▲Every time I stumble upon this I end up losing an hour.
The Rare era Nintendo 64 games are particularly interesting from a graphical stand-point, as Rare really got the most out of the N64's limited texture cache by blending textures with vertex colours.
In Banjo-Kazooie its mostly for used as a primitive baked-lighting (Mad Monster Mansion being a great example of this.) But by the time you get to DK64, they're really working overtime to leverage vertex colours to add variety to the textures and help blend texture edges.
People refer to N64's blurry textures as its signature look, but I think what Rare did with vertex colours is really what most people think when they remember back to the N64.
(Would love to see GoldenEye or Perfect Dark maps added to this site.)
I'm glad I came back to this on desktop, I initially tried visiting the site on mobile and of course nothing loaded, so I dismissed it and moved on. Seeing now what the site is
actually about, holy shit it's impressive.
FYI I saw some references to Goldeneye in the GitHub repo, so we might see it up on the site (hopefully) soon.
ToucanLoucan19 hours ago
[-] I also enjoy how WELL most Nintendo games' levels render in browser, because unlike the other two (Sony and Microsoft), their render pipelines are incredibly simple. This of course isn't a complete win, you obviously miss a lot of features of bigger/beefier GPU's like advanced shaders, but at the same time it really draws attention to how the artists developing for those platforms, at least first party, are
continuing those traditions of covering a lack of technical ability to, for example, render real caustics in real time, and instead simply make water textures that are so evocative of water that they appear as good as, if not better, then technically superior water effects.
I say this as a slight graphics nerd who loves this shit and plays some games solely to see the visuals they can pull off: I mad respect artists who go the complete other direction, who barely use any "real" graphics tech, to make absolutely beautiful things.
I don't make any efforts to make mobile devices work, since usually their GPUs and drivers are not good enough for this, but PRs and patches are welcome. At one point Mobile Safari was working.
reply▲I don’t buy the argument the GPUs aren’t powerful enough. They are orders of magnitude stronger than the original hardware.
reply▲best_answer14 hours ago
[-] It doesn't work on Windows Chrome 143, either: "Your browser does not appear to have WebGPU support."
reply▲stronglikedan13 hours ago
[-] I'm on Chrome 143.0.7499.110 on Windows, and it worked for me, but it also got my fans awhirlin' and locked up my rig for a bit.
reply▲Nor in Pale Moon: "CompileError: wasm validation error: at offset 35: too many returns in signature"
Firefox seems happy enough, though.
In a similar vein, but for Old School RuneScape, is
https://osrs.world/This one is kept up-to-date with the state of the game world. Even includes full NPC locations and animations.
This is so sick. I've been playing OSRS on and off for a while but for some reason never heard of this.
reply▲One of us! That site is dope. Super useful for creating b-roll footage for videos.
reply▲This is actually wild. I have no idea how this works. Does it somehow emulate the rendering engine of each of these games to render the map? The water in Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is just how I remember it. Very cool.
reply▲reply▲Yes! I loved the thread on twitter back in the day where Jasper explained how he implemented the Half-Life 2 water shader using the two camera method.
I can wholeheartedly recommend going through his account there and on bsky, lot's of interesting stuff.
I contributed one earlier this year! The community's a great bunch and I learned a lot.
Always remember, folks: the best feature request is a pull request ;)
If you're lucky you might hear from the author - his handle is Jasper_ here on HN.
reply▲therobots92717 hours ago
[-] This is cool. I recently bought a GameCube and a few games, it’s just as fun and engaging as I remember it being as a kid. The graphics aren’t as “good” as modern games but if a game was fun 20 years ago it’s still fun now… nothing about the game changed. Just our expectations. And the modern game industry is beyond saving at this point outside of a few independent studios.
reply▲> And the modern game industry is beyond saving at this point outside of a few independent studios.
I totally disagree. There are are a ton of fun indie games these days from all sorts of folks and studios.
Look beyond the billion or trillion dollar companies and there is still a ton of fun, new games coming out.
I started learning Blender recently to have a play with throwing something on my blog with Three.js (we're a long way from that), but I appreciate now how you want to remove as much geometry as possible that isn't visible to the user to give the impression it's all very much there and solid, but presents the actual bare minimum to look right[0].
