Thimbleweed Park by Ron Gilbert [XO, XPA, iOS, Android, others later]

[Cyan]

This game by Ron Gilbert, creator or Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island, looks extremely fun.

"In a place like Thimbleweed Park a dead body is the least of your problems".

 

[eloic]

^Yasssssssss! Yesterday I saw the trailer and I loved it! ^_^ I like big pixels when it comes to graphic adventure games (I replayed Gabriel Knight not so long ago... Laura Bow II too, and I must continue with the MI series).

 

[Cyan]

^Yasssssssss! Yesterday I saw the trailer and I loved it! ^_^ I like big pixels when it comes to graphic adventure games (I replayed Gabriel Knight not so long ago... Laura Bow II too, and I must continue with the MI series).

they look very appealing if used right. I remember a picture of The Witcher 3 with 2D graphics style and I liked it very much.

New video from Eurogamer:

 

[milk]

I've been following the development of this game with great interest since it was first brought to public, as a real monkey island fanboy, and I believe it will be great.

but since this is a graphics forum...

Gosh I hate how they've delt with the pixel art in here. I don't mind pixel art games, but it must be done right. Everything must fit within the same pixel grid/resolution on the same screen. That is not the case here. Certain elements are slightly higher resolution than others. There is stuff that occupies half-pixels, or 1,462384653 of a pixel... Ughhh. When characters move away from the screen and are scaled down, the scaling is done according to the full screen resolution and not the game's artificial low-res resolution. In fact, this game deals so slopply with resolution that I'd say it barely qualifies as having an actual defined simulated low-resolution. It hurts my eyes, I swear it does.

 

[eloic]

they look very appealing if used right. I remember a picture of The Witcher 3 with 2D graphics style and I liked it very much.

New video from Eurogamer:

Wow, yes, nice image!

I'm not going to watch the video, btw. I prefer to be a virgin.

I've been following the development of this game with great interest since it was first brought to public, as a real monkey island fanboy, and I believe it will be great.

but since this is a graphics forum...

Gosh I hate how they've delt with the pixel art in here. I don't mind pixel art games, but it must be done right. Everything must fit within the same pixel grid/resolution on the same screen. That is not the case here. Certain elements are slightly higher resolution than others. There is stuff that occupies half-pixels, or 1,462384653 of a pixel... Ughhh. When characters move away from the screen and are scaled down, the scaling is done according to the full screen resolution and not the game's artificial low-res resolution. In fact, this game deals so slopply with resolution that I'd say it barely qualifies as having an actual defined simulated low-resolution. It hurts my eyes, I swear it does.

Whoa, I feel you! I don't want to see much material from this game, but yes, what you describe is awful. At least that's my opinion, too.

 

[Cyan]

I've been following the development of this game with great interest since it was first brought to public, as a real monkey island fanboy, and I believe it will be great.

but since this is a graphics forum...

Gosh I hate how they've delt with the pixel art in here. I don't mind pixel art games, but it must be done right. Everything must fit within the same pixel grid/resolution on the same screen. That is not the case here. Certain elements are slightly higher resolution than others. There is stuff that occupies half-pixels, or 1,462384653 of a pixel... Ughhh. When characters move away from the screen and are scaled down, the scaling is done according to the full screen resolution and not the game's artificial low-res resolution. In fact, this game deals so slopply with resolution that I'd say it barely qualifies as having an actual defined simulated low-resolution. It hurts my eyes, I swear it does.

interesting, I didn't notice that,you might have a keen eye for that kind of detail. It looks like your typical classic game to me. Maybe it's harder to recreate graphics like those accurately than we thought it would be.

 

[eloic]

interesting, I didn't notice that,you might have a keen eye for that kind of detail. It looks like your typical classic game to me. Maybe it's harder to recreate graphics like those accurately than we thought it would be.

No, I don't think it's harder than what most people think. You just have to output everything in real low resolution. There are even free engines (such as AGS) specially designed to create old style adventure games.

If I buy an old style adventure game, I'm not expecting higher resolution effects nor even menus, honestly. What I expect is to find an interesting story, nice puzzles and a good artistic direction to be displayed in those few pixels. And the art is broken if I can detect different sized pixels, ew!

 

[milk]

interesting, I didn't notice that,you might have a keen eye for that kind of detail. It looks like your typical classic game to me. Maybe it's harder to recreate graphics like those accurately than we thought it would be.

