To add to the above, an alternative dithering approach is error diffusion, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd–Steinberg_dithering
The article mentions also doing this in the temporal domain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd–Steinberg_dithering
The article mentions also doing this in the temporal domain.
I've been looking to build an engine/game that approximates this art style: https://obradinn.com
Yes, it's so simple, it can be applied in a single pass on a single pixel buffer. Because in convolution kernel terms - it's only sampling from half of a moor neighbourhood, and that half can be from pixels not yet processed in the same buffer when moving through them in order.
It's so simple it fits in a dweet ;P
https://www.dwitter.net/d/24142
> I've been looking to build an engine/game that approximates this art style: https://obradinn.com
Killedbyapixel took the above dweet for inspiration in the style of some of his proc gen art, although I haven't dug into the how yet. I suppose deeper game/object awareness integration could produce better results than merely piping the output of the renderer into the dither algorithm, perhaps even the rendering could be optimized by targetting dithering specifically.
I was wondering about this possibility as well. I'm already up to my elbows in hand-rolled software rasterizer - which is already constrained to only using a luminance channel (8-bits).
I suppose I could still accumulate dither error and do a one-pass, 1-bit raster by combining the world-space 256-level luminance information with whatever error information is in the accumulator.
That would be interesting to see. I like the idea of renderers that give up things e.g resolution in exchange for something else. Pixel depth is just another. Would be interesting what gains in other areas might be possible if the rasterisation stage turns into 1-bit. Then again the cost of actually operating on single bit stored values might out weight any gains... unless this is done in hardware.
Compare to a typical 24-bit RGB array, you just reduced your full-scan array access requirements from 3 per pixel to 1/64 per pixel.
For 720p (1280x720), you'd only be talking about 14,400 loop iterations to walk the entire frame buffer.
You could almost get away without even compressing the frames in some applications. At 30fps, totally uncompressed, 720p 1-bit dither would come in right at 30 mbps.
Ordered dithering, even at 8-bit, is…not my cup of tea.
At full scale, there is no loss in readability and in fact I think I prefer the aesthetic quality of the 1-bit PNG. However, at <50% zoom, the dithered version was way less readable than a 2-bit PNG of slightly higher file size, so I ended up not compressing to 1-bit.
Edit: I was wrong, my (ex-) image viewer was at fault at 50% zoom. Viewing in other apps, the dithered version is visually no different from the 2-bit version. I bet the difference is even less with a HiDPI screen.