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As much as I loved exploring the world of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, there was one thing that always bothered me - the inability to view certain areas in first person.
Don't get me wrong: it was never a deal breaker, and I felt the 2D, pre-rendered backgrounds did a more-than-adequate job of creating the impression of a larger, more detailed world.
But, inevitably, being told as a child I could only view Hyrule Castle Town from a series of heavily controlled camera angles made me want to swing the camera around wildly and take a closer look at all the other areas hidden from view. Luckily for me, though, there appears to be a new ROM hack currently in development that will allow players to do just this, in addition to eliminating the loading screens inside Hyrule Market.
OoT unJPEG, as it's called, is a work-in-progress project by Reonu, a Spanish 3D artist and modder, who has spent the last year recreating The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's pre-rendered 2D backgrounds in 3D. Reonu announced the project on BlueSky over the weekend, stating that the finished project will be playable on real N64 hardware and as a mod for its PC port Zelda 64 Recompiled.
"I'm recreating all the prerenders using Blender and Fast64, wrote Reonu on Bluesky. "For the market, I combined all of it into a single scene, which eliminates all the load screens and makes it seamless. Making this work on N64 hardware with ok performance was very hard and required me to write custom CPU culling code.
"The N64 version also has LODs for all the buildings in the market to help with performance. These LODs won't be there in the recomp version. This probably won't be necessary for the interiors (shops, etc)."
They continued that because they aren't "great at making textures," the textures used in the mod are mostly "vanilla OoT textures, textures from other games, or photos of walls or floors I took IRL," and have appealed for some help from a 2D texture artist, if there's anybody out there with the time and skills. They also state that "No GenAI was used for any part of this project."
No timeline has been given on when the project will be released yet, but I know I'll be keeping a close eye on the project in the future.