Anyone got example of levels with cool stuff hidden outside of the player area that can't be accessed while clipping is enabled? I remember some stone tablet with credits, in some game, in an "Aztec" area/level many, many years ago, don't remember which game though.
[0]https://noclip.website/#mkwii/beginner_course;ShareData=APu}e9y:oa8[qXpUFsE~WAK4bQ!l|bUooMfUPaItV]lVR9GC@bT{ZRK936MkWP
jakebasile15 hours ago
[-] What a lovely hit of nostalgia on this cold winter morning. Thanks for sharing this, and thanks to the people who made it. Cruising through Besaid Village and Ironforge brought back some strong memories. I could hear the music in my head even though the room was silent.
reply▲Wow, I did not expect to feel the things I did flying through Ironforge.
reply▲The Portal 2 renders were genuinely surprising. Crazy what we can do in a browser today
reply▲One of my favorite parts of Mario 64 was being able to angle the camera to see behind walls and get unexpected camera angles. With 3d games being new, it was really cool at the time. Nintendo really seemed to go with a technically imperfect camera that allowed for great gameplay.
reply▲disillusioned23 hours ago
[-] Wow. Just... wow. Didn't think I'd get to head back to Pilotwings 64 and fly around those maps anytime soon. Or TF2, or HalfLife. Very, very cool.
reply▲qingcharles14 hours ago
[-] reply▲Is this supposed to be the 'bridge facts' easter egg, or something else?
reply▲qingcharles12 hours ago
[-] No, the bridge facts is on the front of the sign. There is something else on the back. It was a very insider joke.
reply▲Oh, that is SO cool. I love that, I love that! This was everything I hoped it would be. Thank you for this amazing stuff. Truly immersive imagination inspiration :)
reply▲mikeponders9 hours ago
[-] If I saw these levels loading in the browser as a teenager I would freak out! GTA? NFS? Very cool!
reply▲Mario Kart 8 Deluxe -> Bell Cup -> GBA Ribbon Road is my favorite, you can see how small the track is compared to the whole room and how much detail there is out of bounds!
reply▲voodooEntity21 hours ago
[-] I have to say i really love this :D damn i could spend hours here ! I really hope nintendo will not end up suing the living s** out of them.
Great project !
What a treasure of a website. I can't imagine the effort put into this.
reply▲This brings back soo much nostalgia.. cool website.
reply▲Wow, what a throwback!
Interesting to see the speed at which levels load.
The old N64 levels are almost instant, and still look amazing.
destructuredObj19 hours ago
[-] Hey it's even got Infra! An underrated gem I imagine many on HN would love.
reply▲pidgeon_lover19 hours ago
[-] I wish there were some of the Metal Gear or Monster Hunter maps.
reply▲Amazing resource for game dev! Specifically level design. So many great titles in there.
reply▲mentalgear20 hours ago
[-] Now, that's something where I would consider dusting off the old VR headset if it had such a mode.
reply▲pimanrules14 hours ago
[-] It does, at least in theory. It displays the option to enable VR for me on Chrome for Android which pops you into Google Cardboard. I can look around fine but without a controller I don't think there's a way to move.
For Chrome on Windows, I had to enable "WebXR Incubations" (chrome://flags/#webxr-incubations), manually start Steam VR, then restart Chrome. The option to enable VR appears, but then in the headset it's just a white screen. Maybe I'm missing a step or maybe it's just broken.
this is sick, these games were like my 3rd space, my digital world as a kid. Nice website.
reply▲genuinely laughed out loud when i saw the t-posing NPCs in the Half-Life levels. really sells it.
reply▲Yeah I know this website!
Its one of my favourites.
reply▲Aw shucks I was almost pulled for another round of Star Fox 64. Unfortunately it's not there.
reply▲wow incredible job ! it's a very nice idea.
reply▲Enabled webgl/webgpu and it still doesn't work on my end with Librewolf
reply▲moffkalast16 hours ago
[-] Ah yes, copyright infringement simulator.
Kidding aside it's really cool, it's insane to me that one can just download the entire map of Most Wanted to their browser in seconds. Some of these maps would make great webgl case studies for shaders and rendering, they're reproduced really well. Also god were they efficient in those days, any polygon that can't be seen from ground level is just removed from the mesh entirely instead of culled at runtime.
I'm glad to have seen this before Nintendo's lawyers load their book throwing catapults.