This was a great read. I&#x27;d like to see Elite (or just a scene from it) rendered with this, I reckon that would be pretty interesting on the play date.Using the handle to rotate your ship on the way into dock would be very cool.

Thought the same thing when the original Surface-Stable dither link made the rounds. There&#x27;s just something off about 1-bit dither with perspective applied, but constantly shifting scale on different parts of the model.Super interesting thought experiment (and this version is an impressive exercise in optimization), but the aesthetic of Obra Dinn is in another league.

I agree with you, it&#x27;s technically very cool but Obra Dinn just looks better.

This is a cool novel technique for sure, but for some reason I’m just not aesthetically in love with it. The fact that the pattern is surface aligned just…doesn’t add anything over dithering in screen space. And I really loved the dithering in Return of Obra Dinn. Is it just me?

&gt; This definitely seems like the wrong platform to experiment with this techniqueAs an owner of a playdate, it’s kind of the wrong platform for… everything. So in that sense it’s right at home.You have to respect the vision, execution, and the commitment to the product - the hardware looks great and feels great.The games are all kinda gimmicky and obviously limited by the platform though. Falls squarely into the “I want to love this thing so bad, but I just can’t” camp.

I&#x27;m sure doing it on the Playdate was the point.

His Game Boy Advance was probably out of batteries. Sometimes you gotta make do.

This definitely seems like the wrong platform to experiment with this technique. It&#x27;s a lot of work to have such a poor result when there are other solutions which would produce much nicer results with less effort.Plus it is doing a wild amount of per-pixel computation for this.I don&#x27;t wanna knock the author too bad, though. He put the hours in and he documented every step in serious detail, so mad respect for that.

yeah I was wondering if you could use blue noise mipmaps, trilinear sample from it, then round to 0 or 1. With the right mipbias it feels like it should look OK.

You can estimate mip levels per triangle and subdivde them based on the wanted mip level across z lines, instead of doing the calculation per pixel. It&#x27;s a bit wonky, but can work, at least for the bigger triangles.I&#x27;ve linked some code that does something along those lines for mipmapping [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Gil-AdB&#x2F;REVIVAL&#x2F;blob&#x2F;0da65f18a34b74575a89694d21c9058f20f75f18&#x2F;FDS&#x2F;FRUSTRUM&#x2F;FRUSTRUM.CPP#L454">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Gil-AdB&#x2F;REVIVAL&#x2F;blob&#x2F;0da65f18a34b74575a89...</a>

Yeah I agree. The dithering effects in Everybody wants to crank the world[0] are much more visually satisfying but as you pointed out perhaps it&#x27;s the levels of the textures that make it feel... Well like textures.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aras-p.github.io&#x2F;demo-pd-cranktheworld&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aras-p.github.io&#x2F;demo-pd-cranktheworld&#x2F;</a>

The dither pattern is not really aligned with the screen pixels. So you can&#x27;t have just one black or white dot per pixel. The alignment is only approximate, so you have dots that are much larger than pixels.

This looks bad since the resolution of the dither pattern is too low. Maybe mipmapping it would help?

Its appeal is that you have a target to build simple games against. It’s limiting, but on purpose.

It has a Cortex M7 180 MHz MCU. No real SIMD. Reasonable memory at 16MB but it is slow to r&#x2F;w at about 30MB&#x2F;s. DTCM 30x faster but you don’t get much to address, e.g. the stack is just 10KB. Framebuffer 12KB. System reserves the rest of the 64KB TCM. There’s just a 4KB cache. So the limiting factor is often memory access not cpu. The 400 x 240 1 bit Sharp Memory LCD has to be carefully addressed in horizontal strips of 32 bit words with weird endianness if you want high performance. It’s very possible to work at the maximum 50fps per full frame and do per pixel work and prep for blit in sub 15 percent of CPU. Almost all devs aim for and achieve 30fps. You can have effective 200fps if you like since not all rows need to be refreshed per frame. An interesting situation is the device had an earlier Rev A before the Rev B that 90% of users have, and with Rev A up to 30-50% slower you have to develop for the base device specs if you want to be inclusive. It makes you wonder about Rev C decisions. All that said, most games are written in Lua which runs 50x slower than compiled C on the device, yet many very fun games have been released. You can compile ARM intrinsics&#x2F;asm but it’s a rare situation if you can beat the compiler. Working within all these constraints is part of the charm of developing for it. It necessitates a discipline of writing tight benchmarked code, even inspecting compiled instructions, if you want to push it.

Well it has a 168MHz arm, so assuming 20fps, you got 80 instructions to work with per pixel drawing - that’s a bit tight, but not overly so. In the 90s, games (like Quake) worked with much less.But this assumes that wait states of the memory or a funky way to access graphics don’t screw you over. I did a quick search, and couldn’t find detailed hardware specs (like pano docs for game boy, or gbatek for gba &#x2F; Nintendo das).

TIL playdate has no GPU. i had assumed part of its appeal was being able to do intense modern graphics processing on an otherwise-retro display.

Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering - 182 points by bj-rn 29 days ago:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42808889">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42808889</a>

Surface-Stable Fractal Dither on Playdate