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I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64 [video]
- gryfft 7mo agoI watched this on YouTube the other day. Another beautiful example of the creative power yielded from building within constraints.
- msephton 7mo agoSuch a clever way to approach the problem! I'd say only possible with a detailed understanding of the N64 constraints.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 7mo agoJust like Superman 64
- azertify 7mo agoIn 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.
- Frenchgeek 7mo agoI think the main issue was he used Nintendo owned tools and libraries to make his game instead of the GPL ones, making the release of the port dependent on Nintendo's approval too. I guess even Valve didn't want to deal with their lawyers.
- throwawayk7h 7mo agoIn principle he could use alternative tools, like libdragon, but he said even if he did that it was unlikely Valve would permit it, as Nintendo would still be antagonized somehow. And Valve it seems wants to improve their relationship with Nintendo (See: Valve blocked Dolphin on steam, and took down a video showing yuzu installed on the steam deck).
- ErroneousBosh 7mo ago> And Valve it seems wants to improve their relationship with Nintendo Valve are the 200kg gorilla of the gaming industry and can throw their weight around. However Nintendo are a 250kg gorilla.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoA very vindictive, petty 250kg gorilla at that
- asno3030 7mo agoNintendo is more like the chihuahua, instead of growling and biting it sicks its lawyers on anything that threatens it (everything and anything).
- komali2 7mo ago> However Nintendo are a 250kg gorilla. It's an interesting question of comparison actually. Valve run the world's biggest videogame ecommerce platform, for PCs only (including handheld PCs like steam deck). Nintendo run a comparably large videogame ecommerce platform, but only for their two hardware platforms: switch and switch 2. Just roughly based on hardware sales, seems to be roundabout the same audience size. Nintendo maybe comes ahead because they're well established in the hardware space (Valve is trying to close the distance), and of course far, far away in terms of 1st party game development - Valve has, what, 8 games? All phenomenal, but nothing compared to Nintendo's library.
- jdwithit 7mo agoDoes Valve even make games anymore? The only thing of note they've done since like 2020 is put a fresh coat of paint on CounterStrike. Which still counts of course but it feels like they are REALLY coasting on the reputation of games that came out 20+ years ago.
- komali2 7mo agoValve's working on Deadlock, an FPS / MOBA. It's very polished, but in early access right now. Based on what I've seen when I tried playing it, and just what I hear in the gaming sphere, it'll probably be a decade-defining multiplayer game once it's done, like TF2 or CSGO both are. They definitely coast, but when they do release something, it's always phenomenal. I do wish they'd make more games, though.
- AdmiralAsshat 7mo agoSomewhat annoyingly, the actual homebrew z64 seems to crash both of the N64 cores that RetroArch supports. :(
- b00ty4breakfast 7mo agoAt the end of the video he says it needs real hardware or a "highly accurate emulator like Ares".
- my-next-account 7mo agoDoes anyone know what it means for something to be a "multi-core emulator" like Ares is? Like, is there some underlying benefit to developing emulators for multiple systems under the same name? Is there some shared code or what?
- x0re4x 7mo agoIt might be because he is not using nintendo's sdk anymore, particularly the "microcode" for RSP "coprocessor". Most N64 emulators usually do not emulate RSP properly, but detect which specific nintendo's microcode is used and then emulate it's behavior.
- Narishma 7mo agoThat means they are not accurate cores since it works fine on real hardware.
- giovannibajo1 7mo agoCorrect, both of them are really really old, accuracy wise. N64 emulation has improved a lot in the past 4-5 years, but old emulators haven’t caught up
- snvzz 7mo agoN64 is (still) poorly understood. Traditionally, emulators relied heavily on HLE. Low-level efforts are recent and not mature. The miSTer core for N64 (and ModRetro's M64 core effort by the same person) and Ares N64 support are the only two serious efforts I am aware of. They tend to share compatibility issues, and advance together when understanding of the platform grows.
- cubefox 7mo agoThe 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 https://youtube.com/watch?v=Sf036fO-ZUk
- LarsDu88 7mo agoLike in id softwares RAGE?
- cubefox 7mo agoYes, id invented it, but I think they published one slightly earlier game which also had texture streaming. The technique (virtual textures) would not become ubiquitous in most engines until the PS4 era though.
- Narishma 7mo agoEnemy Territory: Quake Wars used an earlier version of it but only for the terrain. I think Rage was the first to use it for everything.
- cubefox 7mo agoUnfortunately nowadays id Software doesn't seem to be at the cutting edge of engine technology anymore. Most interesting new developments now come from Unreal Engine as far as I can tell. Like virtual geometry (Nanite) or efficient ray traced direct illumination (MegaLights).
