I recommend you make the vertex lighting a little more blue. In the real Portal you can do the command *mat_fullbright 2* to get the colors you need, pretty much.
@@shadesoftime Giles Goddard did experiment with portals a little for OoT, he talked about it and showed us the tech demo he presented to the rest of the OoT team. Wasn’t as advanced as this AFAIK.
I am gonna just add my support to this comment. yeah, it looks great with vortex lighting :-) speed over some baked textures, let those system resources get used for other stuff :-)
tbh it could get a bit more "detail" with some fake ambient occlusion lightmaps (ie, just subdivide the walls near all the corners and have a dark gradient only for those faces)
Console games from that generation (and even the one after) almost universally used vertex shaded lighting since there simply wasn’t enough texture memory to do good quality lightmaps, especially when vertex coloring is essentially free. But you can still get very good results through baking ambient occlusion or even radiosity into the vertex colors, combined with some manual painting and tweaking of the actual geometry to get the best possible results. Look at games like Vagrant Story to see how far that technique can be pushed.
That and help Nintendo with a few other things, like showing them how to do 8 GB to 64 GB game carts (like the Switch) instead of 8 MB to 64 MB (to help compete against the 700 MB CDs). That and also increasing the texture cache size in the N64 (I'm not a developer, but I think that was one of the weakest things in the 64 hardware, why a lot of games looked blurry).
@@beardalaxy Uhhhh, I don't get your comment. First of all, it wasn't meant to be taken seriously (time travel isn't real!). The idea was to show them how they're doing it now and still be profitable.
@@theresapimentacointheglove8760 I don't think you could help them get 8-64gb carts going unless you went back quite a bit earlier and helped the whole industry and a lot of it's production chain tho : p
In a perfect world, Valve acknowledges it and Nintendo's lawyers can't figure out a way to kill the project. I know this is all perfectly legal, but maybe they'd try to articulate it as hacking official nintendo hardware or something
@@phoenixvance6642 I doubt nintendo would care much, because it doesnt infringe on any of their IP. The reason they are so draconian is because they wanna protect their IP at all cost (allowing fan recreation could potentially weaken their ability to hold a trademark of certain characters) but this doesn't enter in that territory.
I feel like if you baked a blue hue into the greyscale lighting, it would make Potal64 feel more like Portal. Something I thought was missing for a while was the color correction from Portal, which I previously thought would be unachievable on N64 hardware in real-time.
I'm not familiar with N64 at all,but does this mean you can pass a color to EVERY vertex? Including the gun and objects, for color correction of the entire screen?
4:54 Nice! Those orange glowing areas contributed a lot to the mysterious, threatening atmosphere of the original game, I'm glad they turned out so well here!
And yet, at the same time, it totally does. There's zero question this would have been a rare cartridge to find without the golden Players' Choice stamp.
I mean, it certainly doesn’t look like a modern game. I’ve seen more impressive stuff on the N64. That’s not to downplay the impressiveness of this, it’s quite good, but to speak about the heights (or depths) of the insanity people will go to.
@@Minnevanwhat’s probably throwing you off is the default n64 antialiasing is disabled. so that looks more ps1-ish. But the n64 texture filtering and lack of ps1’s affine texture warping, make it look definitively n64
It's honestly shocking how close you've gotten to the original. A full fat version of portal really could have been done on N64, and that's amazing. I would never have guessed that that was true. As far as the lighting goes, you might try using a *really* low resolution lightmap that just has slight edge darkening on convex corners to get a bit of fake AO. Look into how Minecraft does it. Since you're basically only rendering boxes, you should be able to get away with a very small number of 16x16 textures (I don't remember exactly how many cases there are, but not many). If you combine that with the vertex lighting, I think you can probably make it look really nice!
I don't know if the n64 has a separate 2d pipeline, I've not heard it talked about if it does, but even with 3d it's just a quad per digit, and a tiny texture (often less than 1kb) for the numbers, or about 10 tris for untextured geometry. I doubt it would be even noticable with the amount of geometry the 64 can throw around, which looks like ~2000 per 60 FPS frame at the *bottom* end.
@@Wheaggit almost never has any real impact because a very naive approach that works for the most part is to just get a delta between frames and then calculate what the FPS of that would be if it continued to be that exact delta, and that's basically only like 2-3 calculations and then some calls to draw the text on the screen. more complicated engines will do more complicated math, but this is an extremely simple and straight-forward approach that you could easily do and it have little real impact on the game.
