Gliden64
patreon
Some news
🕑 Added 2022-03-13 09:25:39 +0000 UTCHello,
More than year passed since my previous post. Of course, it's not a normal situation. Unfortunately, there are not so many breaking news about the plugin.
The main changes are related to texture mapping. standard-two-simplex moved texture coordinates calculations to fragment shaders. Lots of inaccuracies with texture mapping were fixed. Also, standard-two-simplex and me made new implementation of N64 mip-mapping emulation. Fixed several issues, which were impossible to fix with the previous approach. All these changes increase not only emulation accuracy, but also GPU load, because fragment shaders do more work. Android users started to complain, so the previous "fast inaccurate texture mapping" is now available as an option. "Fast inaccurate texture mapping" is also recommended if you use HD texture packs, because HD packs were made to look good with the old texture mapping. Speaking of HD texture packs - the format of HD texture cache was changed recently. N64 can set different texture formats for the same texture data, so the same texture may look differently. Texture artists may want to create different HD textures for each texture format. It is impossible with the old texture cache, because it searches HD textures only by checksum of the original texture. Checksum for different texture formats is the same because texture data is the same. The new texture cache searches HD texture by checksum, format and size of the original N64 texture. New versions of the plugin can load texture packs in both old and new formats, but store texture pack in the new format only.
Regarding GLideN64 builds. All changes are merged to GLideN64 GitHub repository https://github.com/gonetz/GLideN64
including the ones from Patreon early-access releases. GLideN64 builds for Windows and Linux are available for everyone to download from https://github.com/gonetz/GLideN64/releases/tag/github-actions
I'm receiving messages that people can't access some builds, which I posted on my Google Drive. Google changed sharing policy and the files became unavailable. Dear users, there is no point to download these old builds. Please use the recent ones from GitHub.
Comments
This really helped out with the texture pack I'm making for perfect dark! Besides misalignment, many strange artifacts such as jagged blurring on nearby textures and lines on translucent surfaces were fixed by the new texture coordinates. It also fixed certain textures which stretched the last pixel rather than rolling over to the other side of the texture. Only negative to come out of this (besides having to remake some ui textures to fit in the new positions) is that at far distances the thin lines which would be blurred previously now appear as sharp dots and absences of the line. Since these appear inside textures rather than at edges of objects, not even potential things to come like using pixel coverage calculation for anti aliasing would fix them. I'm unfamiliar if anisotropic filtering can fix these issues as well as bending, since I've never seen an issue similar to this in a modern game. I believe TAA is often used for this, but since post processing looks at the entire frame rather than on textures, it becomes motion blur and also erases particles.
