Godot N64 Style Demo

Play demo in browser!

A collection of shaders and materials for Godot engine that aim to recreate the aesthetics and quirks of the N64

Features

• 3-point texture filtering
• Light anti-aliasing
• Linear mip-map filtering
• Horizontal blur across the screen
• Limited color depth
• Hardware dithering to hide color banding
• Shiny chrome-like metallic surfaces
• Billboard sprites
• Fog to limit draw distance

Demo Controls

• Space: Toggle camera and object movement
• R: Reset scene

Tips for best results

• Use very low poly models
  • Prefer smooth-shading over flat-shading wherever possible
• Keep textures as low resolution as humanly possible
  • Huge blurry texels are the cornerstone of the N64 look
  • Rely on a mix of vertex colours and texture maps, instead of higher detailed texture maps wherever possible
• Keep your internal resolution low
  • Resolution on N64 is a complicated affair. While the system would output to video at certain specific resolutions, games themselves would have their own separate internal resolutions
  • These internal resolutions could vary wildly between games, but 320x240 seems to be the most common choice
  • That being said, you can easily go widescreen by using a 16:9 resolution with similar height
• Use as basic of a lighting set up as you can get away with
  • Modern lighting techniques are a very easy way to break the illusion of appearing like early 3D!
  • Where possible, prefer to use white ambient light, with vertex colours on geometry to fake lighting
• Prefer additive blending to transparent blending

Changes from v1.x

Fog

Godot 4.0 changed how environmental fog worked, the key part being the removal of the "start distance" and "end distance" properties. While a manual workaround could be implemented, there is work being done to restore this functionality in a later version.

Runtime options

In order to release working Godot 4 shaders as soon as possible, runtime options for the demo will be re-implemented at a later date.

Credits

Floor texture (available under CC-0): https://stealthix.itch.io/rpg-nature-tileset