It's crazy to think that this could have been done theoretically in like 2000, and if it had it would probably have been hailed as the literal greatest game of all time.
@@tarajoe07 it's amazing to think about, but there are more constraints than just passion. just imagine what might be possible with today's tech if people had 20 years' foresight into the future, no jobs on the line, and no deadlines.
Wow you are extremely talented and have done an amazing job on this project. I had no idea N64 was capable with these kinds of physics and rendering of this kind of lighting. Amazing. Keep it up!
yeah it's pretty sad meanwhile so many youtubers play martyrs and piss and moan having people think that every 10 minute video they make of simply talking to a camera "takes a lot of work" and say it takes me weeks to write a script!!! then.....editing took me hours!!!! I swear I swear youtube is hard work!. Meanwhile this guy is doing genuinely impressive stuff like this amd strangely there's no "hey guess do what the algorithm likes make sure to smash that like button and turn on notifications! also did you know 9 out of 10 viewers aren't even subscribed!!!" . This guy and this project is what youtube was and was always meant to be doing things for the love of them, no sponsors no plugs no "adpocalypse " bs
couple of horrible misspellings, just wanted to point that out, can't edit comments via brave browser, small price to pay to have youtube be tolerable lmao
This is the kind of care I wish developers had when porting games to current Nintendo consoles. We know the Wii / Switch wasn't/isn't as powerful as their competition, but if enough time and dedication were put into making something half as special as this Portal port feels like, we would be so happy with 3rd party developers.
Kudos for the progress! Keep it up! You could potentially pick a fixed light source position and pre calculate vertex lighting values radially from there from max brightness to farthest from light.
This is insane, you're very very talented and I hope you can finish this amazing project! Please keep up with the devlogs, I'd be interested in some more technical videos like the moving portal paradox one, but they're kinda tough to make so I understand if you keep it on feature based only videos
So excited to see how far this has come and can still go! You’ve gotten almost all of the basic/core mechanics down for the game! Can’t wait to see the full game recreated💜
the previous version was one of the first pieces of homebrew I played on my everdrive, and now I'm tempted to play through it again! Amazing work as usual!
Incredible work, this is an absolutely insane homebrew project! You deserve way more subs, but for now, I'll be excitedly awaiting each new update video :)
So cool! Vertex lighting stays winning. Personally not sure how much more a lightmap will do for you at that resolution anyways relative to the performance trade off, so I think I'd stick with the free solution.
N64 is fillrate limited after all. Why try to reduce vertex count? Maybe add sectors like in Doom for shadows? Might be cool to run Blender Cycles over the level to generate lightmaps and find an optimized mesh for vertex colors to cover this.
You can make dynamic objects look as good as pre baked lighting. The way is to generate a grid of cubes, each having light prebaked as a level, but they shouldn't affect the level lighing and be visible. Then just sample the shading info from the model to the closest "cube", which is, of course, isnt visible. Should fix the blinding bright of the portal gun. Also a note that the light sample could be just a single color point, not a cube.
It's absolutely incredible what the N64 is capable of with proper optimization. If I didn't know any better, I wouldn't even think it was an N64 game. Amazing work!
Vertex lighting is very smart. If you want an example of good vertex shading theres a program that lets you extract levels from the Ps1 game Twisted Metal 4, it extracts the entire level and all the data and the vertex painting they did with lighting is very visible. Would be a great point of reference!
since the original has inset lights around the edges of ceilings to give moodlighting gradients down the walls, you could replicate that with a pale blue light gradient from the ceiling on the wall vertex colours.
If the vertex lighting starts to really bother you, just add more verts to areas that need them, or separate textures. I doubt it will, but it's not really worth lightmapping IMO. Also, you should definitely have a test map. Doesn't need to be the most perfect thing but it would make this type of video have more production value and make debugging easier I imagine
The fact that someone is able to build THAT on a real n64 hardware is already totally crazy. I'm so amazed by talented dev that go back to an old console and push them to their limit in a way it was just not possible back in 1996-2000, but 25 years later ppl are doing some crazy thing and I'm sooo captivated by all these awesome projects!!
This is probably the single best fan made retro home brew I’ve ever seen. Genuinely phenomenal work. If portal had released on N64, I genuinely think it would be a serious contender for knocking Goldeneye and OoT off the top spots.
