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Monday, 25 November 2013

Scan lines and visual effects

Over the weekend i was doing some research and stumbled across a device called SLG 3000 scan line generator, the SLG 3000 enables you to enjoy the look of authentic arcade style scan lines on a modern television or PC monitor. It can be used with most retro systems provided you first convert the video output to a 640x480 VGA signal. Here is a video demonstration of the device being used with a Dreamcast as it natively outputs in this format so it's ideal for use with the SLG3000:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vscKaVByjRU

Now, obviously this device cannot be used in our game as we are not running from a console but this gave me the idea of emulating scan lines to give our game a true arcade style. Now i am obviously not sure how this could look on a 3d platformer as this look has typically only been on 8-bit/16-bit games due to the the CRT technology at the time. Here is an example of of genuine hardware scan lines- on a 240p source running on a Sony BVM monitor..


Now i believe this would be a really nice effect that should be easily do-able in unity as a full screen shader or screen effect. I can't imagine this being something that is too hard to do, obviously we won't be able to emulate interlaced signals. Here is an example of the difference between non scanlines and scanlines to show the difference.

Another idea would be to have the bubbled/fish eye type screen around the edges, like the older CRT screens with curves glass screens. Here is an example that was done with screen filters on a emulator:


Here is a few more examples of other screen effects and filters and glitched out problems that we can try to integrate into our game, visually and physically. Stuff like this on boot up and when the character dies etc.

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