Yes I do have a keen eye for that kind of detail. It's both a blessing and a curse. It's part of my trade though, as I work as art director and graphic designer for ad agencies. It's thanks to this kind of nitpicking that I'm pushed to putting out polished work.

 

[Cyan]

Yes I do have a keen eye for that kind of detail. It's both a blessing and a curse. It's part of my trade though, as I work as art director and graphic designer for ad agencies. It's thanks to this kind of nitpicking that I'm pushed to putting out polished work.

someone brought the issue, I think it looks like the same problem you are mentioning, in this Ron Gilbert's post.

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/parallaxing

Ron Gilbert ✓ - Apr 02, 2015 at 13:39
The scaling is done in the with OpenGL and on the GPU, so the pixels do shrink in size. Scaling was really hard and time consuming back in the SCUMM days (and it looked like crap). Scaling today is basically free. I went back and forth on scaling and if I should use hardware or do the old style. I think I'm going to use hardware, there are too many benefits over doing it in software. For of the game, characters will remain at 100%, so it will only for special things, like walking off into the distance.

to which other person called Falvio replied

have to say I think the opposite is actually true, the pixel shrinking looks really out of place :S
The SCUMM scaling might have looked like crap, but if you are working with certain resolutions constraints they should be respected, imho

and then Ron Gilbert replied to him, too.
But several people expressed their worries about that scaling issue. If you follow the replies it's an interesting discussion nonetheless, from 2015.

I noticed the game is programmed in C#. Btw, could a mod please :smile2: write the complete name Ron Gilbert in the title of the thread, there is space for that now, I had to do with a R. because I had no more space for the title then.

 

[eloic]

At any rate, shrinking is one specific aspect of scaling. I never minded good full resolution characters shrinking and becoming an ugly mess while the pixel size was the same. In my eyes, is far more ugly when you have a low resolution character and upscale it to become bigger. But the worst of the worst is having different sized pixels. Heck, even in 3d games we complain about alpha effects and such being lower resolution than native. And no, I'm not talking about wanting exquisite high resolution graphics: as I said, I want consistency. That's why I find so charming old adventure games.

 

[milk]

Ron is quite behind on modern graphics programming. He is talking as if to mantain pixel proportions he had to do it all on the CPU, which is silly. He can still use open GL and all the nice performance of GPU's, abilities to do shaders, etc. All he has to do is to not render everything directly to the final screen buffer, but to a low-res texture, and than stretch that texture over the final screen. Preferebly, he should do it the closest integer number he can x2, x3, x4, x5... using nearest neighbor filtering (to preserve the pixel shapes) and scale that again to the exact screen resolution using bilenear filtering (to avoid distortion caused by scaling directly to the final screen resolution that is not a integer - the NES mini made that mistake)

Here is a link to a website dedicated ENTIRELY to this issue.

http://2dforever.com/fix-your-pixelart/

 

[Cyan]

Ron is quite behind on modern graphics programming. He is talking as if to mantain pixel proportions he had to do it all on the CPU, which is silly. He can still use open GL and all the nice performance of GPU's, abilities to do shaders, etc. All he has to do is to not render everything directly to the final screen buffer, but to a low-res texture, and than stretch that texture over the final screen. Preferebly, he should do it the closest integer number he can x2, x3, x4, x5... using nearest neighbor filtering (to preserve the pixel shapes) and scale that again to the exact screen resolution using bilenear filtering (to avoid distortion caused by scaling directly to the final screen resolution that is not a integer - the NES mini made that mistake)

Here is a link to a website dedicated ENTIRELY to this issue.

http://2dforever.com/fix-your-pixelart/

wow, interesting stuff there. I like how they compare graphics from the original SNES and smoother scaling methods you could use to avoid too much pixel deformation.

Ron Gilbert has talked about pixels and similar stuff in this entry too:

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/pixel_here_and_there

 

[Cyan]

Q: Will the game be play anywhere on Windows 10 and Xbox?
A: Yes. If you bought the game on Xbox or via the Windows 10 Store. The Windows Store version will release a few weeks after Steam/Xbox.

 

[Cyan]

the game is no2 available as a Play Anywhere game on Windows 10

http://www.windowscentral.com/thimbleweed-park-now-available-windows-10-xbox-play-anywhere-support

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Came over from the What are you playing now PC thread, and the PA news just raised my likelihood of purchase by at least 50%!

Really fantastic reviews as well.

 

[milk]

Man I wanna play this too. And its the kind of game I can install in my damn office computer and play it in 5 minute blocks throughout the day.