So crazy, I haven't looked at anything from this project in awhile and man you've been puttin' in WORK. Crazy, I can't even imagine what's lying underneath this to get the hardware to do this.
This is what Smea would have wanted. This is probably the most impressive homebrew game ever, especially for the first 3d generation and onwards. I wish homebrew game developing was more popular. Of course, that's highly unlikely given that devs don't really get anything other than experience out of it. Everyone knows grinding for experience sucks.
I'm not going to lie, one thing I would absolutely love to see you implement at some point in the future is support for Dolby ProLogic surround sound, a lot of games on the N64 supported surround sound with that format even if it wasn't officially acknowledged as Dolby, and I think that would be really cool to see at some point in the future.
I was aware of this game’s development from a while ago, but just watched a full devlog now. I gotta say, this is so incredibly cool! I’m a huge portal fan and can’t wait to see what else you can do with this game.
In terms of baked lighting, maybe it could be an option in a graphics menu of some sort. Maybe a menu for cool graphics upgrades you thought of that couldn't quite reach full speed.
A small detail the original game does that you could also adopt is that cameras turn to face straight forward when detached, so they can better match their static collision mesh. Also this project makes me so happy. Thank you for making this. If I don't already have an N64 controller by the time this is finished I will literally buy one for this. :3
That last room is the test where you can jam the door with cameras, slip the cube through the door, and then remove the cameras to soft-lock yourself. Glados then scolds you and opens the door for you
As a fellow dev, this is super nice. The cube solution makes total sense, drawing another entity with the same textures is a cheap solution that was used a lot for reflections back in the day, and this seems to be similar enough to a mirror I guess, also, this way you could put two portals and see the cube coming out of it as well from the original point of view. Also, vertex colors can be used to simulate contact shadows as well, just make the borders a little bit darker and done, that way you can have a clear difference between walls/floors/ceilings as well.
it's a blast to play with an N64 controller, just did the first 4 test chambers! I prefer to use my right hand on the joystick + z button and my left hand on the dpad + L button since it feels closest to when I first played portal on the xbox 360! I love how you integrated the menu just like the pc game! good luck on the project!
Just wow. First I saw Kaze Emanuar's amazing Return to Yoshi's Island project, now this?! It's insane how these are even able to run on real N64 hardware, especially this one. Keep up the amazing work!
Whenever you are done and or release the projects 1.0 release I will gladly add this to my emulation collection on my phone! It is incredible what you have managed to implement in a game for a N64 console hardware! And even if you are not going to use the mipmap system you showcase on every texture in this game I feel like the textures on walls and objects are more than good enough! After all this already looks more graphically pleasing than goldeneye, if not as pleasing.
It's great to see you during this project and feel the passion for it ! Hope you will keep having fun doing this port so we can, one day, try it ourselves and meet the final boss!
The fact that you wrote this in c, in a original engine, impresses me to no end! Your attention to detail now that you’ve fixed major bugs is amazing! ❤
This looks so amazing! I'm trying to do exactly the same but in unreal 😅 and was a ton of work to get it right. Doing it on n64 is a whole new level, really inspiring! Continue the good work
Seconding this! I’ve played OOT on my everdrive and freaked out when the surround sound actually worked on my setup. The N64 is such a cool little thing
@@kimgkomg N64 only has 2 audio channels but the sound was mixed in a way to give the perception of depth. The surround magic happens on your Pro Logic enabled receiver
@@DecibelAlexit’s not just illusionary mixing, my understanding is that it’s possible to actually encode a third channel baked into one of the two provided channels for compatible speakers
Yep! Games like Ocarina of Time had Surround, later games such as Majora's Mask, Perfect Dark and Conkers Bad Fur Day have full authenticated Dolby Surround. The SNES also has games that support surround sound, such as Samurai Shodown.
