Show HN: Pix.pe – Easily sharable pixel art

Comments: Would be good if you could somehow define your own color pallette. Obviously you are limited in how much data you can encode in with your available Tweet length... so not sure how plausible that would be. Still kinda fun, just hard to make anything decent out of the available canvas size.

martin-adams2• 13 years ago

Dunno, some life-form out of the Game of Life?

14113• 13 years ago

I suspect it's a glider generator?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway%27s_Life)

xaro• 13 years ago

The first one is Megaman?

Alterlife• 13 years ago

The last one looks like a hummingbird, or perhaps some form of alien from a game.

In any other context this would probably be silly, but given the limitations... Beautifully done.

This is how sports work!

dmbass• 13 years ago

Obviously you are limited in how much data you can encode in with your available Tweet length...

All urls on Twitter are shortened with t.co to 22/23 characters (depending on https) so the url is not a limit.

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

Storing everything in the URL is a feature I just rolled out today. The HN submission is in honour of that. You can of course post it without the http://pix.pe/? to twitter, paste that chunk of letters back in, and it will work. Here is an example of how that looked:

https://twitter.com/ZenSaiyuki/status/373400181338693632

Which is neat, and purist and all, but people didn't know what the "gibberish" was, so making it a link is a compelling improvement, it would seem :)

I was really inspired by the twitter image compression challenge http://stackoverflow.com/questions/891643/twitter-image-enco...

hannahmitt• 13 years ago

It looks like a Rorschach test. I guess thats not an answer you're allowed to give on rorschach tests.

jetblackio• 13 years ago

For the last one, I see a velociraptor :)

http://s177.photobucket.com/user/p0oki_photo/media/Velocirap...

corry• 13 years ago

Neat! Suggestion: show a 'actual size' thumbnail of it. Those of us new to pixel art have trouble visualizing what it looks like shrunk down to actual pixels!

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

Thanks! I like that idea.

midgetjones• 13 years ago

This is cool. It would be nice to have a grid option, though.

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

I used to call this pixtweet. Here's all the pictures I collected from the old times. http://www.zenpsycho.com/allpixtweets.html

edit: also note that "infinite" undo is available via the back button.

OGC• 13 years ago

why the hell aren't you shortening the URLs?

lttlrck• 13 years ago

Because it would be half the fun?

sideproject• 13 years ago

looks like each drawn pixel is being recorded in the URL, which means considering all the combinations + permutations of colors and pixels, you can draw (theoretically) the art just by modifying the URL! :) So maybe you can create a randomizer that creates a picture.... :)

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

yes, but it's easier to modify the text field.

Kiro• 13 years ago

Best part is writing some stuff in the box and see what it produces and how it evolves as you type.

potomak• 13 years ago

I love this idea and your spec! What do you think about extending it to include little animations?

I would like to apply it to Draw![1] pixel art editor.

If somebody want to help me you can fork the project at https://github.com/potomak/drawbang

[1] http://drawbang.com/

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

I like the idea, and was secretly planning to do that eventually. And also I remember drawbang! I thought up the original "pixtweet" around the same time you first posted it to HN.

beefsack• 13 years ago

It might be worth considering encoding the URL data to something to compress it a little bit more, perhaps base 64 or something.

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

it is base64 already.

edit: in an older version I tried out compression. I quote from the pix.pe page:

It turns out generic compression of any kind is very rarely helpful below a certain message size. The size of the added overhead overtakes the characters saved. Only about 10% of pictures were RLE compressible, and even then, savings were tiny.

agf• 13 years ago

I think it would benefit from simple arithmetic compression / huffman coding if the number of colors used is small so the table can be small.

cataflam• 13 years ago

Base64 doesn't compress, it's a way of encoding binary data with just ASCII characters. It takes roughly 1/3 more space than the original data.

guynamedloren• 13 years ago

Finally, a way to share all the pixel art I've been working on!!

Jokes aside, very cool project. Nice work :)

alco• 13 years ago

Try hitting the Back button in your browser after drawing for a while.

libria• 13 years ago

Pretty cool. Any chance you could include a 16x16 preview? You could even dynamically update it as the favicon (e.g., http://favris.info/) which is supported in Chrome/FF.

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

there is some chance.

kwntm• 13 years ago

I love how smooth this is on mobile, regarding touching and dragging. I've been working on making UIs for simple art projects on mobile browsers and this will be great to learn from. The palette option is fantastic, it's cool to quickly see a drawing with different color renderings. Thanks for sharing!

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

I worked hard on it, but sadly it totally breaks on android and windows phone. I hope to at some point remedy this though it is difficult, since I don't have access to testing on those easily.

If you are interested in this, I found hand.js which seems to do a good job of solving my problem.. I plan to use it eventually. http://handjs.codeplex.com/

Youpinadi• 13 years ago

Neat! If you want to go further: http://www.stickaz.com/en/studio You can draw your model (or import it) and buy real stickers.

kristopher2• 13 years ago

My Attempt at Happy Mac [1]

Wants: 32pixels, a 1:1 pixel preview and favicon support!

[1] http://pix.pe/?C___A_4HH4HA_A_H4_H__H_4_4HA_A_H4_AH__4A_H___...

StavrosK• 13 years ago

1:1 preview please. I have no idea what half of these are.

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

Can you think of a way to fit 32x32 pixels reliably in under 128 base64 characters?

edit: hint: it's 768 bits, while 32x32=1024

kristopher2• 13 years ago

Yes, use DEFLATE[1] before you B64. Also, it does not hurt to up-vote all of these useful comments!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFLATE

lifeformed• 13 years ago

It's fun to type in sentences in the URL part, and watch the picture morph around. Even a single letter repeated over and over gives cool patterns.

