
As spotted by GoNintendo, a popular Super Mario 64 modder named Kaze Emanuar has uploaded a new video showcasing a beautiful level from their upcoming "Return To Yoshi's Island" mod.
In December, the modder previously posted a short video of the same level on Twitter with the caption "Making games for the N64 in 2022 looks like". This video demonstrated a custom Mario 64 level featuring an impressive amount of moving parts, in addition to high poly-count textures, and cool lighting effects, all running smoothly on real N64 hardware.
This immediately drew a ton of questions from people wondering how the modder had managed to achieve such stunning results on the original N64 hardware. And now, in a new video, uploaded on January 28th, the modder has revealed some of the secrets behind this impressive level.
Some of the topics discussed in this new video include how he took advantage of baked vertex colours and the N64's directional lights to create "fake" point lights and used multi-textures in the environment to reduce repetition.
According to Kaze Emanuar, the project The Return to Yoshi's Island is roughly 70% done at present and is intended to have over 160 stars in total (including four cap courses and 3 Bowser levels). It's being created in collaboration with Biobak and the musician Badub. You can keep up to date with Kaze Emanuar's progress on his Twitter or over on YouTube.
We'll also be keeping a close eye on the project to see how it develops.
What do you make of the results? Comment and let us know!
[source youtu.be, via gonintendo.com]
Comments 7
That looks incredible! The draw distance, smooth framerate and (for N64) excellent textures are something else. Really mastering the hardware.
Looks stunning will this get a physical release though. Very doubtful Nintendo will have the lawyers out lol π π
Have been following these dev diaries for a while now, and they are super impressive.
I LOVE stuff like this. It's amazing to see indie dev's harnessing the power of the N64 properly. I hope the indie scene takes off; it would be brilliant to see unique games and hacks for the hardware that really show off what the hardware could do on it's own terms, without the shadow of the Playstation hanging over it.
Moreover, I would absolutely love to see this generation of consoles get the indie attention that the Mega Drive has been getting as of late.
The SEGA Saturn has a few really impressive projects going on for it at the moment too, check out this insane WIP port of Epic's original Unreal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svdF2Vg17MM
This is really astonishing! I would love to see the creator replace the Mario stuff with original characters, so he could offer a commercial release. It looks like a full game could be a fantastic homebrew game on a cartridge!
Oh my pick up a picking penguin god!!! It looks more like a Dreamcast game than an N64 one! Im guessing they are using the 4mb expansion cartridge? If not then the devs are performing pure wizardry with the hardware.
I always wondered back in the day why after the June 96 launch of Mario 64 they didn't get to work on an immediate sequel using the 4mb expansion card for a late 97 launch. I guess they were too busy working on Zelda: Ocarina Of Time
Thats cool and impressive but what about the underlying mechanics? It seems being a mod of mario 64 that its just that with pretty graphics so not really creating a game on n64... Id definitely be impressed if that was done on the hardware including music and character models and physics, aren't textures just images? Using hi def images in place of low res long as the size of the files can be small? And fit all of that on a cartridge or else its not really an n64 game, really cool how he breaks them down but why not take all that knowledge and make a brand new game on the n64?
@ParadoxFawkes It really does run on a real N64, as Kaze briefly demonstrates.
About textures, the N64 is notorious for its poor texture quality, so getting good results out of it isn't easy. Any one texture can only be 4 KB in size (as opposed to a typical photo from a phone or camera, which is at least 4 MB, or 1024 times as large)!
A few studios back in the day had some kind of workaround involving reading uncompressed textures straight off the cartridge, but putting high-res textures in that way would quickly balloon the ROM size beyond what a cartridge could hold, not to mention that it would slow the N64 to a crawl.
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