Hacker News

I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64 [video]

284 points by msephton 10 hours ago | 38 comments

Very cool. In 1998 (oof) we built Road Rash 64 which was accidentally open world -- even though you had race on a particular road, with a start and finish line, you could drive anywhere, see traffic all over the map, jump off of mountains, etc. The r4k plus reality coprocessor was quite potent -- we got to over 750k shaded triangles per second in optimized testing -- though finicky because you had to manage audio during vblank, etc. Plus, the reality coprocessor fog had a brutal hardware bug that made it really tricky to use.

everdrive 4 hours ago

Road Rash 64 is a really underrated game. As you say, the environment is alive, and nearly every race has a lot of potential for wacky slapstick fun. The driving feels really nice and is rewarding to learn.

jdironman 2 hours ago

if you were on the development team of that game I send my biggest thanks out to you. it was one of the few things me and my (hard to bond with) father bonded over growing up. We would play I think ..course 2 or 3 with the insanity level bikes ALL night trying to get out times down to something like 1 1/2 minutes. within ms of each other's times. run after run. so thanks.

x0re4x 2 hours ago

There is a nice video by Kaze Emanuar demonstrating N64 easily pushing 300k shaded triangles per second without special optimizations in a game engine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC_jLsxZ7nw

dd_xplore 47 minutes ago

I just loved road rash, I had the demo version initially, I used to call it demo rash. Once in a race I accidentally jumped on a building, it was first open world experience for me!

muggesmuds 2 hours ago

Massive fan, would love to hear some details about the culture in the office at that time!

jmkni 4 hours ago

Comments like this are why I just love Hacker News

ErroneousBosh 3 hours ago

> Plus, the reality coprocessor fog had a brutal hardware bug that made it really tricky to use.

What was the bug?

azertify 8 hours ago

In case anyone is interested, this creator built a remake of Portal for the N64, uploading a really cool set of videos describing the work that went into building it.

He's since stopped to work on his own IP, I believe that the issue was that Valve couldn't allow it because they'd never get Nintendo to agree to it. Something along those lines, anyway.

Frenchgeek 7 hours ago

I think the main issue was he used Nintendo owned tools and libraries to make his game instead of the GPL ones, making the release of the port dependent on Nintendo's approval too. I guess even Valve didn't want to deal with their lawyers.

throwawayk7h 5 hours ago

In principle he could use alternative tools, like libdragon, but he said even if he did that it was unlikely Valve would permit it, as Nintendo would still be antagonized somehow. And Valve it seems wants to improve their relationship with Nintendo (See: Valve blocked Dolphin on steam, and took down a video showing yuzu installed on the steam deck).

ErroneousBosh 3 hours ago

> And Valve it seems wants to improve their relationship with Nintendo

Valve are the 200kg gorilla of the gaming industry and can throw their weight around.

However Nintendo are a 250kg gorilla.

LarsDu88 5 hours ago

I actually used similar camera draw distance trick in my game Rogue Stargun.

The real way to optimize this stuff really well is for the artist to spend a lot of time making LODS for the distant objects. For the really distant objects, esp for a platform like n64, you can replace the distant objects with billboard imposters which are basically just flat poster textures that swap perspectives at certain angles.

GTA V does this extremely well with many manually made LODs and its very costly

oliwary 3 hours ago

Another game that I find has very impressive draw distance is Just Cause 2. You can see objects very far away when flying etc, but they look very detailed and do not change when moving closer. Definitely blew me away the first time playing it.

vertexmachina 4 hours ago

They have a very complicated and robust pipeline that generates all of those LODs automatically. The artists aren't manually creating them.

gryfft 9 hours ago

I watched this on YouTube the other day. Another beautiful example of the creative power yielded from building within constraints.

msephton 8 hours ago

Such a clever way to approach the problem! I'd say only possible with a detailed understanding of the N64 constraints.

user____name 7 hours ago

This is really cool. Kaze Emanuar[0] seems to be able to hit 60hz consistently with his Mario 64 rework, I wonder if such perf is achievable for these wide open landscapes. Iirc Shadow of the Collosus rendered distant geometry into the skybox, which always struck me as a neat trick.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64

smithcoin 6 hours ago

VRAM goes vroom vroom.

I emailed him the video from OP and he mentioned they’ve done some collaboration. I’m assuming there’s a retro programming discord that I’m not worthy of.

uyjulian 6 hours ago

A lot of stuff is happening on the n64brew discord. https://discord.gg/WqFgNWf

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 6 hours ago

Yeah I remember hearing that SOTC's "SuperLow" LOD was a 2D image. Trespasser also did that, but only for trees and props, not for terrain objects. Trespasser being basically a heightmap with dinosaurs dropped in

estebank 5 hours ago

Hey! It also had a barely working physics engine.

Then again the dinosaurs were physics entities, so maybe you already mentioned it. :)

dcrazy 5 hours ago

Even modern games replace distant geometry with billboards. Simplygon is one middleware that does this. The Remedy folks talked about how Alan Wake 2 used it at GDC last year or the year before.

amelius 7 hours ago

The first comment:

> "The N64 is very memory bound"

> Aren't we all these days?

TomatoCo 7 hours ago

This reminds me of Magicore Anomala, a side scrolling game being made for the 1985 Atari. I wish there was a way to know how people contemporary to the release of the Atari or the N64 would react to seeing these modern engines.

ErroneousBosh 3 hours ago

You know that 1985 was when 50-year-olds were starting high school right?

kennywinker 4 hours ago

A super impressive feat, but also the games art style is like having bleach poured into my eyes. Am I just the wrong age for this specific retro nostalgia? Probably.

cubefox 7 hours ago

The same guy, James Lambert, also implemented texture streaming (which would not be invented until two console generations later) in an N64 demo. The textures look uncharacteristically high res: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Sf036fO-ZUk

LarsDu88 5 hours ago

Like in id softwares RAGE?

cubefox 4 hours ago

Yes, id invented it, but I think they published one slightly earlier game which also had texture streaming. The technique (virtual textures) would not become ubiquitous in most engines until the PS4 era though.

Narishma 4 hours ago

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars used an earlier version of it but only for the terrain. I think Rage was the first to use it for everything.

cubefox 3 hours ago

Unfortunately nowadays id Software doesn't seem to be at the cutting edge of engine technology anymore. Most interesting new developments now come from Unreal Engine as far as I can tell. Like virtual geometry (Nanite) or efficient ray traced direct illumination (MegaLights).

ill_ion 7 hours ago

This is awesome!

AdmiralAsshat 8 hours ago

Somewhat annoyingly, the actual homebrew z64 seems to crash both of the N64 cores that RetroArch supports. :(

x0re4x 5 hours ago

It might be because he is not using nintendo's sdk anymore, particularly the "microcode" for RSP "coprocessor". Most N64 emulators usually do not emulate RSP properly, but detect which specific nintendo's microcode is used and then emulate it's behavior.

Narishma 4 hours ago

That means they are not accurate cores since it works fine on real hardware.

giovannibajo1 59 minutes ago

Correct, both of them are really really old, accuracy wise. N64 emulation has improved a lot in the past 4-5 years, but old emulators haven’t caught up

b00ty4breakfast 7 hours ago

At the end of the video he says it needs real hardware or a "highly accurate emulator like Ares".

ryguz 3 hours ago

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