[OUT OF DATE] This version has since been halted in production, the new version can be found here: Pixelated Roblox Part 4!
I’ve always been interested in shaping Roblox games in a way that makes them not even look like Roblox games. After seeing a Youtube video on Unity compute shaders I became really inspired to want to make my own look for a game.
I’ve always enjoyed purposefully looking pixelation and wanted to see if it were doable. I found a wonderful forum post asking if this were possible and how it could be done. The majority of people said that it would be too computationally expensive and wouldn’t run well if at all, so I wanted to put that to the test! (uhh yeah no, there’s no like big reveal here, they were 100% right)
TL;DR: People said it wasn’t a good idea, they were right, but I did it anyway.
fun fact! after making that “wonderful forum post”, i actually challenged my self to try and get a pixelation GUI going, and, i did!
here’s what my GUI currently looks like in action:
This is 75x75p, but normally i would run this at 25x25p to 40x40p. But i did this just to get a screenshot, just cause its unplayable at 75x75p, as your PC runs at 3 FPS.
And yes, i added shading to tell distance. Hopefully later on i can implement light emitters with casting shadows!
That’s amazing! I see to cut down on performance drainage you decided to keep the screen as a square and black everything else out. Very creative! I was always thinking of how I could possibly make this more efficient.
I’ve had a recent idea on this topic that I believe could actually make pixelation 100% viable and frankly kind of easy.
Have you guy’s ever played the Portal Demo game? In it they use ViewportFrame’s to show the other side of the portal, one thing I noticed while playing is that if your camera get’s too close to the portal, the image of the other side becomes perfectly pixelated.
My idea is to strap a Part with a ViewportFrame displaying exactly what the camera would normally see very close to the camera, this will cost a little bit in processing but not nearly as much as the ray casts do! I’ll try to set up a demo for this idea and see if it’s possible.
