Want to take a nostalgia break in Shroud of the Avatar?

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SotA_Screenshot_21022014_165820

Type “/classicmode” in the chat window.

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3 Responses

  1. Sanctimonia says:
    February 22, 2014 at 12:49 am

    Awesome; nice little Easter egg. I’d like to see that in motion.

  2. Matt says:
    February 22, 2014 at 3:43 am

    I already mentioned this in a comments thread on TTLG: this doesn’t work for me as an Easter Egg, because pixellating a modern(ish) 3D game doesn’t look much, if anything, like the early 3D games. If this looked like, say, Ultima IX or Ultima Underworld, that’d be one thing, but it doesn’t. What sort of ‘classic’ is this supposed to be hearkening back to? It strikes me more as fascile nostalgia-mongering with little understanding of what people are being nostalgic about. “Big pixels!!!” seems to be the “OMGPirates, ninjas, zombies!!!” of nostalgic old-school gamers…

    • Sanctimonia says:
      February 22, 2014 at 6:29 pm

      You’re right, though it is something. If they wanted to be serious about it they’d need to do a few things:

      1) Either (a) use a static 256-color palette derived from all the texture maps or (b) create an algorithm which will downsample to 256 colors on the fly. OpenGL may be able to do the latter automatically (I’m a newbie here) by changing the bit depth of the final composition buffer (probably not what it’s actually called) to eight bits.

      2) Disable mipmapping. When mipmapping is disabled, textures rendered smaller than their native size appear “crunchy”, which is a signature property of old-school software rendered scaling.

      3) I think there’s an OpenGL setting where textures rendered larger than their native resolution appear pixellated instead of blurred, but whatever the method is that would need to be done as well.

      4) Reduce anisotropic filtering to the lowest level or disable it if possible.

      5) Render at 320×240, then upscale this to the native window/screen resolution.

      6) Lower the frame rate to somewhere between 15 and 30 FPS.

      You said:

      “Big pixels!!!” seems to be the “OMGPirates, ninjas, zombies!!!” of nostalgic old-school gamers…

      I browse the indie game scene quite a bit, where old-school and pixel art reign supreme, and one of the things that really bothers the shit out of me is when a pixel art game or trailer either mixes pixel sizes or doesn’t constrain/snap “sprite” coordinates to the native resolution being emulated. So while I like the idea, I have a love/hate relationship with the execution.