Posted by atan2 3 days ago
>But a CRT isn’t a camera filming the world. Its a physical device that generates an image as an output of physical process. [...] That’s not a post-process overlay or filter effect, its an entirely different mental model of what it means to draw or render an image. I think this is why I struggled when trying to bolt this onto a modern engine. The foundations between the two models is just so fundamentally different. At this point, I was already beginning to consider my options. I was half inclined to give up.
An LCD or an OLED are also not cameras. I honestly don't understand what insight this person believes they've stumbled upon.
This is also very mystifying:
>The frame is never a single instant, its a culmination of integrations over time.
Strictly speaking, a CRT doesn't understand frames. It just fires whatever intensity of electrons is indicated by an analog signal at any given time as the magnets steer the beam across the screen in whatever pattern has been designed into them. If the tube is controlled by a digital source, there will likely be some kind of framebuffer of some size somewhere on the pipeline that stores at least a full scanline, and nowadays invariably a complete frame, so a DAC can convert the values in it to the analog signal expected by the gun.
The entire article supposedly addresses the "why", but after getting to the end, I still don't understand the why. What's wrong with Unity or Unreal architecturally that this guy's engine addresses?
Here’s an entertaining video showing the difference in retro games on crt and lcd screens. It’s pretty incredible if you aren’t aware. Games back then were designed on CRTs and can look awful on LCDs in comparison.
We did lose quite a lot when we trasitioned to lcd screens.
And then they got BIGGER.
I do remember playing some NES games on emulators on LED screens and thinking the weather effects and such looked pretty bad compared to the CRT experience I remembered, but hadn't gone much deeper than that. I'll have to try and find a CRT and do some tests
However, I have not tried, so I cannot verify that claim to 100% accuracy. The author ...might have tried? They definitely surveyed the landscape. My read of the article was that they went down this rabbit hole and back-justified it instead of investing a similar amount of time in a practical solution in a modern engine.
CRT look and feel is a niche full of very passionate and opinionated people.
As an example, I will quote the article:
> Retro Game Engine owns the full frame lifecycle. I decide what the input signals are, what the display does with it, how time affects it, what gets presented and when.
You can replace "Retro Game Engine" in that sentence with "Unity" or "Godot" and it is just as true.