oh neat, artwork that isn't 15+ years old in the hall of fame
It tends to come in waves. Sometimes you'll feel really stagnant and other times you're amazed over what you apparently can do now.
looking at my pixel art improvements in the gallery rn is honestly a little wild. my most recent pixel art is so much prettier than my vtuber concept from a few months back
anyone else find art level-ups staggering sometimes?
Here is the link to Secret Santa post for easier access, because it is already swamped by many fresher news.
During that last decade, have you made any cool artworks you could share in the gallery?
@Partack, wow, a comeback after ten years. I wasn't around back then, but still, I'm very happy to read this.
I still don't get why everyone is all up in arms about AI given that real live humans frankensprite and "copyright" ownership over palettes. At least the AI isn't threatening to murder anyone's dog. 
Hey PJ, keep on rockin. you guys are still awesome =) i'm glad to see this site still active
Hello everyone! Does anyone have the link to that pixel art tutorial by Cure? Where he examplies what is considered pixel art and whatnot? A friend of mine is starting to do pixel art and I thought that would a nice first steps.
my apologies i should have read more closely. i guess my bias against ai in general colored my perspective haha
In that case, the creator of the plugin/model clarifies that it was trained with a person's sprites, with their authorization.
wow those are pretty incredible tools, i know ai is frowned upon here but i'm impressed there's one that works so well in conjunction with aseprite. looks like it pretty shamelessly borrows from other artists though, in some of the examples you can even see it faking a signature in the bottom right cornor lol
the adopt pixel extension for aseprite looks good:
https://astropulse.gumroad.com/
the stable diffusion plugin looks good too! and in the preview of retro diffusion, they use a plugin called paletize I think. This is a start way!
would be interesting to somehow have a high res image on a layer, and pixel in chunky pixels on top of that image. like tracing with legos haha. maybe photoshop can do that? but yeah scaling down a photo and just doing pixel art on top is a pretty quick way to get where you need to be, compared to trying to get whatever software to behave just the way i want.
Yeah I think Reo's method is the way to go. Personally I scale using GIMP, load into Grafx2, then auto-reduce the palette to a number where it feels like it still maintains all the info I want, could be 64 colors or more, then I manually combine similar colors until I feel the palette is about as concise as it can be. Then I load it into Aseprite to do the actual pixelling and cleanup.
Though sometimes I find it faster and easier to just pixel right on top of the (downscaled) full-color photo/painting using a limited palette, using the full scale image as a reference. I used this latter method for these portraits.
i think they mean a method for turning a regular image into pixel art, without having artifacts or needing to do manual editing to make it convincing. i personally don't know of any way to do it without lot's of cleanup, but what reo suggested is probably the closest you can get with normal image editing software. maybe there's something out there though.
So, does anyone know the way to process an image so that it has, let's say, "the rules of pixel art"?
Thanks for your insight on your process with this, Reo! Picking out the palette first and then indexing from there makes so much sense, duh.
Dunno about best but the way I do it, if there's a digital painting I think would be more fun to do/would look better as a piece of pixel art, Is I bring it into Aseprite and size it down to a size where it looks good and I then manually pick out a pixel art appropiate palette from the colors in the painting (so something like 8-24 colors). I then set the color mode to indexed. Obviously some detail will be lost/not every shade will survive but that kind of problem solving is what I enjoy about the process anyway.
Guys, you must stop making so much noise in this chat.... I can't sleep!
No. He stopped replying to everything including his emergency contact and even skype.
It's possible he's still alive but scrubbed his internet identity clean and change his phone number. Because last time I talked to him he was somewhat depressed and said he's going to turn off his phone and go fishing for a week. That was the last I ever heard from him. 
Nobody has managed to get in touch, but there has been a sign of life from what seems to be him (I don't doubt it), at some subreddit, 4 years ago (so 3 years after he disappeared from PJ), which was discovered recently.
Secretly checking monthly awards
Still seeing pixel purist discussions, never change pixel joint. :)
I don't really do art much as I shifted into working IT in banks,absolutely boring and not really well paid. I long to just sit, exist and do some art, no matter how bad it is, but the time is very limited, need to put food on the table.
