The 10 fps screenshot was taken in my Celeron laptop with Windows Vista, which is the one I use for coding. And there's been some optimizations since then.

But yeah, I'm aiming this renderer at high-end CPUs (for full HD, a Core i5 should be the minimum recommended). 

Here's the skybox l_swampn from Arcane Dimensions: before and now. These shots are from one of the lower corners of the skybox, and skyboxes in Retroquad are (still) rendered without any lighting of fog, just the raw preprocessed textures.

Now all six sides of the skybox are preprocessed as a single image, to smooth out the edges, and I've noticed that this helped to improve the image quality as a whole, getting rid of image artifacts like the pattern on the lower side of this skybox, therefore improving the overall color fidelity.

Right now, skyboxes are the only thing using this image format, but I'm going to port this image preprocessing algorithm into a texture compiler tool, to allow the engine to use 24-bit textures everywhere with fast load times. I'm really curious to see how the combination of this texture color quality with the 4-step dithered lighting will look.

All this has near zero impact on performance, by the way. I'm getting around 60 fps when rendering nothing but the skybox at full HD in my Core i5 laptop. Regular BSP geometry is slower to render due to lighting and their 3D mesh complexity. 

I was going to post this in the LowRez Jam thread since someone had brought up making pre-rendered sprites and I thought my tests could be helpful. But, it looks like the project may have found a pixel artist, which is awesome. For those of you who also like pixel art, this thread over at polycount has some awesome stuff.

Since I don't have the time, money or talent to create an entire bestiary of beautiful pixel art monsters I opted to do pre-rendered sprites instead, here are some shots from the first test I did some time ago:

pre-model doodles
initial sculpt
pre-retopo rig test
rendering setup
eight angle render
in-game test

This was made in blender. This is my first model and, of course, pre-rendered sprite. Making the actual model took a couple days, but most of that time was spent going through tuts from CG Cookie. I was pretty burned out after making the model and just did a rushed paint job because I really wanted to figure out the rendering bit and see how it would look in game. Needless to say, a better paint job would have gone a long way, but this is sufficient for this test. Also, I intend to use GLSL shaders to emulate software rendering of the game, so that will further alter the look of the sprites (and world).

I prefer the look of hand-drawn sprites over pre-rendered sprites, but the flexibility of going pre-rendered just can't be beat. Also, this project has a lot of characters and lots-o-frames for each one. So really, pre-rendered is the only feasible way to go about it, I think.

One thing I *hate* about some pre-rendered sprites is hard lighting and shadows, which give it a plastic, fake look and totally gives away the fact that they are pre-renderd. I did a series of tests and it turns out that flat, uniform lighting looks best (IMO). Maybe incorporate something like SpriteLamp could yield some badass results.

Here are some picture dumps of the sprite making process from Blood, Duke Nukem 3D and Doom that I found helpful and interesting.

I've also done some viewmodel tests with physical models made from toy gun parts, duct tape and paint. It was a fun experiment but I have since moved to 3D models for that too. Maybe I'll post some pics from that test sometime as well.

I know this is kind of a niche thing but I hope someone may have found it useful or interesting, I did! 

O_O 

I find this very interesting, I've also seen the graphics for the level before, at least the bricks and the ivy hanging down from the arch, cause you have posted this at Q3W before right?

I love these old low polygon games, I have such an itch creating a game like this haha. 

Yeah, this is some of the earliest test art, so you may have seen it before. I go to q3w when I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around shaders. The arch is a decal with which I was having issues, that's probably what you saw.

I'm trying not have so much of a death grip on what I reveal or not, plus this is only old, pre-alpha test art, so not that big of a deal.

There certainly is something charming about low tech games... 

Do you use the Q3 engine for this, or what do you mean? Just the bsp with it's shaders?

I think you can get a long way with pre-rendered frames, like you do. We talked about this at the office today, if you do ONLY that and not mix it in with regular pixel art, then you will have a consistent and clean overall art style. 

Yes, consistency is definitely best. I use hand drawn sprites for pre-model visualization just so I can get things looking right before committing to a model. 

What engine? Darkplaces perhaps? 

Yes, dp, which I would like to eventually fork. Also using quakec/csqc. 

This is also made in darkplaces
http://www.retroblazer.com/

And also uses sprites as enemies. 

Yeah, I'm familiar. I was rooting for them when they launched their kickstarter. Sadly they did't get very far. IMO, it's sorely lacking in the gameplay department, which the primary focus of my current project.

AFAIK, steelstorm is the only commercial game using darkplaces. 

Words not good 

This art of yours is freaking great.

I don't think you need to mimic software rendering. At 64*64, you're going to need all the detail you can get, specially on distant objects, so I'd recommend regular 32-bit rendering with anisotropic filtering and trilinear mipmap filtering.

Since the resolution is so small, you can also use 8-bit alpha channels on the sprites and enable FSAA to smooth out all edges.

And for sharp pixelated texturing on close-ups, you can use this large texture magnification for pixelated games without aliasing between texels shader.

By combining all these approaches you should get a visual style with sharp texturing and smooth geometry.

Also, pre-render a shadow directly from above the models, to give a better sense of them touching the ground. You can even use an 8-bit alpha channel to make them really smooth.
The fact that the prerendered models aren't lit directly from above isn't a problem. Artistic freedom can be more charming than realism in such cases. 

no chance of making that a 3d model then? you could make a low poly mesh and render the high poly texture onto a low poly UV...

either way, that thing looks awesome. really well done. :) 

Oh crap, I thought Killpixel was Khreathor. My reply was for the low res jam game.

https://33.media.tumblr.com/c3139b5d84e53da909f8b7083b022f23/tumblr_nsb0doVQEo1s2yegdo1_500.gif 

Oh crap, I thought Killpixel was Khreathor. My reply was for the low res jam game.

Nope, not Khreathor. Glad you liked the art though! Interesting write-up you linked as well.

@necros - Thanks :) But no, game-ready models are not on the agenda. The irony of creating high poly models just to turn them into low res sprites has not escaped me, however. 

well, most of the hard work is done already, if you ever decide to do it... 

Beautiful work, hell of a first model! With Blender you can render out a world space or tangent space normal map. SpriteLamp tends to have a pillow shaded look it to. 

Did the password change? I tried the ZigguratVertigoBlewTronynsSocksOff and it doesn't seem to be working 

@joshua - thanks! I'll look into normal maps, still feeling my way through blender (and 3d modeling, for that matter).

Delver was one of the games I used as reference when exploring the pixel art style. I still pop in once in a while just to so soak in the art, go figure! 

The password still works for me.

One problem I've had before is when using copy & paste to enter the password. Sometimes I would get an extra space at the end. 

I can vieuw quaktastic, but every link further bounces back to the waybackmachine.

I tied all, delete cookies, cleaned up webbrowser. There's just some kind of hacker in between. 

Quaddicted.