- LarsDu88 7mo agoDoom the Dark Ages uses some pretty advanced (and performance intense) illumination techniques which i believe are comparable ro megalights. They ripped our Carmacks texture streaming stuff outta the engine years,ago though
- user____name 7mo agoThis 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 http://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 7mo agoYeah I remember hearing that SOTC's "SuperLow" LOD was a 2D image. Trespasser also did that, but only for trees and props, not for terrain objects. Trespasser being basically a heightmap with dinosaurs dropped in
- estebank 7mo agoHey! It also had a barely working physics engine. Then again the dinosaurs were physics entities, so maybe you already mentioned it. :)
- dcrazy 7mo agoEven modern games replace distant geometry with billboards. Simplygon is one middleware that does this. The Remedy folks talked about how Alan Wake 2 used it at GDC last year or the year before.
- smithcoin 7mo agoVRAM goes vroom vroom. I emailed him the video from OP and he mentioned they’ve done some collaboration. I’m assuming there’s a retro programming discord that I’m not worthy of.
- uyjulian 7mo agoA lot of stuff is happening on the n64brew discord. https://discord.gg/WqFgNWf https://discord.gg/WqFgNWf
- charcircuit 7mo agoVRAM on the n64 is notoriously slow.
- amelius 7mo agoThe first comment: > "The N64 is very memory bound" > Aren't we all these days?
- ill_ion 7mo agoThis is awesome!
- TomatoCo 7mo agoThis 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.
- ErroneousBosh 7mo agoYou know that 1985 was when 50-year-olds were starting high school right?
- christophilus 7mo agoI think he meant: “How people at the time would have reacted.”
- egypturnash 7mo agoMagicore Anomala seems to actually be a sideview non-scrolling bullet hell game for the Amiga, which came out in 1985. Teen me owned one of the first Amigas in my city and the in-progress videos I can find of Magicore don't feel too out of place with the games I was seeing on it by the early nineties. It's moving around a couple of sprites and rendering a single-bitplane image of projectiles, and has some basic copper list tricks to get a 3-plane background image to have more than eight colors, which was pretty normal for the Amiga. Here's a dissection of the title screen of Shadow Of The Beast (1989), for instance: https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/ https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea... - you can find a ton of video of this game very easily, go have a look. Magicore is generally a bit zippier than most Amiga games, so many of them were kind of chunky and sluggish when I look back at them. Also the dev notes on using modern compression schemes that use what would be apocalyptic amounts of RAM and CPU by 1990 standards to crunch the data are amusing, but it's not like 1990 me wasn't used to chilling out for a few minutes between levels for a disc load, it was still worlds faster than the horrible load times of the C64 that was my first computer.
- LarsDu88 7mo agoI 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
- vertexmachina 7mo agoThey have a very complicated and robust pipeline that generates all of those LODs automatically. The artists aren't manually creating them.
- LarsDu88 7mo agoArtists did generate a lot of those lods. At the very least they had to hand tune a lot of them. Look at the sheer quality of some of these: https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study-part-2/ https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphi...
- oliwary 7mo agoAnother game that I find has very impressive draw distance is Just Cause 2. You can see objects very far away when flying etc, but they look very detailed and do not change when moving closer. Definitely blew me away the first time playing it.
- CoryOndrejka 7mo agoVery 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.
- everdrive 7mo agoRoad Rash 64 is a really underrated game. As you say, the environment is alive, and nearly every race has a lot of potential for wacky slapstick fun. The driving feels really nice and is rewarding to learn.
- CoryOndrejka 7mo agoThank you! We had an absolute blast building it and we just kept playing it. I need to look up the full unlock cheat code.
- CoryOndrejka 7mo agoAccording to a sticky note somehow still stuck to RR64 box, the unlcok everything code is (from the main screen): Control Up, Control Up, Left Trigger, Control Down, Z Trigger, Left Trigger, Z Trigger, Control Up
- msephton 7mo agoI asked the one person I know who digs for these kind of things and they were kind enough to share the codes with me: https://bsky.app/profile/bbayles.bsky.social/post/3mia5sbu6gc2u https://bsky.app/profile/bbayles.bsky.social/post/3mia5sbu6g...
- someperson 7mo agoPhysics of jumping off vehicles is really fun and great
- kennywinker 7mo agoA 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.
- ryguz 7mo ago[dead]
- Hekkova 7mo agoThat is awesome! Imagine having that in the 90s. Would have blown peoples' minds.
- DarthCeltic85 7mo agoMy inner 12 year old is losing it.
- MegaDeKay 7mo agoIf 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. https://www.youtube.com/@codingsecrets https://www.youtube.com/@codingsecrets
- ljf 7mo agoI'm gutted he stopped releasing videos - I've watched all his stuff and check back now and again to see if he's been tempted to post something new...
- nguyendinhdoan 7mo ago[flagged]
- dmead 7mo agoNice telescope