Stick w/ the vertex lighting, that's a no-brainer. What's the source of the FPS drops in some scenes? Is it the transparency drawing over the framebuffer? What about going with the dithered blending instead, if transparency is what's hurting perf? IIRC from your older vids you do have a PVS system in place, so no rooms that aren't visible are being drawn, but it does seem like some spots - like walking away from the fizzler drops perf, is it just total geometry taxing the hardware? I can imagine it's being pushed pretty hard. Maybe some kind of room LODs where walls aren't divided up into as many triangles and as you approach/enter a room it fades from the limited vert lighting of the lower-poly walls/surfaces to the lighting of the higher poly version that accommodates somewhat better vert lighting. I don't know if this would be difficult due to memory constraints though, but basically it would switch to the high-poly version of the room (that you have now) but with lighting that matches the low-poly version and lerp to the high-poly lighting. Just spitballing, and I don't know what the N64's limitations happen to be so... Anyway, thanks for sharing! :)
I recommend you make the vertex lighting a little more blue.
In the real Portal you can do the command *mat_fullbright 2* to get the colors you need, pretty much.
I didn't know that was a thing. Thank you for pointing that out
hallu weegee
weegee
Wait, what does full_bright 2 do?? I thought that command only expected a binary
It doesn't work, those colors aren't supported on the N64
This is probably the most incredible homebrew game not only on the Nintendo 64, but in general. Amazing work.
No matter when this game is finished it's going to be amazing, but imagine if it was released when the N64 was new? Would've blown everybody's minds.
@@VinnytotheKpeople didn't have the tools and knowledge necessary back then
@@shadesoftime not to mention the original game didn't even exist lol
@@shadesoftime Giles Goddard did experiment with portals a little for OoT, he talked about it and showed us the tech demo he presented to the rest of the OoT team. Wasn’t as advanced as this AFAIK.
@beardalaxy yeah, level design might be completely different if it was made in the 90's
That all the objects like the radio have physics like in Source engine is crazy
i really didn't expect to see that, not on an n64
That blew my mind as well! and the way they move looks so smooth
it isnt even the havok engine!
@@glubfun724which also powered Silver's gameplay in Sonic 06
@@AmbrosiaPoly-yolkEggsonic fans try not to mention sonic
Just stay with vertex shading, I think it looks really good. Framerate is more important than a lightmap that takes up precious texture cache.
If you want some more lighting detail, just split the face to get more vertices.
What about vertex lightmapping though?
I am gonna just add my support to this comment. yeah, it looks great with vortex lighting :-) speed over some baked textures, let those system resources get used for other stuff :-)
tbh it could get a bit more "detail" with some fake ambient occlusion lightmaps (ie, just subdivide the walls near all the corners and have a dark gradient only for those faces)
Console games from that generation (and even the one after) almost universally used vertex shaded lighting since there simply wasn’t enough texture memory to do good quality lightmaps, especially when vertex coloring is essentially free. But you can still get very good results through baking ambient occlusion or even radiosity into the vertex colors, combined with some manual painting and tweaking of the actual geometry to get the best possible results. Look at games like Vagrant Story to see how far that technique can be pushed.
Reasons why I want a time machine: going back to N64's launch with a cartridge of this.
And create a massive space time continuum split, where all the future of gaming is changed for ever 😂
That and help Nintendo with a few other things, like showing them how to do 8 GB to 64 GB game carts (like the Switch) instead of 8 MB to 64 MB (to help compete against the 700 MB CDs). That and also increasing the texture cache size in the N64 (I'm not a developer, but I think that was one of the weakest things in the 64 hardware, why a lot of games looked blurry).
@@theresapimentacointheglove8760 are you going to provide them with the necessary funds to produce 8gb cartridges in 1996?
@@beardalaxy Uhhhh, I don't get your comment. First of all, it wasn't meant to be taken seriously (time travel isn't real!). The idea was to show them how they're doing it now and still be profitable.
@@theresapimentacointheglove8760 I don't think you could help them get 8-64gb carts going unless you went back quite a bit earlier and helped the whole industry and a lot of it's production chain tho : p
Spectacular. I really hope Valve positively acknowledges this upon the the completion of it. This is extremely impressive
In a perfect world, Valve acknowledges it and Nintendo's lawyers can't figure out a way to kill the project. I know this is all perfectly legal, but maybe they'd try to articulate it as hacking official nintendo hardware or something
@@phoenixvance6642 I doubt nintendo would care much, because it doesnt infringe on any of their IP. The reason they are so draconian is because they wanna protect their IP at all cost (allowing fan recreation could potentially weaken their ability to hold a trademark of certain characters) but this doesn't enter in that territory.
In a perfect world they would sell actual copies because I would love to buy one.
