sometimes, sierra on-line artists could be *really* on their game when it came to rendering 256 colour backgrounds in deluxepaint

vga256@dialup.cafe

this particular background from Police Quest 3 was likely hand painted on traditional media, scanned in, and then touched up in dpaint

i usually use this scene as an example of an interesting cinematic high-angle rarely seen in games, but today i thought i'd focus on the anti-aliasing. aliasing or "jaggies" occur when a high-res image is resampled to a much lower resolution - and only get worse as the resolution decreases. you can imagine how much resolution loss there was, going from a physical painting, to a 320x200 image. jaggies galore. it probably looked like a mess when it first came out of the scanner.

this is why the additional touch-up step in dpaint was so important. artists had the chance to iron out jaggies by blending neighbouring colours into more pleasant (smoother) patterns, so harsh lines wouldn't stand out so much

handcrafted AA became a lost art in the mid-90s, when photoshop made layers and transparency ubiquitous. today, you can blend an object into the background using opacity sliders, or using a blending tool.

but in 1992 when this game would have been painted, the palette was limited to 256 colours with *no* transparency or automatic blending available. artists had to build "ramps" or tiny incremental palettes of similar colours, and then use those to smooth out the hard lines.

i've zoomed in on the destroyed car so you can see the anti-aliasing approach this artist used. it's still jaggy, but jaggy in a pleasant, relaxing manner. compare it to the white car in the bottom right corner, which has had no AA drawn, and is harsh and unpleasant to look at, "popping" off of the background like a bad copy + paste job.

i love that game art of the early 90s was a mix of traditional colour-mixing knowledge, and intensely delicate pixel art. someone zoomed in to 800% to work on the back end of that car for an hour, just to provide you with a stronger sense of realism.

it is interesting to me that while you could try to replicate this scene using transparency today (and a 16M colour palette) - you'd end up with something far less pleasant, and less cohesive for the eye. using such a compressed palette of 256 colours forced colour coherence and holism into the process. if you only have 6 shades of white to work with, it can make things *easier* for the eye to read.

#adventureGames #pixelArt #sierraOnline