Stabilizing the Obra Dinn 1-bit dithering process (2017)
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HN comment orderHaving worked on graphics programming for more than a decade, I still didn't pick on that when I played the game. Considering the overall visual language of the game, I'd say it's 100 hours well spent. Could have easily published this at SIGGRAPH under temporal coherence for non-photorealistic rendering.
If you find this interesting, you might also be interested in this video of someone diving even deeper into how to make the dither surface stable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs
The dithered highlight on the sphere looks odd because it was calculated in a non-linear colorspace. You can get better looking results by converting to a linear colorspace, dithering, then converting back to sRGB. Eg, in ImageMagick, using the same 8x8 matrix: convert Dither2-Exp_crop_resize.png -colorspace RGB -ordered-dither o8x8,2 -colorspace sRGB Dither2-Exp_dithered.png Result: https://imgur.com/a/81bNg
Regardless of the details which are of course important, a very very good game. Just pay attention. Created by Lukas Pope who also created Papers Please (on Steam) https://store.steampowered.com/app/653530/Return_of_the_Obra... and the equally cool Mars After Midnight for the Playdate https://play.date/games/mars-after-midnight/ Steam sale starts in ~20 hours,
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100+ points or 50+ comments
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reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-11-23 | Dither stabilisationFirst breakout | robin_reala | 291 | 20 |
| 2024-03-24 | Motion-Stable Dithering in Obra Dinn | ant6n | 2 | 0 |
| 2024-06-26 | Return of the Obra Dinn: Stabilizing the Dither | Bluestein | 2 | 1 |
| 2024-11-08 | Stabilizing the Obra Dinn 1-bit dithering process (2017)Best thread | CharlesW | 527 | 114 |
| 2026-03-16 | Return of the Obra Dinn: spherical mapped dithering for a 1bpp first-person gameHall induction · Latest 20+ point return | PaulHoule | 472 | 59 |