Pekka Väänänen

Some of you might know that I've been working on a book. Today I'm happy to announce Palette Programming: A Modern Guide to Color Quantization paletteprogramming.com It's a textbook on how to design palettes and represent images using them. Will be out this year. Code in Python & NumPy.

Some bold Atari 2600 inspired art in this game youtu.be/osgQ3W6RlK4

@kunstbanause.bsky.social shows off his physics driven sailing game SailAway64, where you deliver cargo across the seas. The game was made using N64brew user zoncabe's Engine64, a custom game engine built on top of Libdragon and Tiny3D. youtu.be/jdCt4IMuQLI

Incredible sound design www.youtube.com/watch?v=grLJ...

Color science in the wild: "Beer color is measured in Degrees Lovibond, a metric based on the Munsell system" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_me...

nintendo 64 desertification 🏖️

In ~2007 when coding the ambient lighting of Splinter Cell, I had the idea of storing dynamic SH probes in Voronoi cells, where a) dynamic objects could walk/lerp the face graph, and b) static meshes "palettised" probes per vertex and lerped to give Realtime GI. It never shipped but look how pretty!

Of all the formats for newsletters, zines and information indexes, I'd honestly have not thought people would use WinHelp format. But Vannevar K has collected hundreds of examples of WinHelp formated documents, all conveniently emulated in Windows 3.1.

I've been racking my brain over linear space dithering. Adding noise sounds simple but how much, exactly? Finally, I found a trick: scale the dither down near zero. Found from Timothy Lottes 2016 slide deck. Attached is an exaggarated example.

The #N64 development scene has been making huge strides recently. I blogged about where things stand right now: Also, that chunky header image took a *while* to make 🥹

While investigating #voxel rendering alternatives that don't involve generating triangles, I ran into the "Voxel GI with Nested Axis-Aligned Distance Fields" paper. github.com/cg-tuwien/NA... Super promising method, with adapted code, I can render RTAO with 1 billion voxels on an M2 Macbook Air!

Being able to bake shadows into the Doom Engine is so freaking cool.

Hexagonal-grid dithering looks pretty wild up close, especially the 50% case here. A crop of a figure from "Alpha stable modeling of human visual systems for digital halftoning in rectangular and hexagonal grids" by González et al. 2008.

Ever wondered what a test card is for? TV signals are encoded in the YUV or YCbCr color spaces. A vectorscope is just the CbCr or UV part of the signal in 2D. Running a SMTPE test card through the scope gives you a zigzag pattern where it visits the center of each primary box in a specific order.

What do you call the act of inserting an element to a sorted list? "Insort" of course... A snippet of a guide in the Python language docs.

An interesting insider view from the SGI side to Nintendo 64's development and launch: steveshepard.com/blog/making-...

"Kodak Lab notebook entry showing Bayer Pattern" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryce_B...

Another good find from Bouman's image processing course: CIELAB DeltaE is intended for comparing larges swathes of color, not individual pixels. Source: engineering.purdue.edu/~bouman/ece6...

Useful dithering (digital halftoning) related notes: engineering.purdue.edu/~bouman/ece6... They are from Charles A. Bouman's Spring 2026 "Digital Image Processing I" course, Purdue University.

I've read that newspaper-like halftone patterns are laid out in a 45-degree angle because the human eye is less sensitive to that than to straight grid lines. But wouldn't a simpler explanation be that newspaper photos of streets and buildings have straight lines, so a rotated pattern works better?

The Mona Lisa mapped to the Commodore 64 palette by taking only pixel lightness into account. Two algorithms: N-Convex (left) always tries to dither the result while in Knoll's algorithm (right) dither strength can be tuned.

A new article: Revisiting Yliluoma’s ordered dither algorithm 30fps.net/pages/revisi... It's a deep dive to a single "color selection algorithm" used for ordered dithering. Nothing groundbreaking but I did uncover a neat simplified version that works OK. It's technical but with visual examples.

Trying to finish a new blog post on ordered dithering. It's been _so_ much work but I think it's turning out really interesting.

Tried my hand at a 90s pre-rendered CGI aesthetic in Unity for a game jam #GameDev #IndieDev

An incredible blog post on ordered dithering in color. Perhaps I shared this before but it deserves to be seen: matejlou.blog/2023/12/06/o...

My new hobby: Taking holiday photos with multiple exposures to create fake GDC slides afterwards.

Really love this project and article - a handmade early-mid-90s-ish FPS. The procedural pixel art "gibbing" and particle effects are pretty cool, among other stuff staniks.github.io/articles/cat...

A computer history question: Why didn't VGA support a 256-color 640x400 mode even though a frame would fit in 256 KB memory? I can see a business reason (the IBM 8514/A high-end card introduced at the same time) but is there a known technical justification for not having such a mode?

I uploaded a few historical text files related to color quantization and dithering. It's easy to forget how difficult it was to read up on the latest research without the internet. Well, it still is but for different reasons😅 paletteprogramming.com/archive/

Now this is a bold typeface for a paper title. "Quantization" by Allen Gersho. IEEE Communications Society Magazine, September 1977.

Applying Floyd-Steinberg dithering (with serpentine scan order) to constant grey images creates interesting artifacts. Inspired by a 2001 paper by Victor Ostromoukhov who brute forced optimal weights for each level based in a similar experiment. The paper: perso.liris.cnrs.fr/victor.ostro...

New article: Single-pass palette refinement and ordered dithering 30fps.net/pages/bayer-... It's a method that modifies the online k-means algorithm to produce an ordered dithering pattern as a side effect. The result is closer to pleasant glitch aesthetics than a proper dithering replacement.

The "popularity" color quantizer is one of the simplest: find the K most used unique colors in the image. That's the palette. I was surprised how well it works when K=256 and the image is reduced to 4-bits per channel before. Even transparencies look kinda OK.

I will not continue to work on this so I might just share the URL. I just wanted to pack everything about a palette onto one view: palettarium.color.pizza

Came across this handy matrix of accurate but integer-only bit depth conversion formulas: threadlocalmutex.com?p=48

A cool plot from "A Simple and Efficient Error-Diffusion Algorithm" by Victor Ostromoukhov, 2001. They show how the classic Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion can't always produce a pattern with the blue noise (no clumping) property. Paper: perso.liris.cnrs.fr/victor.ostro...

Always a delight to see science being done on a 2 MHz 6502. From "On the Statistical Analysis of Dirty Pictures" by Julian Besag, 1986.