All posts tagged "graphics"
Stupid font tricks
I thought I’d try creating an LFSR in font substitution tables to turn a string of the same character into a string of random variants of that character to make things appear more organic.
Trying to improve mipmap blending
LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR, blending from one mipmap level to the next, is an interesting bodge. It approximates a dynamic cut-off frequency with linear interpolation between adjacent log2 cut-off frequencies.Font-based digit grouping
Struggling to read absurdly large numbers in terminal windows many years ago, I wondered how I might apply some logic in the terminal to subtly bunch together groups of three digits as a form of thousand separator. Eventually it occurred to me to try doing it in the font with ligature rules (initially as a joke, but then I looked into it) and it turned out Numderline was a thing which already did that.
Neighbourhood sampling order during texture filtering
In my pixel-art scaling tinkering I found a source of glitches in anti-aliased threshold operations involving derivative functions in shaders. So I worked out a workaround which saves me having to think too hard about a bunch of corner cases.
Scaling pixel art with SDF
For a while I’ve been wondering if giving a fantasy console like PICO-8 a graphics system defined in terms of more scalable low-memory primitives would lead to a more interesting retro style than the conventional sharp-edged squares. Not concepts like low-poly 3D or minified SVG (eg., RIPscrip), but maybe using pixel art scaling algorithms natively, or with additional markup in the data to clarify intent (sharpening corners, for example). Simply bake them into your pixel-art editor so you see what you’re going to get once it’s upscaled, with the option to correct it where it goes awry.