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What an awesome writeup. I am not even really personally invested in the problem as I don't play older video games, but I loved reading the story. I wish other
by et2o 9y ago
What an awesome writeup. I am not even really personally invested in the problem as I don't play older video games, but I loved reading the story. I wish other open source projects would do similar writeups when they reach major accomplishments.
If I just saw "specialized shaders replaced with ubershaders" on a feature update, I probably wouldn't think there was much of a story to it.
- MichaelGG 9y agoThis might apply to even newer videogames. Playing Breath of the Wild on Cemu seems to have huge stuttering due to shader caching, even with a good spec machine.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- masklinn 9y agoThe "issue" is architectural, it has every reason to apply to more or less every game on the GC base.
- makomk 9y agoProbably not. Wii U shaders are apparently much more complicated than Wii/GameCube shaders (fully programmable shader pipeline).
- phire 9y agoTheoretically yes. Modern Shader cores are basically Turing Complete, so you should be able to emulate anything, including the Wii U's modern GPU. But it won't run fast enough to help, because you will have to spill some (or even a lot) of the shader's state to the host GPU's main memory. Ubershaders work well for dolphin because the entire mutable state of the GameCube's pixelshaders fit into the available registers, with plenty of space left over.
- sitkack 9y agoStill seams like the model could be repurposed to make gamedev more stable across APIs and backends at the same time removing lots of interactions with the underlying driver. It is a really clever identity function with some mechanical sympathy. Amazing stuff and so glad it is open source!
- richdougherty 9y agoI'd love to know how this project manages to get such high quality stories out for every update. I assume their project has a community member who is passionate about writing. It's such a rare, but useful thing to have someone volunteer their time to do great technical writing. I wish someone would do it for the open source projects I work on!
- richdougherty 9y agoThey seem to have people on the forum with 'Content Creator' badges who work on these reports: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-progress-report https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-progress-repor.... Great idea to recognise people who help in other ways other than coding.
- ClassyJacket 9y agoIt's an incredibly impressive project. I can't believe they're not on Patreon (maybe this type of project doesn't qualify?). They're more high quality with their updates and the writeups about their updates than most commercial software made by professionals getting paid.
- jsheard 9y agoThe Dolphin project doesn't accept donations in any form, IIRC they said that fairly splitting the money between the contributors would be too difficult. Apparently their infrastructure costs are covered by the few ads on the site and they're happy to leave it at that.
- im3w1l 9y agoWow, that's a decision I deeply respect.
- LocutusOfBorges 9y agoAs far as I'm aware, the user you're thinking of is JMC4789- they do some fantastic writeups. They've recently started a side blog (http://emucross.com/ http://emucross.com/), as well. If you're curious, their reddit submission history (https://www.reddit.com/user/JMC4789/submitted/ https://www.reddit.com/user/JMC4789/submitted/) has a bunch of interesting stuff.