@@Quasmok I think James said at one point that that was the plan
@@phoenixvance6642
Nintendo won't care about this project, they only care about their own IPs, and have a special disdain for remakes of their games
Vertex colors are such a nice touch. They really help sell the 3D depth of the levels.
I feel like if you baked a blue hue into the greyscale lighting, it would make Potal64 feel more like Portal. Something I thought was missing for a while was the color correction from Portal, which I previously thought would be unachievable on N64 hardware in real-time.
I'm not familiar with N64 at all,but does this mean you can pass a color to EVERY vertex? Including the gun and objects, for color correction of the entire screen?
@@O5MO from what i can tell, yeah, basically. every vertex has lighting info that can be any color you want.
3:10 as someone with barely any coding experience, I still know how satisfying that must feel for you to get that bug fixed. It's exciting to me!
4:54 Nice! Those orange glowing areas contributed a lot to the mysterious, threatening atmosphere of the original game, I'm glad they turned out so well here!
This doesn't even look like an N64 game, it's insanely impressive
And yet, at the same time, it totally does. There's zero question this would have been a rare cartridge to find without the golden Players' Choice stamp.
I mean, it certainly doesn’t look like a modern game. I’ve seen more impressive stuff on the N64. That’s not to downplay the impressiveness of this, it’s quite good, but to speak about the heights (or depths) of the insanity people will go to.
It looks exactly like and N64 game, which is what makes it so impressive.
to me it almost looks like something from the PS1, graphically
@@Minnevanwhat’s probably throwing you off is the default n64 antialiasing is disabled. so that looks more ps1-ish.
But the n64 texture filtering and lack of ps1’s affine texture warping, make it look definitively n64
It's honestly shocking how close you've gotten to the original. A full fat version of portal really could have been done on N64, and that's amazing. I would never have guessed that that was true.
As far as the lighting goes, you might try using a *really* low resolution lightmap that just has slight edge darkening on convex corners to get a bit of fake AO. Look into how Minecraft does it. Since you're basically only rendering boxes, you should be able to get away with a very small number of 16x16 textures (I don't remember exactly how many cases there are, but not many). If you combine that with the vertex lighting, I think you can probably make it look really nice!
That sounds good, hopefully he sees this
This is the most amazing Demake ever
A "demake" that's so sophisticated... it's almost just a remake.
I'd love to see an FPS counter. Likewise, I'd be interested in seeing coverage of any performance enhancements as they come.
Wonder how much an FPS counter would affect FPS 🤔
@@Wheagg Definitely not much based on other N64 homebrew I've seen. 2D debug information doesn't seem to affect the 3D pipeline.
I don't know if the n64 has a separate 2d pipeline, I've not heard it talked about if it does, but even with 3d it's just a quad per digit, and a tiny texture (often less than 1kb) for the numbers, or about 10 tris for untextured geometry. I doubt it would be even noticable with the amount of geometry the 64 can throw around, which looks like ~2000 per 60 FPS frame at the *bottom* end.
@@Wheaggit almost never has any real impact because a very naive approach that works for the most part is to just get a delta between frames and then calculate what the FPS of that would be if it continued to be that exact delta, and that's basically only like 2-3 calculations and then some calls to draw the text on the screen. more complicated engines will do more complicated math, but this is an extremely simple and straight-forward approach that you could easily do and it have little real impact on the game.
@@Templarfreak people don't do counts per-second anymore?
It's crazy to think that this could have been done theoretically in like 2000, and if it had it would probably have been hailed as the literal greatest game of all time.
Nah most people don't care for puzzle games ain't no greatest game of all time
1996. This could have been done in 1996. Developers just didn't take the time to learn 64 hardware with this level of passion.
@@tarajoe07 it's amazing to think about, but there are more constraints than just passion. just imagine what might be possible with today's tech if people had 20 years' foresight into the future, no jobs on the line, and no deadlines.
The NASA shirt you're wearing is spot on, because I'm feeling astronomical levels of "Holy $H1T!!!" watching Portal running on the N64.
Wow you are extremely talented and have done an amazing job on this project. I had no idea N64 was capable with these kinds of physics and rendering of this kind of lighting. Amazing. Keep it up!
@@xg223🤡
Physics isn't all that expensive to calculate.
