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I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64 [video]

I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64 [video]

msephton

Comments (20)

  • azertify
    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.
  • LarsDu88
    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
  • gryfft
    I watched this on YouTube the other day. Another beautiful example of the creative power yielded from building within constraints.
  • user____name
    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
  • amelius
    The first comment:> "The N64 is very memory bound"> Aren't we all these days?
  • TomatoCo
    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.
  • cubefox
    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
  • ill_ion
    This is awesome!
  • AdmiralAsshat
    Somewhat annoyingly, the actual homebrew z64 seems to crash both of the N64 cores that RetroArch supports. :(