u/MaximusDunton

I’d been looking for her three nights straight before I saw her again beneath the lights outside the Nocturne.

Rain hammered the boulevard hard enough to turn the streets into black glass. The whole city smelled like gasoline, wet concrete, and somebody else’s bad decisions.

Then she laughed.

You spend enough time in Westfall Babylon and you forget certain things still exist. Honest smiles. Luck. Beautiful women who haven’t learned to fear the city yet.

Then Erika turned toward me beneath all that red neon and for one second my heart jumped like I was twenty years younger and stupid enough to believe somebody still gets a happy ending in this place.

That was my first mistake.

I’ve been experimenting with evolving my Orbis artwork away from a more anime and cyberpunk aesthetic into something I currently call “Modern Pulp Style.” The goal is a more cinematic noir crime thriller feeling with grounded characters, cleaner composition, stronger visual hierarchy, and less of the typical AI anime look.

The attached highway chase scene is part of that transition. Compared to the earlier versions, I think the newer direction feels much more cinematic and coherent, almost like a stylized crime film or modern pulp illustration instead of pure anime inspired AI art.

One thing I’m still struggling with though is the micro texture and procedural pattern problem in ChatGPT Image Generator 2. Especially on wet asphalt, black leather, dark clothing, glossy surfaces, and shadow gradients, the renderer tends to generate etched or embossed looking micro detail patterns instead of broad cinematic surfaces. It often feels like the model is “over explaining” materials.

I’ve been trying to push the images toward calmer non focal surfaces, larger reflection masses, lower frequency material rendering, and more selective detail compression. Interestingly, Gemini handled this specific issue better because it simplified surfaces much more aggressively, but I still prefer the cinematic lighting, composition, and anatomy coming from the ChatGPT renders.

So I’m curious if anyone here has found good techniques, workflows, prompt strategies, or post processing methods for reducing procedural texture chatter and repeated glossy micro patterns while still preserving cinematic realism and atmosphere.

I've been experimenting with a stylized anime-cinematic visual direction for a crime simulation project and would genuinely love some outside impressions regarding the overall mood and presentation.

The goal is not realism, but a balance between cinematic readability, stylized characters, atmosphere, and memorable action scenes. I’m especially interested in whether the images feel visually coherent as part of the same world and whether the style feels distinctive enough to stand out.

Some scenes focus more on action and violence, others on power, nightlife, or criminal atmosphere. I’ve also been trying to keep character identity and visual consistency stable across different scenes, which turned out to be much harder than expected.

I’d really appreciate honest impressions regarding the atmosphere, consistency, readability, and the balance between realism and stylization. I’m also curious whether the scenes feel cinematic or game-like to you.

One C64 game that always stayed in my mind was Donald Duck’s Playground. I loved how simple but relaxing it was. You could move between different jobs, earn money, and slowly build something over time. Even with very simple graphics, it felt like a small living world.

I’m currently creating a spiritual successor for my ORBIS platform, but instead of retro pixel art I’m reimagining the idea as an anime-cinematic futuristic world with stylized visuals, soft cel shading, and connected mini games.

The idea is to merge everything together into one consistent world that feels almost like a futuristic theme park city filled with activities, small jobs, attractions, and exploration. I recreated several original C64 scenes while preserving their gameplay layout, but visually transforming them into modern anime-inspired environments.

I’m adding both the original C64 screenshots and the new reinterpretations below. I honestly think many old C64 games had gameplay ideas that would still work today with modern presentation and worldbuilding.

I would really love to hear what people think about the overall direction, especially the combination of nostalgic sandbox gameplay with this anime-cinematic visual style.

I’ve been experimenting with reimagining the old 1986 Commodore 64 game “Mafia” into a modern stylized cyberpunk anime sandbox world while preserving the original gameplay structure and city layout.

The original game was surprisingly ambitious for its time. It had districts, subway and train travel, casinos, robberies, bribery, gang hiring, and open ended progression. I always loved the sandbox feeling of it because the city itself felt like a living system you could freely interact with.

