Old school awesomeness

[Dan]

This is a demo of an old technique used for animations back in the day when computers were really slow and we had to find clever ways to cheat to pretend we had real animations / 3D / whatever.

Check the following demo:

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5

This requires some serious talent to design something like that.

[Sik]

This is indeed absolutely impressive. Nice find Dan, it brings back some good old memories ^^

[Wolfboy]

The people who designed these animations are indeed really talented!

[freejosh]

That's really cool, I didn't understand what was happening to produce the animation until I saw the actual pallette. Very innovative.

[Fitz1980]

As is often the case it's less about the tools that you have than it is how you use them.  That's how a movie like "Jurassic Park" (1993) can have special effects that look better than some CGI blockbusters released this year.  I love the show "Babylon 5" (1994-1999) and some of their effects look pretty dated, but their entire special effects department was using computers that had less power than my home computer today.

[Karla]

However, 2D pixel graphics of old are making a comeback in recent years, with mobile devices and web games.

It's always the way! The old techniques never get forgotten, just redeployed. For example magnetic tape used for mainframes, then personal computers, then digital video cameras etc.

If things continue as they do pervasive computing will be the next area that old school techniques will be used in.

Although saying that, self compiling programming language compilers that are about 200K in size in total don't seem to be making a comeback. I am sure I'm going to get corrected on this though! :)

[mcibear]

Wait this is old school, why do I feel old all of a suden?  I remeber when the computer doing 8 colours was good.  Then again I leared to use DOS before I could read.  This is impresive none the less.

[Ed]

As is often the case it's less about the tools that you have than it is how you use them.  That's how a movie like "Jurassic Park" (1993) can have special effects that look better than some CGI blockbusters released this year.  I love the show "Babylon 5" (1994-1999) and some of their effects look pretty dated, but their entire special effects department was using computers that had less power than my home computer today.

Similarly, I honestly think that the original Star Wars' ships look better than the ones from the new trilogy. Obviously the lasers and explosions aren't anywhere near as convincing, but the actual ships themselves I think look much, much better.

[Steggsaurus]

I love the show "Babylon 5" (1994-1999) and some of their effects look pretty dated, but their entire special effects department was using computers that had less power than my home computer today.

and they did it in a CAVE!  With a box of SCRAPS!!!

... sorry.

Great animations.  Takes me back to some of the graphic adventures my cousin used to play on his home PC - I was always too little to play them, but the graphics i found fascinating.

[Cabding]

there was a star wars marathon this weekend on Spike and i was dissapointed that in episode IV they had put in a CGI Jabba the hut. kinda ruins it. like when you paint a new room you realize how shitty the rest of the house looks.