I wonder if there are any sentences that are also meaningful pictures?

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

A friend of mine worked out that if you draw a picture, and leave "blank" space (which is rendered in text as underscores) then you can carefully replace the blanks with letters which appears as noise in the picture, but otherwise doesn't disturb what you drew.

edit: e.g. http://pix.pe?Cttttt5tt9vt____P_5___J__v9_ttttttt9v9tttttkkk...

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

a robot made of the word "ROBOT"

    G_____________ROBO_ROB_ROBO_______ROBOT______
    ROBOT______RBOT__________ROBO______ROBOT_____
    _ROBOT_______ROBO_BOT_OBOT_____________

jevin• 13 years ago

I have just one suggestion: Make it possible to erase pixels by right clicking.

Other than that, great work!

pents90• 13 years ago

"Oliphant Immortal" from Gurk III: http://pix.pe?Q_____A4_YEAHDDYcDbYacDbA4_H_______wGuAA_H4__H...

8ig8• 13 years ago

Happy Halloween

http://pix.pe?IJJttttSJTdaStuttts2kkkgkkltttttttkkkkkktltttt...

ne0phyte• 13 years ago

I found the easter egg but I'm not sure what exactly it does. At first I thought it's one iteration of conways game of life but that's not it. Enlighten me!

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

Oh! well it's a failure mode. I have used an unconventional pixel order, in order to improve the look of failure modes. I use a hilbert curve.

When you enter in an amount of text that is not exactly 129 base64url characters, it takes out the non base64url characters, turns them into 0-7 numbers, and then 1-dimensionally stretches those until i get exactly 256 pixels- and lay those out along the hilbert curve.

ehsanu1• 13 years ago

Replace state over push state for this kind of history twiddling please.

einarlove• 13 years ago

You should look into using replacestate()[1] from History API[2] instead of changing the hash on each pixel change. This will remove the problem of not been able to use the back-button to get to the previous page (instead of the previous pixel)

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17507091/replacestate-vs-...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/API/DOM/M...

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

Thanks for the advice. I use the backbutton as an undo stack. if you want to get back to where you were before then you can open pix.pe in a new tab I suppose.

Also, i would note that the backbutton is not per pixel. Each pixel event is filtered through a debouncer, so it actually only updates the url if you are inactive for about 200ms.

throw-away-914• 13 years ago

Was drawing obligatory lady finger and two potatoes, ended up with this. http://pix.pe/#http://pix.pe?QAHA____A4HA_____H4AAA4AAHA4H4A...

Lerc2• 13 years ago

This just screams challenge to me. You have a 16*16, 8 colour image in 768 bits.

So the question is, how much can the format be changed to allow for a wider range of expressibility?

The obvious place to start is increasing the resolution by somehow reducing the bits per pixel.

768/(16x16) = 3 (current resolution makes 3 bits per pixel)

768/(17x17) = 2.657

768/(18x18) = 2.370

768/(19x19) = 2.127

768/(20x20) = 1.920

768/(21x21) = 1.741

768/(24x24) = 1.333

768/(26x26) = 1.136

768/(32x32) = 0.75

Of course, once you get a higher resolution with fewer bits you lose the ability to be able to make each individual pixel any colour you want. Once you go below 1 bit per pixel you lose the ability to refer to pixels individually altogether. Most pixel artists would take some degree of hit though, in fact much of the beauty of pixel art is in massaging the restrictions.

A lot of 8 bit systems used 8x8 cells at 1 bit with a colour attribute byte to bring it up to 1.125 bits per pixel. The spectrum used that to make things like http://fc05.deviantart.net/images3/i/2004/116/3/d/ZX_Spectru...

You could quite easily support a 24x24 image in that form, but with only 3 cells across the colour restrictions would be a bit harsh.

My preference would be to try for 21x21 using 3x3 cells. Being restricted to only 2 colours per cell is much less of a problem when the cell size is small. A quick and easy approach would be a 2 byte per cell structure where the first byte defined the foreground an background colours and the second byte defined the pixels. That gets you a palette of 16 colours overall, any two in each cell. It is marginally over the required limit (21x21 at 1.778bpp) though, so would require a little more cleverness to eek out that extra little bit. dropping back to an 8 colour palette would do it easily, but 1.778 is so close to 1.741 that those bits can surely squeezed out from somewhere.

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

Thanks. It did occur to me that I could get pretty close to a black and white 32x32 picture by replacing the 8 colors with 8 patterns. You'd have to make impossible some patterns, but constraints breed creativity!

Lerc2• 13 years ago

I made a mode like this for a dcpu16 emulator as a mode proposal. http://fingswotidun.com/dcpu16/GraphicsMode1.png

There's potential for extra data in the situation where the two colour attributes are the same. Possibly have a second compliment palette where

     if A==B {
       colourA:=pallette[A]; 
       colourB:=compliment[A];
     }

That allows for an extra set of colour pairs, to help out in unusual cases. You don't gain ability to set the bottom right pixel of each cell to the compliment colour, so even though it gives you another 16 colours to play with you get some interesting restrictions rewarding clever use.

dc2k08• 13 years ago

you should post this on r/pixelart

TheZenPsycho17• 13 years ago

Oh! maybe I'll wait til after I implement some of these feature requests.

Show HN: Pix.pe – Easily sharable pixel art

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