Hello!
Sorry for lack of updates last month. I was on vacation, then I had to sort out things on my work. However, the work on the plugin not stopped. Current hot theme is fixes in sprite microcode. Independent efforts of two developers intersected in time:
* olivieryuyu greatly advanced in decoding S2DEX microcode, which is used by many games to draw 2D graphics. While the microcode is documented and its HLE implementation made long ago, there are several tricky things under the hood. Microcode decoding should help us to fix various glitches.
* gizmo98 found that not all documented features of S2DEX are properly emulated. He made several fixes, which made 2D more sharp and clean in several games.
I will describe these changes in traditional changelog a bit later. Work on S2DEX is not finished yet. Source code can be found in this branch:
https://github.com/gonetz/GLideN64/tree/2D_fixes
Besides this important work, I finally fulfilled users request for implementation of Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing aka FXAA. FXAA is post-processing filter, which eliminates aliasing. Check the image to see how it works with Super Mario 64. As you may notice, traditional Multisample anti-aliasing aka MSAA gives the best result. Result of FXAA is decent, but not as good. So, why use it? As you may know, N64 depth compare is hard to emulate properly on PC hardware. I made shader based emulation of N64 depth compare. Currently it can be enabled without sacrifice in performance, but it is not compatible with MSAA. That is if you enabled N64 depth compare you lost anti-aliasing. Now you may enable FXAA and N64 depth compare and play without major sacrifice in graphics quality. Also, FXAA is less demanding to hardware power than MSAA. Anti-aliasing techniques as FXAA are the only way to get AA on mobile devices with GL ES 2.0.
Test build with FXAA and all recent fixes in 2D is available for all patrons with early access. You should get email with download link.
Robert Dyson
2018-08-26 16:55:23 +0000 UTC