well with the hard transparency (no alpha). All edges end up looking very jaggy. Another issue I see is that some parts have very busy textures, that look like a mess of pixels when seen on anything other than a blurry CRT TV.

Other than that, I think the style is pretty consistent, and it works even though the hardware isn't the best to reproduce pre-rendered 3D graphics. Unfortunately, the Genesis is even less suited for that, and I don't even have to say anything about the NES.

On the Genesis, I think that the standard techniques would work fine: increase the contrast a bit, so the result doesn't look washed out, and reduce color usage with dithering. Make use of the higher horizontal resolution to make the dithering blend more, which means adjusting the graphics to a new aspect ratio.

On the NES you'd need a different approach if you expect it to not look like crap. The pre-rendered look won't work, the graphics have to be cartoonized a bit. Objects should still have volume (i.e. shadows and highlights whenever possible). Backgrounds could be more heavily dithered. A more washed out look will be unavoidable.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

If you think that's bad, I suggest you look at this:
DKC Atribute Klash.png
tokumaru wrote:The most serious problem I see with DKC is that the anti-aliasing of the graphics doesn't go well with the hard transparency (no alpha).
I find the biggest problem to be the weird anti aliasing artifacts around some of the sprites, like edges on Diddy Kong's hat that turn gray
Anti Aliasing.png
Anti Aliasing.png (760 Bytes) Viewed 6724 times
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

tokumaru wrote:On the Genesis, I think that the standard techniques would work fine: increase the contrast a bit, so the result doesn't look washed out, and reduce color usage with dithering. Make use of the higher horizontal resolution to make the dithering blend more, which means adjusting the graphics to a new aspect ratio.
Even though this is a pirate piece of garbage, the backgrounds don't look too bad as they look pretty colorful, but as a result, there's only enough colors for one type of object onscreen. Something better looking could have been made, (there's no excuse when it comes to animation) but it's still impossible to magically turn 64 into 256.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUz-Qc0c-9Q
tokumaru wrote:On the NES you'd need a different approach if you expect it to not look like crap. The pre-rendered look won't work, the graphics have to be cartoonized a bit. Objects should still have volume (i.e. shadows and highlights whenever possible). Backgrounds could be more heavily dithered. A more washed out look will be unavoidable.
Remember the picture I made? :lol:
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Myask
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by Myask »

Perhaps it does look bad close-up on crisp monitors- that's not what it was expected to run on, though.

Donkey Kong Land seems like a better target.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Donkey Kong Land looks bad even far away though. :lol:
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by tepples »

How does DKC (GBC) look?
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

I think the sprites need some help. I'd have probably sacrificed some of the sprite per scanline limit for more colorful sprites. Also, kind of random, but many of the backgrounds are oddly colored. Why is the factory background red? It really doesn't seem like all 16 color palettes for BGs or sprites are ever being used and there are some attribute problems, but that's to be expected with 2bpp graphics. (Certainty not all palettes are used for sprites, because on the SNES with 8 palettes, no more than 8 different types of objects are even onscreen, unless they do use the same color palette. They probably could have reserved 2 palettes per object instead of just 1.) Like I said though, flickering can be pretty bad, but only ever really around large amounts of bananas, which reasonable only need one palette anyway.
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by Sik »

tepples wrote:How does DKC (GBC) look?
Took a quick look at a longplay. The backgrounds are surprisingly good, but the sprites are, um... let's just say they leave a lot to be desired, and some palette choices are really questionable. No idea if this longplay is using color correction though (the LCD screen washed out the colors a lot so palettes were made to counter it - also this causes issues on the GBA that doesn't do this heavy washing making GBC games look darker than they should)
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Which video did you see? I actually own the game (I own all 3 versions of DKC) so I can verify if it looks correct. A lot of the palette choices are just really odd though, and there really isn't much excuse considering both the GBC and the SNES run at the same color depth, although the GBC obviously uses 2bpp graphics.
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by tepples »

Just because it's 5-bit doesn't mean that the intensities encoded by those bits are evenly distributed. To oversimplify things: GBC's gamma is kind of light, GBA's gamma is very dark, DS's gamma is less dark, DS Lite's gamma matches Game Boy Player and is very close to Super NES 5-bit.
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by Sik »

I was under the impression that the GBA's darkness was more related to the complete lack of backlight (how does the GBA SP look, for comparison?). If the issue was gamma being so off I'd expect emulators accounting for it, since most games are overly bright to compensate for the darkness.
Espozo wrote:Which video did you see? I actually own the game (I own all 3 versions of DKC) so I can verify if it looks correct. A lot of the palette choices are just really odd though, and there really isn't much excuse considering both the GBC and the SNES run at the same color depth, although the GBC obviously uses 2bpp graphics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pHP3JNwkQ8
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by tepples »

Sik wrote:I was under the impression that the GBA's darkness was more related to the complete lack of backlight (how does the GBA SP look, for comparison?).
The GBA SP and New GBA SP have an internal light but kind of dark gamma for compatibility with GBA software designed to correct for the GBA's gamma. When GBA homebrew was first starting out, I made a demo that proved that the GBA's alpha was close to 4 when sRGB is closer to 2.2.
If the issue was gamma being so off I'd expect emulators accounting for it
NO$GBA includes multiple gamma settings to simulate multiple screen types. The uncorrected "VGA" setting resembles what GBA games look like on a Game Boy Player and on my white Lite.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

That made me want to vomit through my eyes. It's like the contrast or the color or something was turned up to infinity.

Well, Anyway, I tried my best to take a picture of the GBC game, (it's at an awkward angle because when I took it head on, all I saw was white from the flash, and if I disabled it, it was dark) which doesn't look even half as bad as what was shown in that video.
DKC GBC.JPG
The main part with the odd color choices are just in some of the levels, the palette is incorrect, like in slip slide ride, the background (which was shown earlier) is purple for whatever reason. Oil Drum alley also has a dark red background instead of the dark gray, and I'm sure many of the caves are also off.
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Re: Do you think DKC looks bad at close glance?

Post by Sik »

OK that sounds like color compensation wasn't turned on then... (doesn't explain the overly bright green/blue enemies, though)
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