13 ms·

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 i

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.

cubefox 7mo ago
I wonder whether there could be a way to circumvent this with procedural textures, like the ones we saw in the .kkrieger demo. Alternatively, perhaps the texture streaming could be made to work with PlayStation or Saturn, though I assume the slow latency and transfer speed of the CD drive would make it impractical.
- djmips 7mo ago
  texture streaming was used on Crash Bandicoot on PS1. Look up the interview with Andy Gavin. And here's an excerpt from Game Developer. "Andy wrote an incredible paging system that would swap in and out 64K data pages as Crash traversed the level. This was a "full stack" tour de force, in that it ran the gamut from high-level memory management to opcode-level DMA coding. Andy even controlled the physical layout of bytes on the CD-ROM disk so that—even at 300KB/sec—the PS1 could load the data for each piece of a given level by the time Crash ended up there." https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/memory-matters-a-special-ram-edition-of-dirty-coding-tricks https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/memory-matters-a-s...
  - cubefox 7mo ago
    That game had a fixed camera on rails though. Theoretically, they could have used a pre-rendered video of the level and just adjust the playback speed. There are some racing games which actually did that. So the asset streaming could be linear and the data arranged accordingly on disk. But that's not how modern texture streaming works, where the camera is assumed to be free. In the worst case scenario, the player can turn the camera around in a second, and the entire texture content has to be replaced in that time.

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.

cubefox 7mo ago

I wonder whether there could be a way to circumvent this with procedural textures, like the ones we saw in the .kkrieger demo. Alternatively, perhaps the texture streaming could be made to work with PlayStation or Saturn, though I assume the slow latency and transfer speed of the CD drive would make it impractical.

djmips 7mo ago
texture streaming was used on Crash Bandicoot on PS1. Look up the interview with Andy Gavin. And here's an excerpt from Game Developer. "Andy wrote an incredible paging system that would swap in and out 64K data pages as Crash traversed the level. This was a "full stack" tour de force, in that it ran the gamut from high-level memory management to opcode-level DMA coding. Andy even controlled the physical layout of bytes on the CD-ROM disk so that—even at 300KB/sec—the PS1 could load the data for each piece of a given level by the time Crash ended up there." https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/memory-matters-a-special-ram-edition-of-dirty-coding-tricks https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/memory-matters-a-s...
- cubefox 7mo ago
  That game had a fixed camera on rails though. Theoretically, they could have used a pre-rendered video of the level and just adjust the playback speed. There are some racing games which actually did that. So the asset streaming could be linear and the data arranged accordingly on disk. But that's not how modern texture streaming works, where the camera is assumed to be free. In the worst case scenario, the player can turn the camera around in a second, and the entire texture content has to be replaced in that time.