Better engine, Better graphics (Nintendo 64)

today I want to showcase how optimizing your game's code can give artists more Freedom by showcasing the progress this Nintendo 64 level has gone through after I've optimized the engine this is a Mario 64 mod that has improved the performance of the original Mario 64 engine 6V in the demo from 2021 that ran on an unmodified Mario 64 engine only with compiler optimizations turned on this scene only hit 15 frames per second it also had a lot detail and you couldn't look into any of the other dos because not calling them was just too expensive to render this new view is so much nicer the colors the detail the textures I absolutely love this and best of all despite making this so much more detailed and adding about 50 skeletal mesh algaes the frame rate is still more than twice as high as before and this level hasn't even been optimized yet that's something I do at the end because I keep finding new things that would change what the best optimization is so car boxes batching rooms for the Dome inside that car while you're outside and probably a few more things that I can think of right now they aren't even part of this yet but let's start the level at the entrance the traditional Mario 64 star select has been replaced with a cool little scene that shows the player traveling to the level obviously this doesn't take much performance but I like it so much that I just had to show you guys once per play through when you enter a level you will see a cool little mood setting cut scene this was originally only the second level I've made for this game and since then has gotten a pretty big overhaul my own skill has improved a lot while working on this game and thanks to my patreon support I've been able to pay an artist by a beas's name to help me beautify these levels we want to make this game the absolute best we can the new Star select was actually his idea too fun fact even without performance restrictions the demo was simply not capable of running above 30 frames a second because the vanilla Mario 64 engine was not not capable of accounting for higher frame rates than 30 running Mario 64 at more than 30 FPS would simply speed up the physics and be uncontrollable here you can already see the level hit 60 FPS frequently even though I am only targeting 30 frames per second on this game since it is still an N64 game although emulators will have no problem running this game at perfect 60 FPS throughout don't worry I won't spoil too much of this level but I'll just let you know that all the sub areas here have been reworked from the demo as well and this level is now but twice as big as before some would call that feature creep but I think it's really just bringing this level up to the standard I've slowly converged to while making the later levels this level plays in these domes that kind of act as inverse aquariums all the entrances are gated off with airlocks it's never directly said who built these or who lived here but you'll find a lot of environmental storytelling while exploring this level so you can maybe piece it together for yourself I always thought the deep sea was really cool so this is one of my favorite level themes in the game so far it's important to me that my levels have something I like to call placess I want players to play my game and come out of thinking what would it be like to live in that world to have that imagination run wild and have a part of the game be with the player even after you've turned off the TV I want to make sure that what you get out of playing this game is more Adventure than busy work which is a gripe I have with a lot of modern games I find a lot of them act as fr ation minimized busy work designed to just erase your time which maybe sounds a bit negative or even pretentious but I think you get what I'm saying another cool update is that since the demo this level has gotten a newly composed soundtrack to properly match the vibe we want to have the demo was using ripped songs from other games but the current game has all custom music thanks to bop he's been making a lot of Banger comp compositions and remixes of Mario songs to fit this game's atmosphere with all the performance improvements this actually hits close to 60 FPS on real Hardware almost always but I'm really only shooting for 30 so we can decorate this place up a lot more if we want to but I do like the desolate feeling of this place if you have ideas for some set pieces that work out to make this place seem more desolate somehow let me know I've already put as much seaweed across as I could reasonably get away with but I'm sure there could be more cool stuff to see around during a first exploration of this level you will feel the dread of swimming in the deep sea as you will run out of oxygen real quick and you will be forced to go back into the Doms relatively quickly but if you make some progress you'll gain some Freedom through an underwater shell you can unlock that lets you explore this level freely and push even deeper into the deep sea with the shell you can get the r quick without losing oxygen and explore everything in peace in Mario 64 you typically find Stars randomly in the middle of the level while exploring around this game is different in that instead of directly finding the star you are often presented with a whole new area and a little puzzle or adventure to go on that then leads to a star this area here wasn't in the demo at all and I've added it afterwards because to be honest the content I put here in the demo just kind of sucked it's always easier to see what sucks and what works if you put people up to play test your work that's also the reason I want to make one or two more mini hacks on this engine so we can limit test the collision and ensure all my physics improvements to Mario 64 are not introducing unintended confusions or Consequences I've actually made over 100 little changes to mario64 physics at this point but unless you are a hardcore player you've probably not noticed a single one of them in this video so far almost all of these changes are near invisible and I just ensuring that physics work consistently across the board and that inputs are as responsive as they can be I have a whole video about some of them up too if you like to see it if you listen closely you can also hear how Mario's footsteps have new sounds the original game had eight different step sounds of which only a few can be used in each area but I for the Collision to allow me to use 16 different sounds that lets us make surfaces sound much more immersive these additional sounds were made by Yoshi Milkman by the way and I think he did a great job in the background you can see some pretty nice vertx animations these are pretty simple to do on the N64 these are not like modern shaders at all rather the CPU transforms the actual mesh verances directly to achieve this effect I also added some deep sea Biol luminiscent jellyfish around and who knows who else lives in this deep sea near the sunken town maybe you'll see someone if you look around not enough I think all of that really makes this look like a second City and the existence of this place alone really adds to the fantasy of this level I hope you enjoyed this I rarely upload previews because people don't want spoilers but I figured I'd let you guys know that this game is still being actively worked on every single day you can stay subscribed to be up to date I don't know how long it will be before the release because I'm doing this alongside having a full-time job but I'm doing my best on delivering content I'm currently done with 11 out of 15 courses so we are reaching the final third of the content I have to make but that will be all for today see you here [Music] we yeah here we go

Channel: Kaze Emanuar

Views: 206,958

Keywords: super mario 64, kaze emanuar, n64, nintendo, mod, download, mario, rom, emulator, retro

Id: -nhhfYkluT0

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 09 2023