by CoryOndrejka
7 subcomments
- Very cool. In 1998 (oof) we built Road Rash 64 which was accidentally open world -- even though you had race on a particular road, with a start and finish line, you could drive anywhere, see traffic all over the map, jump off of mountains, etc. The r4k plus reality coprocessor was quite potent -- we got to over 750k shaded triangles per second in optimized testing -- though finicky because you had to manage audio during vblank, etc. Plus, the reality coprocessor fog had a brutal hardware bug that made it really tricky to use.
- In case anyone is interested, this creator built a remake of Portal for the N64, uploading a really cool set of videos describing the work that went into building it.
He's since stopped to work on his own IP, I believe that the issue was that Valve couldn't allow it because they'd never get Nintendo to agree to it. Something along those lines, anyway.
- I actually used similar camera draw distance trick in my game Rogue Stargun.
The real way to optimize this stuff really well is for the artist to spend a lot of time making LODS for the distant objects. For the really distant objects, esp for a platform like n64, you can replace the distant objects with billboard imposters which are basically just flat poster textures that swap perspectives at certain angles.
GTA V does this extremely well with many manually made LODs and its very costly
- I watched this on YouTube the other day. Another beautiful example of the creative power yielded from building within constraints.
by user____name
2 subcomments
- This is really cool. Kaze Emanuar[0] seems to be able to hit 60hz consistently with his Mario 64 rework, I wonder if such perf is achievable for these wide open landscapes.
Iirc Shadow of the Collosus rendered distant geometry into the skybox, which always struck me as a neat trick.
[0] http://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64
- The first comment:
> "The N64 is very memory bound"
> Aren't we all these days?
- This reminds me of Magicore Anomala, a side scrolling game being made for the 1985 Atari. I wish there was a way to know how people contemporary to the release of the Atari or the N64 would react to seeing these modern engines.
by kennywinker
0 subcomment
- A super impressive feat, but also the games art style is like having bleach poured into my eyes. Am I just the wrong age for this specific retro nostalgia? Probably.
- The same guy, James Lambert, also implemented texture streaming (which would not be invented until two console generations later) in an N64 demo. The textures look uncharacteristically high res: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Sf036fO-ZUk
by AdmiralAsshat
3 subcomments
- Somewhat annoyingly, the actual homebrew z64 seems to crash both of the N64 cores that RetroArch supports. :(
- This is awesome!
- [dead]
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