The project is moving forward according to the “Plan for Project Completion”. Today time is come for the second large beta release. According to the Plan, the following tasks were planned to accomplish:
Since the plan for the previous release was not fulfilled on 100%, uncompleted works were moved to this stage. These are mostly bug fixes. I need to say few words about situation with emulation errors. It was planned that the project will reach compatibility level of Glide64 within month or two. My estimation of that work was based on assumption that legacy code (that is original code of glN64 plugin) is correct and just incomplete. I seriously mistaken here. I spent weeks on debugging since the previous release and all this time I stumble on issues in very core of the plugin's code. Since code of Glide64 and GLideN64 differs a lot these issues are hard to notice. In spite of my hard efforts compatibility level of Glide64 is still not reached. However, the situation is much better than with the previous release. Circa 80 issues closed on the bug tracker during this stage. Most of serious issues are fixed, and most of games work pretty well.
According to the Plan, the main feature of this beta release is support of HD textures. I ported GlideHQ module to this project and adopted it to the new reality:
- 3dfx texture formats are replaced by OpenGL ones.
- texture compression is removed. This technique was useful for 3dfx cards which had 24 mb of texture memory at most. Since texture quality degrade noticeably after the compression, I removed it.
- added new family of texture scalers - xBRZ. xBRZ was invented after original GlideHQ was finished. Many people like how that scaler works, so now you may check yourself is it suitable for N64 textures.
- improved texture library text messages output during HD textures load. You know how it looks with Glide64. With GLideN64 you may change font, font size and text color for these messages.
Another mega feature of this release is support of LLE, that is Low Level Emulation. Just select LLE RSP plugin in the emulator to enable it. Besides new games support that feature has another practical use - you may easily find what causes particular graphic glitch: errors in HLE or bugs in core functionality.
Other changes are not so global:
- Implemented microcode for Star Wars - Shadows of the Empire
- Implemented gamma correction feature
- Implemented flat shading and prim shading
- Lots of fixes and modifications in texture code.
Note about non-windows platforms. Linux build worked well until I added texture library. Current code can be built but emulator can't load the plugin due to conflicts in included libraries. It is technical issue, I hope to fix it soon. The situation with Mac OS X is similar: I can compile the code but can't run it. Current release of Mupen64Plus for Mac does not support OpenGL 4. The problem is also technical.
Next stage will be started in the New Year. The plugin will get new GUI and will be compatible with Zilmar's specs emulators. Of course, bugfixing will be continued.
How to get the beta:
How to get the beta:
- All project contributors with access to the forum may download the beta from GLideN64/New Year Beta Release subforum.
- All project contributors with perk "Early beta for Mupen64Plus 2.0" will get the beta by email.
- If you are not a contributor, you still may support the project.
I was too busy to make video materials to this release. You may check this cool comparison video, made by our forum member aquatakat:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ux4mFG-cCw
It shows difference between glN64 and GLideN64.
And a few screen shots from Perfect Dark:
It shows difference between glN64 and GLideN64.
And a few screen shots from Perfect Dark:
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| Object highlight |
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| Motion blur |
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| Spy cam |
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| Night vision |
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| Coronas, mip-mapping, reflections |
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| X-Ray scanner |
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| Sky textures |
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| Horizon scanner |
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| IR scanner |
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| Multiplayer mode |
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| Multiplayer with simulants |