Instead of going for dark Blade Runner style cyberpunk, I tried a more colorful and readable “playable city” direction inspired by modern anime urban games. The focus was on strong district identity, atmospheric city life, clean visual readability, stylized futuristic urbanism, and a more social open world vibe instead of grimdark noir.

I attached the original C64 images together with several reinterpretations using a consistent visual style system.

I’d honestly love feedback specifically about the vibe and direction. Does this feel like a good modern evolution of the original Mafia atmosphere, or does it drift too far away from the original sandbox feeling?

I have been experimenting with a hybrid renderer inside my self-developed BASIC interpreter that combines cinematic imagery, realtime Unicode rain effects and ambient audio entirely inside the terminal.

The layered rain moves independently over the static city background to create a strange retro-futuristic atmosphere somewhere between old demo scenes, terminal graphics and cyberpunk visuals.

Still highly experimental, but I really love the mood this direction is starting to create.

I've been experimenting with realtime graphics rendering inside Kitty terminal and ended up with two very different visual aesthetics generated from the same rendering system. One uses high resolution image rendering while the other uses low resolution Unicode halfblock rendering.

What interests me is that the lower resolution version does not simply feel like a degraded version. It creates a very different atmosphere and abstraction level. The high resolution renderer feels cinematic and immersive while the lower resolution version feels much more stylized and almost dreamlike.

Most of the work unexpectedly turned into exploring the behavior and limitations of terminal rendering itself. Things like dirty cell rendering, image placement, terminal cell alignment, scaling artifacts and mixing Unicode rendering with image layers became part of the creative process.

Right now I am experimenting with combining both approaches together. Using detailed terminal image rendering for static scenes and lower resolution Unicode rendering for realtime effects like rain, particles and overlays.

I am curious how people in the generative art space feel about the directions, and what would be optimal.

I've been experimenting with realtime terminal rendering inside Kitty and ended up with two completely different visual styles. One uses a high resolution hybrid Kitty graphics renderer with dirty cell updates and adaptive redraws, while the other uses low resolution Unicode halfblock rendering.

What surprised me is that the lower resolution version does not just feel like a technically worse version. It feels like a completely different artistic medium. The high resolution renderer feels cinematic and immersive while the lower resolution version feels much more stylized and retro.

Most of the work unexpectedly turned into solving rendering problems instead of drawing graphics. Things like terminal cell alignment, dirty tile rendering, image placement behavior, scaling artifacts and mixing Unicode rendering with Kitty graphics turned out to be far more complicated than I expected.

Right now I am experimenting with combining both approaches together. Using Kitty rendering for detailed static backgrounds and Unicode rendering for realtime effects like rain and overlays.

Now I am honestly unsure which direction is more interesting creatively. Pushing terminals toward high resolution realtime rendering or embracing the aesthetics and limitations of lower resolution text graphics.

Curious what the demoscene community thinks about this.

I have been experimenting with a small retro-inspired BASIC runtime called ORBIS and recently focused heavily on terminal rendering performance and fullscreen graphics.

Instead of using SDL or OpenGL, the renderer works directly inside modern terminals using ANSI truecolor escape sequences, Unicode halfblocks and software framebuffers. Initially I expected terminal graphics to be far too slow for realtime animation, but after implementing fullscreen streaming frame output and dirty-cell rendering the results became surprisingly smooth under GPU accelerated terminals like Kitty.

At the moment I have working demos for scrolling panoramas, snowfall simulation, classic fire effects, neon fireworks and simple sprite animation. One of the most interesting discoveries was how dramatically rendering performance changes depending on update strategy. Sparse scenes benefit heavily from dirty rendering while fullscreen scrolling performs much better when generating one giant contiguous frame stream instead of many small cursor updates.

The runtime itself is built around Cosmopolitan portability, so the same executable can run across Linux, Windows, macOS, x86_64 and ARM64 systems with very little platform-specific handling.

This originally started as a fun retro computing experiment, but modern terminals turned out to be much more capable for realtime graphics than I expected. Right now I am mostly focused on polishing the renderer, improving documentation and creating more demos before sharing public preview builds.