vunderba
Nice article. There's another option for pixel art that's
recently been coming into vogue as tool usage improves in
LLMs which is procedural graphics.I actually experimented
with creating a set of skills around rendering early AGI
style EGA graphical scenes, and it worked surprisingly
well.So rather than storing full bitmaps, you instead
store sequences of simple drawing instructions designed to
recreate some specific scene - like you would an SVG.As a
result you end up sidestepping a lot of the problems with
larger generative models, which can have issues with grid
alignment, palette choices, and high-frequency
noise.https://github.com/scpedicini/agi-stylisthttps://kq-
styles.specr.net
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> armcat
This is very cool! I will try your method for
background and tile creation in the asset-generation
tool I've built [1]. Would your procedural method work
for animations as well, like sprites?[1]
https://github.com/acatovic/ai-game-studio
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> thijson
Looks great. This could be a form of image
compression.
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> nonethewiser
I suspect your picscript language is an entirely
unnecessary abstraction and the prompt (ie the model)
is doing all the work.
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> > badsectoracula
How so? Judging from the examples the model does
seem to take advantage of the language (creates
and uses reusable elements) and AFAICT the
language itself compiles down to "real" Sierra PIC
commands so in theory it can be used with a Sierra
PIC viewer/engine.
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> > > nonethewiser
Yeah compiling to Sierra PIC is a unique
advantage over asking the model for an image.
But the claim im attacking is different. The
claim in attacking is that you cant just tell
it to produce images like this directly.>As a
result you end up sidestepping a lot of the
problems with larger generative models, which
can have issues with grid alignment, palette
choices, and high-frequency noise.All of these
can be avoided with simple prompts and don't
require all this ceremony.Convo then the
artifact from the convo (sorry, apparently no
way to share the pics but they are just
captured from the artifact).Convo:
https://claude.ai/share/78cd63c8-ffdd-4569-8de
2-ac8ab5c5cfe0Artifact:
https://claude.ai/artifact/3M6xiKJKz1oDxTKGWi8
FUi
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> > > > nsib96
the style is completly differrent...
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> satvikpendem
Exactly, turn something nondeterministic into
something more deterministic and AI does a great job
at that.
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> westsmith
Neat! I've followed you on Github. I like the idea of
going to the past to see what works and adapting it
for the LLM age. Nice work!
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> > vunderba
Thanks! Yeah, I started building it because I read
an interview with the original creators of King's
Quest, Ken and Roberta Williams where they
mentioned in passing that it was too expensive (in
the 80s) from a storage perspective to store
entire bitmaps for each scene, so instead they'd
just store a series of very simple drawing
instructions and render on demand.I'm super
excited to see more LLM-driven procedural graphics
stuff in the future!
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__bias
These models always create pixel art that looks like
garbage because the people using it don't know enough
about the medium to properly judge the output. This
article is no exception. If you want pixel art for your
project then learn or hire someone with that expertise
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> sheepscreek
Are you saying people unfamiliar with the 'pixel arts'
can't enjoy it their own way?I don't think the author
is posing as a professional. These models are like
having a 3D printer at home. Very handy in a pinch,
but what they make doesn't replace the real thing.
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> > stymaar
> Are you saying people unfamiliar with the 'pixel
arts' can't enjoy it their own way?The problem
isn't that they look shitty to pixel artists or
experts, they look shitty for anyone with a bit of
observation.It's junk art the same way Mc Donald's
is junk food.
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> > > user43928
It's calorie-dense and high in sodium?I think
we could do a bit better here with the
explanation of what looks bad to you..
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> > > > stymaar
> It's calorie-dense and high in
sodium?There's plenty of real food that is
as heavy and as salted, and as such no
healthier, than junk food. But it actually
tastes good. (I can't exactly put the
finger on what makes an Italian pizza
better than a US 7/11 one, but it's not
about the former being healthier).
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> > > > ramblurr
I am just a layperson when it comes to
pixel art, but to me the example in the
article is clearly garbage/low quality.-
the magenta background is still visible
along the edges
- the color palette is all over the place
- random noise pixels of totally different
colors are visible scattered around
- the lighting and shading doesn't look
that good
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> Aerroon
But if the user thinks it looks fine, then won't most
players think the same?I just don't get the complaints
about "use proper art" when it comes to games. Most of
the time the game has some other, far more glaring,
visual issues (anti-aliasing, clipping,
icons-not-matching-items).
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> > IsTom
> But if the user thinks it looks fine, then won't
most players think the same?I have a suspicion
that when you're looking at (and generating,
because you then look at the results) AI generated
images and text more you get desensitized and are
more likely to say that something looks okay when
to other people it won't.
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> > tuna74
You don't want to anti-alias when having pixel
art.
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turbobutton
Related question: Whenever I try to run Image generation
locally, be it with Flux or Qwen, I seem to be getting
results that are about 1-2 years behind what ChatGPT can
produce today - and take up to 5 minutes for a single
image. Is this a hardware problem (running it on a decent
windows gaming PC), a configuration problem or just the
reality of what local models can deliver at the moment on
consumer hardware?
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> user43928
I found that for Qwen Image 2.1 the prompt enhancer
makes a big difference.It won't bridge the gap to
gpt-image-2.5 though, and it's going to slow down the
process further.With a 4090, Qwen Image 2.1 Turbo
takes around 15s per image, depending on the
resolution. That's without the prompt enhancer.
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> zf00002
Configuration and maybe prompting problem in my
experience. Are you doing the prompting or are you
letting claude or something do it?
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> satvikpendem
Look into r/StableDiffusion and follow their prompts
and download their ComfyUI workflows.
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> > turbobutton
Thanks, I've done that, but with mixed results.
I've also tried comfyui wrappers and alternatives
that try to hide the complexity and just set
sensible defaults, but I'm beginning to suspect
its ultimately a consumer hardware vs million
dollar NVidia server question.
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> > > satvikpendem
What are you trying to generate? I've also
noticed that local models aren't as good as
cloud models due to hardware but there are
still ways of optimizing the process.
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> Karuma
You can get results a billion times better than the
horrible, disgusting look of ChatGPT in less than a
couple of seconds with a model like Krea or MOSS, and
ComfyUI. With just a 8GB VRAM GPU or so...Just visit
Civitai, look at the pages for the base models, filter
for images with the ComfyUI workflow in them, then you
can just download and drag and drop them onto your
local ComfyUI app.
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Lerc
Are control nets not being used much anymore? I haven't
seen anything that provides a similar level of composition
control, and yet I do not see them being referenced much
at all.
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> search_facility
They are used a lot, and modern edit models kind of
support base cases - depth, canny, openpose - as a
reference image. I mean they understand "use image 2
as depth map", result indeed have same depth, etc. But
interpretation sometimes arbitrary to model.For the
tasks where several control nets should be adhered
(depth and canny and segmentation) dreaded SDXL is
still unmatched. SDXL also the only one handling
influence weight for each control net normally, this
ability completely vanished on modern modelsControl
nets in early post-SDXL models like ZIT or Flux kind
of work too, but still much worse in quality when
combined. I suspect pure diffusion architecture of
SDXL is really favorable to mixing control signals
with precision, DITs probably can be trained to
similar level for mixing signals - but it is much
harder and never seen in practice. At least every
post-SDXL model I tried is trained with single one in
mind, judging from my attempts. This rant is from
personal expirience.
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tonmoy
I have been asking opus 5.5 to write python to create
logos. It is more consistent and easier to control than
gen AI for this purpose
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armcat
You mentioned in your README that it was tested with
GLM-5.3 but this is not a multi-modal model. Did you mean
GLM-5.3-Flash?
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