In the end, did someone manage to contact Jal? Did he pass away? I always had that in mind.
q=1 is the only parameter that works, which gives page x of whatever your latest selected category was. If you were looking at the hall of fame and enters q=1&pg=4227, it gives you the lowest rated artworks. if you look at newest pixel art, it gives you the oldest artwork.
Yeah going back with pages works somehow but only with something like pixeljoint.com/...?q=1&pg=4220, and not with something like ...?ob=rating&pg=4220 parameters which is the one used for Hall of Fame section.
While at it I also tried parameters like ?ob=showcase&pg=4220, ?ob=date&pg=4220, and ?ob=favorites&pg=4220 and these don't work.
Oh great,I forgot to use the url to view,4000+?That's crazy!
You can reach a lot of interesting places if you hack page numbers in the url. The hall of fame goes back to page 4000+ if you feel like going there.
It works and all pieces I've added are still there. Thanks a lot! 
@dinpixels; try to change the number in the page link from 48 to 49. 
Oh my you're right. I still remember some of the first pieces I added to favorites and now they're gone. 
My favorite's pages are currently 48 in total. I haven't checked the total pages last time I checked but I'm leaving this info here just in case that it's important.
There seems to be an upper limit to adding favourites on PJ?Now every time a new collection is added,the original will be one less.
-By the time I discovered this,at least one page in the initial favourites was missing:(
What's the typical queue wait time? Had something in there for 4 days and I saw one prior to mine that's been in there for 6 or so.
Trigonomicon: I'd heard of that ship! Very cool that you got to see it in person!
Also ooh, Name of the Rose adventure game, do want o:
Please update me, when it's done. I'm super hyped but I might forget about it :(
@Trigonomicon
The ship looks amazing. Must have been a blast.
Speaking of games, I am following the development of a point & click adventure version of Name of The Rose here: https://twitter.com/superrune/status/1334076049030778880?s=20
That is so awesome. I do envy you kindly. Speaking of "remembering Obra Din" I just checked if Lucas Pope is working on something new and found out about Playdate. This thing is so cute!
@eishiya: Speaking of "remembering Obra Dinn" I just retrured from a vacation that included a short guided tour aboard the reconstructed east indiaman Göteborg and it was kinda surreal how the layout of the ship felt vaguely familiar from playing Obra Dinn. Very cool expereience.
@Trigonomicon: This was a replay, my previous one was in 2020 or 2019, and the only thing I remembered was to pay attention to some things I ignored for a long time in my first playthrough :] My memory's pretty bad, so I just need to wait a while longer and I should be fine. But I want to play naaaaao.
Is that a quip you want to make, glass houses and all?
I always love checking into PJ every now and then to see what new great pixel art has been produced and also how greenraven continues to stir up drama or reminisce about how he misses Jal. Keep being you, GR, it'll get you far lol
I didn't wanted to go there but apparently a broken record of going back to already dismissed arguments, using a subject which is not the center of the debate as an argument in it, cherrypicking or pretending that arguments of interlocutor didn't exist, or thrivialising strong arguments as non significant, basing on a false logic, and many other behaviors which makes the conversation frustrating, embarrassing and pointless, is more than any of us can bare.
I'm temporarly shutting down the topic of AI art, until greenraven discovers a different topic which can give him a trolling enrichment.
Any post about AI art in the chatterbox will be deleted. This temporary rule does not apply to discord if anyone is interested in debating this matter, even if the whole "debate", was just many people trying to either explain simple things, or point out that the problem is much more complicated, and all were hitting a brick wall.
I mean frankensprites, recolors, and rips were always a thing. AI just makes that process mildly faster. No one ever freaked out to this extent about bootlegs before when it was just humans doing it.
Yeah it sucks that people are stealing commissions but as long as there's profit to be made grifters gonna grift.
At face value though I don't see anything wrong with AI art. If anything we should be encouraging AI to be more artistic, because we're only a few steps away from living breathing artificial intelligence and real actual thinking machines. AI art is probably the luckiest boon in the field of mechanical sentience.