You could try adding a subtle light blue "ambient lighting" like the original (If the vertexes are recoverable).
it'd be so incredibly cool to have a physical cartridge with its own art for this when it gets finished
For how good this is, it really is a shame these videos don't get many views.
yeah it's pretty sad meanwhile so many youtubers play martyrs and piss and moan having people think that every 10 minute video they make of simply talking to a camera "takes a lot of work" and say it takes me weeks to write a script!!! then.....editing took me hours!!!! I swear I swear youtube is hard work!. Meanwhile this guy is doing genuinely impressive stuff like this amd strangely there's no "hey guess do what the algorithm likes make sure to smash that like button and turn on notifications! also did you know 9 out of 10 viewers aren't even subscribed!!!" . This guy and this project is what youtube was and was always meant to be doing things for the love of them, no sponsors no plugs no "adpocalypse " bs
couple of horrible misspellings, just wanted to point that out, can't edit comments via brave browser, small price to pay to have youtube be tolerable lmao
@@AntiJewluminatiDwarf Oh ok, also yeah I agree RUclips really does favor shit easy to make content over actual quality.
It's niche. I think he'll get the attention he deserves soon ^^
@@ipd0043 sadly it is niche in this day and age......
This is beyond fantastic. The physics blow my mind. I wonder if the N64 had the potential to be the first system to use ragdoll effects.
This is the kind of care I wish developers had when porting games to current Nintendo consoles. We know the Wii / Switch wasn't/isn't as powerful as their competition, but if enough time and dedication were put into making something half as special as this Portal port feels like, we would be so happy with 3rd party developers.
I've been following this project since forever and it's SO satisfying to see it come together like this in all it's glory. You're awesome!
WOW HE COMPILED THIS VERSION ON MY BIRTHDAY!
my bday is 8/23/2009
Just having a little lighting makes a lot of difference, it's looking great!
this is starting to feel so faithful, that it's almost weird calling it a demake.
That's impressive. I'm a big fan of that sort of thing, your work is really impressive.
Kudos for the progress! Keep it up! You could potentially pick a fixed light source position and pre calculate vertex lighting values radially from there from max brightness to farthest from light.
Incredible work... Really really well done. I am speechless.
This is insane, you're very very talented and I hope you can finish this amazing project!
Please keep up with the devlogs, I'd be interested in some more technical videos like the moving portal paradox one, but they're kinda tough to make so I understand if you keep it on feature based only videos
Who would’ve thought valve’s influence would’ve resulted in one of the most impressive n64 games ever seen.
Current-gen hardware-limited platforms need people like you. Imagine what the N64 could have been with current knowledge ❤ fantastic job man.
this is so incredibly fucking cool
6:27
So excited to see how far this has come and can still go! You’ve gotten almost all of the basic/core mechanics down for the game! Can’t wait to see the full game recreated💜
I'm looking forward to see how you implement the more complex and detailed levels that come later into the game.
the previous version was one of the first pieces of homebrew I played on my everdrive, and now I'm tempted to play through it again! Amazing work as usual!
Incredible work, this is an absolutely insane homebrew project! You deserve way more subs, but for now, I'll be excitedly awaiting each new update video :)
This is insane. The fact that you made the physics and the portals work on N64 hardware and run at a decent frame rate is amazing.
Looking more and more awesome by the minute! Love seeing these videos pop up!
you could probably cover up the lighting transition by having objects near enough to the portal be lit in the portal's color
So cool! Vertex lighting stays winning. Personally not sure how much more a lightmap will do for you at that resolution anyways relative to the performance trade off, so I think I'd stick with the free solution.
N64 is fillrate limited after all. Why try to reduce vertex count? Maybe add sectors like in Doom for shadows? Might be cool to run Blender Cycles over the level to generate lightmaps and find an optimized mesh for vertex colors to cover this.
Amazing job so far. Can't wait to see the turrets and of course, the main lady herself.
You can make dynamic objects look as good as pre baked lighting. The way is to generate a grid of cubes, each having light prebaked as a level, but they shouldn't affect the level lighing and be visible. Then just sample the shading info from the model to the closest "cube", which is, of course, isnt visible. Should fix the blinding bright of the portal gun. Also a note that the light sample could be just a single color point, not a cube.
"Now make portal 2 on the Gamecube"
This is crazy impressive. The fact that it still /feels/ like portal is a testament to what you've done so far. Nice work.
This videos are always such a pleasant surprise.
