News

Hi all!

* You surely already know that Rare’s unreleased N64 game Dinosaur Planet has leaked. Unlike many other Rare's games, this one uses standard microcode from Nintendo. Thus, there were no need to decode it to run it in HLE mode. There was only one problem with graphics: dynamic shadows did not work. I fixed it, so the game looks cool now with GLideN64.

* Six month ago standard-two-simplex proposed a new approach for drawing N64 primitives. Currently drawn primitives are often shifted by half-pixel or texture coordinates are shifted by half-texel, which leads to various minor glitches. The new methods tricks OpenGL viewport transformation and makes it possible to pass screen-space coordinates to vertex shader.

Now it is much easier to put coordinates to the right place, but, unfortunately, only in native resolution. This method fixes lots of issues with 2D graphics (HUD, menus) in native resolution. The situation in hi-resolutions is improved too thanks to special shift of texture coordinates. The full explanation from the author is here:

https://github.com/gonetz/GLideN64/issues/2324#issue-692348753

https://github.com/gonetz/GLideN64/issues/2324#issuecomment-772866005

List of related issues:

https://github.com/gonetz/GLideN64/pull/2334#issuecomment-711362297

The author worked on this method for months, and achieved the very cool progress. It is the last feature which I plan to include to the new Public Release. So, I have a request for you. Please take this build: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/gonetz/gliden64/builds/37988053/artifacts

and test it as much as possible: in native resolution, in high resolution, in wide screen etc. Please report about regressions: https://github.com/gonetz/GLideN64/issues

* I implemented new OSD info - statistics. It shows number of primitives per frame. It can be interesting to see, how many polygons were sent to RSP and how many of them were  actually drawn. Sometimes total number of polygons is several thousands but most of them are clipped or culled.