Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zeta0134 2222 days ago
> The crazy hacks that Rare did to subdivide their geometry on texture boundaries wouldn't be necessary for instance.

I would love to know more about this. Is their texture format tomfoolery written up somewhere?

2 comments

I don't think anything is written up, but you can see it if you put Project64 into wireframe mode. The most clear I've seen it is in the intro cut scene of Conker's Bad Fur Day where the camera's slowly backing up from Conker's throne.

So TMEM is only 4k. If you want mippmapping, that eats half of it, down to 2k practically. That leaves you with enough room for 1 32x32x16BPP texture at most. So I think what they did in some cases was to take a mesh with a larger texture, and run it through a processor to tesselate the mesh on smaller texture block boundaries in UV space, so they can render each tile of geometry with the same texture block at once, then swap to the next subtexture and render all it's geometry. That'd give you an apparent larger texture than you could fit into TMEM, and is one reason (of many) why their games look so good. They also might not have had tooling for that and just brute forced it by hand, I can't tell just from looking at the wireframe.

this is relevant but not same system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o