A lot. I come across old stuff in the gallery occasionally and laugh because I know it would be sent back today. Things slip through the cracks. It's tough but as long as you can prove your innocence, then you'll be fine. 

Btw, awesome work here. The animation is great! And I love the colors

I agree, I think the end result matters not how it was achieved, as long as it's original work. I wonder how many of the original pioneers of the medium would have their work denied entry because it was made with those dirty dirty tools :)

As tools become more advanced, PJ faces tougher decisions when approving things. When you upload work that MIGHT be controversial in the eyes of purists, this kind of thing happens.  I believe this is valid and acceptable pixel art for the gallery. 

For a long time this was a difficult effect to achieve, and I think a lot of the PJ rules were put in place before stuff like this became easier or known about. Index painting is another good example. I'm sure someone was doing it way back when PJ was born, but not many knew about it. Today it's very common thanks to great tutorials by amazing artists. Index painting produces legitimate pixel art, but it's been established on multiple occasions that it's not acceptable on PJ. I've seen awesome pieces not make it simply because the creator stated that they made it using index painting techniques.  Kind of unfortunate..

Thank you for the recommendation. We will definitely be writing up a ruleset. As we are talking about art, there will always be a little bit subjectivity involved. Also we won’t bother with removing very old pieces out of our respect to the judgement of the past moderators.

Also thanks for understanding. Know that there is nothing against you here.

Hi Gecimen

1. As I've stated in my first post, they are resized but not cleaned up due to time constraints.

2. It is not a transparent overlay, it is a layer mask that deletes the brighter clouds revealing the darker clouds underneath, they are stacked on top of each other and perfectly in sync.

It would take a lot longer than 5 mins to fix everything up and since it is commercial work that means it likeley won't be.

If you believe that it's a fishy piece then go ahead and remove it, but then do so equally to other pieces. Honestly this would be so much easier to resolve if you guys had a standard submission ruleset that applies to all of the pieces in the gallery regardless of how old it is. That would be my suggestion for what it's worth.

I think you can agree that a person can't reasonably be expected to follow invisible rules that change depending on the moderator's subjective value judgement at the time. Why not have a standard set of rules that apply to everyone? Of course this means you would have to remove pieces that violate this ruleset, otherwise you will come of as being hypocritical.

On the Jal piece: considering the insane amount of noise it almost looks like it was made with the spray tool in ms paint. Some unoptimized lines as well. I don't think it's pixel perfect, but you do so maybe the definition of "pixel perfect" is highly subjective. We'll have to agree to disagree on this one :)

Oh and the preview slightly surpasses the required 25kb file size to appear on the front page.

Hey Wolfenoctis, you know you are a revered artist here and on other communities and you have the experience to judge if this piece has the pixel quality (and we all think it does) and if you've used non-pixel art (NPA) methods while making this.

The parts that have been pointed out are:

1- That the front and back clouds are very similar but in different sizes (reminds of rescaling).

2- There is a transparent dither layer in front of the whole thing.

I'm quite sure you are able to make this an undoubtfully pure pixel art piece in 5 minutes but if you don't want to we'll understand. We will approve this piece because of its pixel quality and because your judgement as a pixel artist is at least as valid as ours. If you want to remove the doubts later on by applying a fix later on, that's great. If you're happy with it as it is, that's ok by us but I hope someone else doesn't give it as a "fishy" example as you did other past pieces.

In the gallery there will be plenty of examples of pieces that use much worse effects or look much worse, sadly. In the past there have been different standards, and pieces unintentionally slip through from time to time. However that is no excuse for us not to strive for a better gallery.

I'll comment on the ones you've linked.

The first one, uneven dithering: Uneven dithering isn't wrong on necessarily. The piece you've shown is a great example of dithering placed exactly as seemingly intended, receiving the smoothness and texture only a hand controlled dither pattern can achieve.

In the second, we would always discourage scaling without cleanup. The water in this image has some, but actually very few scaling artifects. It surely could have been done even cleaner, but I don't think it is even close to as rough as we're looking at here.

I can not find fault in Jalonso's background, what would you suggest is not pixel perfect about it?

The helicopter beach scene, yes obviously this is terrible. With the accidental color redux dithering on the helicopter, the gradient through the water, the semi transparent wings, the rough palm leaves and the grain on the beach characters, there is no way this would get in today. Mind you that piece was posted more than 12 years ago.

I thought that it was glaringly obvious that the uncleanliness stands out here, but just in case here is an image to show what I mean. Green is the semi transparent dithering pattern, which seemingly randomly becomes double width in some rows and columns, and acts completely unrelated to the clouds animation or shape. Yellow is the artifacts from scaling. Magenta are a bunch of stray pixels.

https://i.imgur.com/L8tCFAQ.gif

As for the invisible ruleset, sadly yes there is an invisible rule set, and behind the scenes I'm making a big effort to get that to become more visible. Mainly it comes down to our (shifting and some times individual) notion of what pixel art is or should be: Art focussed on the relationship between individual pixels.

You're very welcome to participate in our ongoing discussion on what PJ should and should not allow in its gallery in the future, have a look here.

I'll send in another mod to decide if this goes in or gets sent back.

No, not really. It seems that I am being held to a different standard than other artists for some reason.

Uneven dithering: http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/33722.htm

"automated" effects causing distortion: http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/49906.htm

Not pixel perfect: http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/12726.htm  http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/6765.htm

And these are just some pieces from the hall of fame, loads more examples. So why is it actually being denied entry? It feels like I'm expected to follow an invisible set of rules here, what is going on?

Sorry, you're right, obviously hand drawn but scaled. Which sadly does ruin the pixel perfectness of the clouds...

As for dithering, I have nothing against dithering, but now it is like a layer on top of the animation which put's a strangely static texture on the clouds. The dithering pattern is strangely uneven, as if it has been scaled as well. The dithering on the glow around the moon seems handmade but why is it applied to only a couple of frames?

All of the techniques you've used make sense with time constraints for games, but due to the uncleanlyness of the automated effects and it's negative impact on pixel details it's unsuitable for the gallery. I'll get another moderator to look at this as well, but they are likely to say the same.

Does that anwer your question?

Hi Hapiel

They were in fact hand drawn, just never polished up due to time constraints, the clouds are made with a base particle that is resized to create the thicker/thinner areas of the cloud, depending on the cloud's position the rough shading on the particle varies. The dither overlay is actually a dither mask, each cloud is actually 4 clouds stacked on top of each other (4 different light levels) so that the cloud appears brighter the nearer it is to the moon and darker when far away.

I dont know why you say the dither is out of place, cant really achieve the effect I'm going for with 13 colors and not use dither. Could you explain what you mean?

Hey Wolfenoctis,

This looks great! However, it also looks as if the moving clouds were not completely hand drawn. That would of course be nearly infeasible for a picture this large and this many frames, but it does make thiswork unsuitable for the PJ gallery...

Also, why do you have this strange dithering overlay? It looks out of place!

Good luck withy our game :)

Holy damn! That's really cool.

Nice use of sliding dithering on the moon in the background. looks neat.