Giving An "Eye Candy" Look To Our N64 Games

[Jale]

We already know you can do magic with Rice's video plugin. I saw somewhere you can do cell shading to give our games a more cartoonish look. Then I thought, if Rice is cappable of that, why not writing shaders of other types such as bump maps, water reflection and specially the nice looking bloom/glow (or the so-called HDR) effect? HDR (High Dynamic Range) works like a human eye. When there's too much light, the scene darkens. When there's little or no light at all (inside a house or tunnel for instance), the scene brightens and the objects outdoors are overbright.

I've been experimenting how games would look like if this feature is supported. No problem for DirectX 9 cards since this shader is well optimized at this level. Here are two images of what I'm talking about:

Left: Normal (original).
Right: With HDR.

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Don't you think they look nice?

[azoreseuropa]

I played this game and finished it and I really enjoyed it.

To your question:

Yes, they look nice!

[Jale]

Well, another question. Does Rice support this feature or do we have to wait for a plugin cappable of such thing?

[Jale]

More:

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[Zach]

I wonder what kind of performance hit something like HDR would bring though..

Even on PC games with a beefy CPU and somewhat decent GPU, it can be taxing on the smoothness, unless you have like really top-end gear. I almost always turn it off for that reason

[Jale]

Another alternative is to map those shaders at low-res, since they're just post-processing images. And yeah, pixels instead of vectors for an added performance. Obviously the shots above are Photoshopped, but we would get similar results with hardware HDR.

I wonder what kind of performance hit something like HDR would bring though..

Even on PC games with a beefy CPU and somewhat decent GPU, it can be taxing on the smoothness, unless you have like really top-end gear. I almost always turn it off for that reason

The big problem with Project64 is that it doesn't include a frame skipping feature like other emulators such as 1964, ePSXe, VisualBoyAdvance, among others. Project64 needs to render 60 FPS in any way possible to perform a real-time emulation. I've read you can do this with the counter factor thing, but that isn't enough for me. If Project64 works a bit on frame skipping, system requirements would drop drastically, making it playable even on older Celeron processors running at 800 MHz or less.