Discussed on HN in January 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42808889

Thanks!

As a retro game dev and pixel artist, this is a lot more more preferable than the constant shimmering of other recent techniques such as Texel Splatting (https://dylanebert.com/texel-splatting). Love how stable it is, reminds me of billboarding but is clearly 3D.

Edit: Ah, I didn't finish reading the blogpost - didn't realise splatting was based on yours. I actually like your variant a bit better, but perhaps that's just due to the choice of textures/models.

It's truly the perfect detective game. There are so many original ideas brought to life here: the blending of a single frame of a scene, rendered in 1-bit 3D, that you can navigate around to forensically examine... coupled with the incredible voiceover work, such that the audio itself becomes a huge clue (listening for accents to try to determine origin!), and just... how layered and fantastical the story itself is, and the Memento-style reverse reveal.

Absolutely LOVE this game. Lucas Pope is brilliant.

If only they didn't break into that ark...

My thoughts exactly.

IMO, the holy grail of 3d dithering is yet to be achieved. runevision's method does not handle surfaces viewed at sharp angles very well. I've thought a lot about a method with fractal adaptive blue noise and analytic anisotropic filtering but I don't yet have the base knowledge to implement it.

Very cool! The dither is no longer in screenspace though, which kills the retro charm.

This really is a fantastic video. I don't think I'd considered many of the ideas behind dithering before seeing how it could be extrapolated to this degree.

The video ends in a place where I suspect even further advances could still be made.

One of the biggest issues with dithering stability in screen space is attributable to perspective projection. The division operation is what screws everything up. It introduces a nonlinearity. An orthographic or isometric projection is much more stable.

My take on it is to use some arbitrary dithering algorithm (e.g. floyd-steinberg, blue noise thresholding, doesn't really matter) for the first frame, and for subsequent frames:

1. Turn the previous dithered framebuffer into a texture

2. Set the UV coordinates for each vertex to their screenspace coordinates from the previous frame

3. Render the new frame using the previous-framebuffer texture and aforementioned UV coords, with nearest-neighbor sampling and no lighting etc. (this alone should produce an effect reminiscent of MPEG motion tracking gone wrong).

4. Render the new frame again using the "regular" textures+lighting to produce a greyscale "ground truth" frame.

5. Use some annealing-like iterative algorithm to tweak the dithered frame (moving pixels, flipping pixels) to minimize perceptual error between that and the ground truth frame. You could split this work into tiles to make it more GPU-friendly.

Steps 4+5 should hopefully turn it from "MPEG gone wrong" into something coherent.

Fair point, though I think that when it's low rez enough, it becomes less apparent that it's not in screenspace, and it gets closer to a retro look: https://youtu.be/EzjWBmhO_1E?t=102

There's a follow up video with variations of the technique (some of them with color) demonstrated in a game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzjWBmhO_1E

But yes, there's still the issue of oblique angles looking different that still remains open AFAIK.

Chants of Sennaar is my absolute favourite and I also really enjoyed The Case of The Golden Idol.

I haven't found anything close to scratching that Chants of Sennaar itch so far but I will check out the other games you mentioned as I haven't played any of them.

I also loved the conceit of the Obra Dinn but the visual style made me feel physically ill to the point I couldn't continue with the game. I'm useless with any first person POV stuff in general though.

I'll throw Heaven's Vault in there as well.

I really liked the unique style.

Golden Idol and Chants of Senaar are incredible as well though.

Have you at least played with the other color schemes?

I got half way through but honestly just don't enjoy the core loop enough to finish. And it's the kind of game you need to finish in one sitting else you're shit outta luck and need to start over.

Interesting. I was really impressed by the art at first, taking joy in exploring that as much as the scenes themselves. But it soon faded out of focus as I was engrossed in the story and gameplay.

Same thing for me, I love the technical aspect in the same way I love the demoscene. The visuals are original and very well done, so much that it is now almost impossible to talk about dithering without mentioning the Obra Dinn at some point.

I am also a fan of puzzle/detective games, and this is an excellent one.

Truly a masterpiece in both visual and gameplay, but together... not so much. For a game where understanding every detail of the scenes is critical, it felt I was fighting the game engine. Many times I wished I could turn off the dithering effect and see the underlying models with more standard shading. At no point it felt unfair, they really did a good job making it functional, but it was a distraction.

Not enough of a distraction to stop me from completing and enjoying the game and art. But hadn't the art style been unique, I would have enjoyed it much less.

Yeah. I’ve wondered if the game could be a total hit on some possibly-not-yet-real eink display that can reproduce the intended effect at 60fps without such eye strain.

As a kid I imagined playing Cosmic Osmo on actual magical paper at my desk at school.

Yeah, I also loved the idea, but found that playing it require me to strain my eyes too much and abandoned it. One of those games that is more fun to read about than to actually play.

Mostly enjoyed it but the art style gave me motion sickness during and after each session where I had to stop (playing on a TV).

Agreed. The game is tied together so well with its deductive gameplay, art, and music. I also appreciate how difficult it is, I was banging my head against it frequently during my playthrough - but the "aha" moments are so worth it.

I picked up Blue Prince after - completely different game in most respects but hits some of the same satisfying puzzle-solving/deduction notes.

Some other good ones based around deduction:

The Case of the Golden Idol

The Roottrees are Dead

The Seance at Blake Manor

Chants of Sennaar

Outer Wilds is the best in class for this genre, IMO.

Some of the examples in the post are really bad, but even the last one has "flickering" not of the dithering pattern but of the edges, which feel "off".

An experience i will never forget

Have you played it?

In the game it's pretty great.

I have and wasn't terribly bothered by it, but that may have changed if I had done it on large screen (TV).

My greatest curse, and greatest bless, is that I have really good memory. I could never re-experience this game the same way I experienced it first. It is a shame really, since games like this are not very common.

If you want to experience another great investigation/puzzle/story game, check out Outer Wilds [1]. It is a much bigger game (expect 60+ hours), but you can play it at your time. The ending is mind-blowing, and, similar to Return of the Obra Dinn, the whole universe story is weaved perfectly, everything falls into place at the end.

It is also very spacey for the space-nerds like me

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Wilds