Some news

Hello,

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.