It's absolutely incredible what the N64 is capable of with proper optimization. If I didn't know any better, I wouldn't even think it was an N64 game. Amazing work!
excited to catch one of your uploads early, loving the progress you've made!
damn this is starting to look GOOD
This is possibly the best demake ever!
Vertex lighting is very smart. If you want an example of good vertex shading theres a program that lets you extract levels from the Ps1 game Twisted Metal 4, it extracts the entire level and all the data and the vertex painting they did with lighting is very visible. Would be a great point of reference!
Need for speed 2 has nice shadows from the trees onto the road.
since the original has inset lights around the edges of ceilings to give moodlighting gradients down the walls, you could replicate that with a pale blue light gradient from the ceiling on the wall vertex colours.
If the vertex lighting starts to really bother you, just add more verts to areas that need them, or separate textures. I doubt it will, but it's not really worth lightmapping IMO.
Also, you should definitely have a test map. Doesn't need to be the most perfect thing but it would make this type of video have more production value and make debugging easier I imagine
Imagine showing this to someone in 1998
The fact that someone is able to build THAT on a real n64 hardware is already totally crazy.
I'm so amazed by talented dev that go back to an old console and push them to their limit in a way it was just not possible back in 1996-2000, but 25 years later ppl are doing some crazy thing and I'm sooo captivated by all these awesome projects!!
This is probably the single best fan made retro home brew I’ve ever seen. Genuinely phenomenal work. If portal had released on N64, I genuinely think it would be a serious contender for knocking Goldeneye and OoT off the top spots.
This is the coolest homebrew I have ever seen! This looks incredible!!!!!!!
hype levels... RISING
This could be a Dreamcast game just for the visual fidelity, but the physics really bring it into the next generation of gaming.
Truly outstanding!
So crazy, I haven't looked at anything from this project in awhile and man you've been puttin' in WORK. Crazy, I can't even imagine what's lying underneath this to get the hardware to do this.
This is what Smea would have wanted. This is probably the most impressive homebrew game ever, especially for the first 3d generation and onwards. I wish homebrew game developing was more popular. Of course, that's highly unlikely given that devs don't really get anything other than experience out of it. Everyone knows grinding for experience sucks.
If Galaxy DS got to a more finished state then that'd take the cake for me, but that project has been on pause for at least two years.
(Smea made Portal DS, but it was not like this)
I'm not going to lie, one thing I would absolutely love to see you implement at some point in the future is support for Dolby ProLogic surround sound, a lot of games on the N64 supported surround sound with that format even if it wasn't officially acknowledged as Dolby, and I think that would be really cool to see at some point in the future.
I was aware of this game’s development from a while ago, but just watched a full devlog now. I gotta say, this is so incredibly cool! I’m a huge portal fan and can’t wait to see what else you can do with this game.
Absolutely amazing work! It’s been fascinating to watch the progress. Genius!
This get more impressive with time. I hope it gets released to public but if not i hope he plays through the game for us
i like the static effect with the fizzling, very eye pleasing
In terms of baked lighting, maybe it could be an option in a graphics menu of some sort.
Maybe a menu for cool graphics upgrades you thought of that couldn't quite reach full speed.
This is amazing, I can't believe I'm only hearing about your work now! Looking forward to future updates!
A small detail the original game does that you could also adopt is that cameras turn to face straight forward when detached, so they can better match their static collision mesh.
Also this project makes me so happy. Thank you for making this. If I don't already have an N64 controller by the time this is finished I will literally buy one for this. :3
wow this looks amazing, great work!!
That last room is the test where you can jam the door with cameras, slip the cube through the door, and then remove the cameras to soft-lock yourself. Glados then scolds you and opens the door for you
As a fellow dev, this is super nice. The cube solution makes total sense, drawing another entity with the same textures is a cheap solution that was used a lot for reflections back in the day, and this seems to be similar enough to a mirror I guess, also, this way you could put two portals and see the cube coming out of it as well from the original point of view.
Also, vertex colors can be used to simulate contact shadows as well, just make the borders a little bit darker and done, that way you can have a clear difference between walls/floors/ceilings as well.
it's a blast to play with an N64 controller, just did the first 4 test chambers! I prefer to use my right hand on the joystick + z button and my left hand on the dpad + L button since it feels closest to when I first played portal on the xbox 360! I love how you integrated the menu just like the pc game! good luck on the project!
