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.
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
That demo also uses 40MB of textures, so I think the effect would be highly impractical (in both cart size and performance) for most commercial N64 games even if the technique did exist at the time.
I think it's overstated that texture streaming didn't happen until two console generations later. Texture streaming was famously used in Crash Bandicoot on the PS1 and extensively on most PS2 titles. However I do understand that with the lens of megatextures it's fun to look at James' accomplishment on the N64 in that light but just know that the N64 doesn't actually have the hardware needed for true modern paged feedback streaming.
I don't think any PS2 games used texture streaming. They used LOD, which is different. (As I argued below, the asset streaming that Crash Bandicoot used was even simpler than LODs because it relied on a fixed camera path.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If you like this kind of thing, check out Coding Secrets on YouTube. He goes further back in time to show how they pulled off seemingly impossible effects on a really old console: the Sega Genesis.
23 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 44.9 ms ] threadHe'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.
[0] http://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64
> "The N64 is very memory bound"
> Aren't we all these days?
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
https://www.youtube.com/@codingsecrets