a comprehensive collection of all LucasArts background art (1987-2000)

[Laserschwert]

4 hours ago, JPL said:

 I was curious if the PDF specs support embedded PNGs with indexed color specifically (the PNGs in the sample you gave were RGB, afaict) - according to this page they do - because IMO it's important to hold onto that for uses like color cycling and palette swaps (see below).

When I open the PDF in Photoshop, I can choose to open individual images from it. And all images show up with indexed palettes.

[Thrik]

Regarding the CRT filter, doing this via the web could be a challenging project if someone hasn’t already built it, but you could just take a second set of screenshots via something like ShaderGlass on the desktop. It would be a one-off pain but then would allow for easy viewing on any device. Perhaps an on/off setting next to the pictures.

 

This is obviously getting quite ambitious but could be iterated on over time, and Mojo has plenty of people who are good at this sort of thing. I have let my best people (Remi) know about the potential interest in hosting and/or implementation.

[Laserschwert]

ScummVM has different shaders for CRT overlays or dither removal. But I don't know if these could be leveraged on a web page.

 

Apart from that, though, it's trivial to just batch-apply a CRT filter to all files (or run them through other tools for some fancier cathode ray simulation).

Edited August 13, 2023 by Laserschwert

[Benny]

1 hour ago, Laserschwert said:

ScummVM has different shaders for CRT overlays or dither removal. But I don't know if these could be leveraged on a web page.

 

Apart from that, though, it's trivial to just batch-apply a CRT filter to all files (or run them through other tools for some fancier cathode ray simulation).

A basic example of that here https://skynetde.github.io/scummvm-shader-comparison/

[Laserschwert]

These are so good. I think the Royale ones are my favorites.

 

Edited August 14, 2023 by Laserschwert

[JPL]

6 hours ago, Laserschwert said:

When I open the PDF in Photoshop, I can choose to open individual images from it. And all images show up with indexed palettes.

That probably just means the program I used to extract the PNG was converting it then, that's good to know!

[Lagomorph01]

21 hours ago, Laserschwert said:

These are so good. I think the Royale ones are my favorites.

Wow! That looks amazing!

Are the Royale shaders optional downloads? I can't seem to find them in my ScummVM options.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Guest Dr Venom looks exactly how I remember MI2 on my CRT monitor back in the day ❤️

[JPL]

Hi folks. The LucasArts Places Mastodon and Cohost bots have been running strong for over a year now, but I haven't totally forgotten about the other part of this project, a browseable online repository for all the art.

 

Around this time a year ago, I had a look around at all the different javascript lightbox libraries out there, and tried out a few of them. "nanogallery2" seemed as good as any, so I did a couple tests on my site, just to see what a single game's page might look like (ignore the page's CSS and overall visual style, that's just what my personal website uses):

 

http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/maniac64/
http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/monkey2/

 

One of the difficulties I encountered was in how to handle all the games with non-square pixels (ie everything before Curse of Monkey Island). With HTML <img> tags it's certainly possible to non-uniformly scale an original 320x200 image to be the correct aspect ratio, but there's no guarantee it'll look good in most browsers. For the tests above, I pre-processed the images, doing the same kind of upscale + aspect correct that the LucasArts Places bot code does, effectively increasing the image's size X4 so that the nonuniform scale doesn't look too noticeable. The file size increase, while non-trivial, isn't the biggest concern; it's more that it's changing the original image from the collection, and one of my primary goals here is to provide those images as close to the source formats as possible. Of course, the answer there might simply be to have a "download original" link for each piece of art.

 

I also wanted to present the art for each port of each game "side by side", with the alternate versions just a click away. Here's an attempt at that kind of functionality I just whipped up:

 

http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/multi_plat_images/

 

Alongside aspect ratio correction, this is another feature that off-the-shelf lightbox plugins don't have - as Ron pointed out, most of them are aimed at photographers.

 

And of course there's always the dream features, like being able to toggle on a CRT shader, and heck maybe even embedding the music for rooms where applicable. And gosh, what if the few backgrounds that made use of color cycling (things like the labyrinth waterfalls from Fate of Atlantis) used something like the HTML5 Color Cycling Demo tech to present those? That's getting wayy ahead of myself, though.

 

So I'm kinda wondering if this means I should try modifying one of the open source lightbox plugins to add these features. Or maybe there's already something out there that would work great for this, that I just don't know about.

Edited September 1 by JPL