I wish to add to that a slightly different situation - an aspiring art student, who went to academia before all that situation started. I'm very certain that I cannot comprehend how devastating this could be to a person, becasue I cannot imagine how this could feel, when you decide to do something you love for a living, so you put everything you have on that, and just before you earn the profession and start working, it becomes meaingless and obsolete in so many aplications. (I actually know a story of a real person like that who is having a long list of problems put to work on psychotherapy).
I belive people like me, who already worked in so many totally different jobs, could eventually cope with AI "replacement" after a great deal of struggle, but someone who is just starting their proffesional life can be unmeasurabely devastated and damaged irreversibly by that, which - if even overcomed - will have an impact on everything since. But of course I'm not forgetting that someone who had worked their whole life as an artist and only that, and that is the only thing they know, can be literally killed.
All the individual economical or psychological stories are probably the worst negative outcome of how the AI art technology is being released into the world and how it is being used. But there are much more problems on a much wider or much deeper scale, that could, and should be adressed. And maybe we will, but with people willing to honestly invest into that debate and equipped with basic debating skills.
Okay green. I'll be honest, I was trying to largely avoid engaging with you on why AI art is harmful to the art community at large and how it's negatively affecting artists' careers, especially independent artists. Frankly, I'm not emotionally invested in explaining this to you, so I won't be citing any sources, just explaining what I've encountered online. You can choose to consider my points invalid for that reason if that's what you wanna do, but I'm not just going to sit here and watch you continue this drama for I don't know how long over willful ignorance.
AI art is essentially training a neural network to generate images based on a collection of other images from a database. I'm sure you already know this, but I figured I would explain just in case. On its base, AI art seems like it could be an interesting tool if ethically trained, but it seems that it's been coopted by bad actors who just write bots to scrub the images off of sites and use artists' own works to generate derivative images, effectively using an algorithm to graft already made artworks together into a new image. It's admittedly more of an automatically generated edit than it is an original artwork.
I've seen this phenomena used by additional bad actors to start a commission process for an artwork, and save the sketch before they've actually paid for it, so they can just have an AI "complete" the artwork for them. This denies artists of what might very well be their primary source of income, and artists who live off of commissions have their lives put in jeopardy because of it. Believe me, I actually do live off of commissions at this point in time, and am already in a difficult position without people stealing progress images for an AI to produce a more derivative product for a cheaper price.
in response to the game question, I recently played through Signalis, and it honestly dethroned NieR Automata as my favorite game. EXCELLENT survival horror, and a beautiful story to top it all off. highly recommended
I never played them but they were from the same team so I think they would count.
Planescape Torment is one of my all time favorite games. I replayed it a lot and still find new things every time I do. They made a sequel of sorts but I didn't end up playing that as much just because I don't have the time for long play games anymore.
Nice. I played Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment as a kid but never got that deep, replayed Torment like a decade ago and it was just as good as I remembered. Still didn't beat it because I'm terrible at sticking with games, but came close.
The first one. Never played through it before but definitely enjoying it
It is not very long so nothing more special than one totally free day is needed (or a two day weekend just in case). 
Damn, strong recs for Return of the Obra Dinn here! I'll save it for sometime special.
@Yogurt: that sounds super fun! I never got the appeal of watching other people play games until I become too busy to invest the time to be good at any and realized that I still missed them lol.
@bobs: glad the new MH stepped it up again, seems like a pretty great series. Which BG, the new one? I spent so many hours on Shadows of Amn / Throne of Bhaal years ago, good times
I'm playing Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak on the weekends with some friends and am enjoying it a lot.
Was a huge fan of the PSP era MH games up to MHFU and came back to the seriens with MHW, which felt a bit disappointing (still enjoyed it tho) so I'm glad I'm getting a lot out of the current game.
Other than that i have a baldurs gate save that is waiting for me to return but haven't managed to set time aside for it (not because of busy but because of terrible time management)
"Civil discussion"? That's rich coming from a place that's too scared to have any actual discussions and feels the need to vet users and kick out people from discord conversations before they even have a chance to say hello. "Civil" right.
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I'm guessing this