THIS IS UNREAL BROOOOO
This is absolutely mind blowing. Can anyone name even a single N64 game with this kind of physics?
Just wow. First I saw Kaze Emanuar's amazing Return to Yoshi's Island project, now this?! It's insane how these are even able to run on real N64 hardware, especially this one. Keep up the amazing work!
Whenever you are done and or release the projects 1.0 release I will gladly add this to my emulation collection on my phone! It is incredible what you have managed to implement in a game for a N64 console hardware! And even if you are not going to use the mipmap system you showcase on every texture in this game I feel like the textures on walls and objects are more than good enough! After all this already looks more graphically pleasing than goldeneye, if not as pleasing.
It's great to see you during this project and feel the passion for it !
Hope you will keep having fun doing this port so we can, one day, try it ourselves and meet the final boss!
I've been watching you work on this for a while, and it's such a marvel! How awesome!
You've put so much into this, and it really shows! c:
The fact that you wrote this in c, in a original engine, impresses me to no end!
Your attention to detail now that you’ve fixed major bugs is amazing! ❤
This looks so amazing! I'm trying to do exactly the same but in unreal 😅 and was a ton of work to get it right.
Doing it on n64 is a whole new level, really inspiring! Continue the good work
This has come really far since i last saw it, this is really impressive!
this is looking awesome. I am super impressed with how good this looks and seems to play
Amazing work! Looking forward to the continued progress on this.
Wow! I can't believe how good that looks, how well it runs and how close to the original you got. Amazing job.
Such awesome work. I have enjoyed your update videos for a while and it's a pleasure to see things coming together like that
This looks great. Especially like that lighting. Outstanding work.
I love seeing these kinds of projects cuz it proves we were never held back by hardware, just creativity and experience.
I've been following this since the start, phenomenal work.
I love that someone is doing this, people like this are amazing. keep up the fantastic work!
This is looking awesome and I can't wait to play through the final thing!
Also the obvious next step is Portal 2 for the gamecube heheh
You seem very passionate about your project and we absolutely love that! Keep going and kleep up the amazing work!
If there are plans to sell this at some point, might I suggest an orange cartridge, to be reminiscent of the Orange Box it came in with TF2.
I’m really impressed this runs on actual hardware. Looking forward to seeing a completed copy with save capabilities. Great job.
Any chance of seeing the N64's surround sound capabilities taken advantage of for the final release?
Seconding this! I’ve played OOT on my everdrive and freaked out when the surround sound actually worked on my setup. The N64 is such a cool little thing
The N64 had... Surround sound??
@@kimgkomg N64 only has 2 audio channels but the sound was mixed in a way to give the perception of depth. The surround magic happens on your Pro Logic enabled receiver
@@DecibelAlexit’s not just illusionary mixing, my understanding is that it’s possible to actually encode a third channel baked into one of the two provided channels for compatible speakers
Yep! Games like Ocarina of Time had Surround, later games such as Majora's Mask, Perfect Dark and Conkers Bad Fur Day have full authenticated Dolby Surround.
The SNES also has games that support surround sound, such as Samurai Shodown.
Continually blowing my mind. I didnt think you'd get much farther than the original demo with the first implementation of portal mechanics.
Stick w/ the vertex lighting, that's a no-brainer. What's the source of the FPS drops in some scenes? Is it the transparency drawing over the framebuffer? What about going with the dithered blending instead, if transparency is what's hurting perf? IIRC from your older vids you do have a PVS system in place, so no rooms that aren't visible are being drawn, but it does seem like some spots - like walking away from the fizzler drops perf, is it just total geometry taxing the hardware? I can imagine it's being pushed pretty hard. Maybe some kind of room LODs where walls aren't divided up into as many triangles and as you approach/enter a room it fades from the limited vert lighting of the lower-poly walls/surfaces to the lighting of the higher poly version that accommodates somewhat better vert lighting. I don't know if this would be difficult due to memory constraints though, but basically it would switch to the high-poly version of the room (that you have now) but with lighting that matches the low-poly version and lerp to the high-poly lighting. Just spitballing, and I don't know what the N64's limitations happen to be so... Anyway, thanks for sharing! :)
i knew you were gonna do it but it looks so much better than i thought was possible
Amazing work. I've been loving to see this one come together. Keep it up!
Ten times better than those portal vfx versions that make every goddamn surface made out of glass