Majora's Mask N64HD Project Completed!

[Nerrel]

Final download- 09/30/21-

There is an auto-installer available here (thanks to Rosalie241 from Discord) that can handle all of the emulator and plugin setup:
https://github.com/Rosalie241/BetterMajorasMaskInstaller/releases/latest

Otherwise the HTS version is currently the only option for Project64. This pack will only load the textures for the current room and will dramatically reduce memory use compared to PNG or HTC at the cost of potentially stuttering when new areas are loaded (check "use file storage instead of memory cache" to use this option, place the HTS file in project64 2.3\plugin\GFX\cache):

HTS Download

_______________________________


This is a new GlideN64 texture pack I'm working on with the goal of faithfully updating the original game to serve as an alternative to Majora's Mask 3D for those who prefer the old gameplay (I plan to port it to MM3D as well once the 64 version is done). Here's a video overview followed by some more information:

None of the textures are final yet- here is the road map for the pack:

Environmental textures- I plan to finish all of the areas of the game by fall of this year.

Character textures and model edits- I'll attempt to do some model editing to increase poly counts and remap the textures to allow for more detail. I'm not sure whether it will be possible to do anything drastic, but hopefully I'll be able to improve the main character models.

Second pass- Once every texture and character been addressed, I'll go through the game again and replace any textures that I feel could be improved (pretty much everything recognizable as a photo is likely to be replaced and hand drawn)


The screenshots above were using ReShade in order to add (subtle) new lighting effects to the game; this enhances the visuals but comes with a few compromises like reduced performance and occasional glitching. My ReShade configuration is included with the pack if you want to use it.

Thanks for looking, and be sure to let me know what you think. Any criticism is welcome :satisfied

 

[Knight45]

Good textures here it's nice to see another texture pack for Majora's Mask especially when their has only been 3 and 2 being very incomplete. Just have some questions like would you ever upload a version without texture size being reduced, and how did you get your shaders to work? Are you using Poject64 with GlideN64, when I use AO and disabling Frame Buffer my screen all turns black and there will be a tiny box on the upper left screen.

 

[Nerrel]

Thanks for the comment. All I'd have to do for a full resolution version is export the images again, but there wouldn't be a benefit unless you had a 4k monitor. I downscaled the textures in the first place to avoid the moire patterns and graininess that occur when the textures are too detailed for the screen resolution. I'm using a 1080p screen, and in this case higher resolutions would actually look worse. When the pack is done I do intend to put a full resolution version up, though.

For ambient occlusion, I just opened Reshade and under "game" selected my project64.exe and chose the "openGL" radio button underneath, then went through the tutorial that launched with the emulator and that was it. If you're using the current versions of P64 (2.3.2) and GlideN64 (2.0), are you sure you selected openGL, and does reshade work otherwise? It won't really matter for the time being anyway, since gonetz said that the next version of GlideN64 won't allow depth buffer access when framebuffer emulation is disabled, meaning the effect won't work anymore. He did say it would be easily possible to restore depth buffer access as an option that could be enabled even when framebuffer emulation is active, which would be really great. So until then, I wouldn't worry about it. Disabling framebuffer emulation is a really big compromise.



I'm done with the outdoor areas of Clock Town and am now finishing up the shop interiors, some of which are already done. Here are some shots of the signs and posters around town (it was hard to figure out what the lottery poster was supposed to even be):

 

[Knight45]

The screenshots are really nice and now I see why you didn't decide on releasing a version with full resolution. As for the SSAO I still would like to get it to work because I cannot use the latest GlideN64 because it wont load the textures I've done for Ocarina of Time, instead it will simply crash the emulator. I've also noticed some odd issues with a dirt texture but I think it may be an issue with GlideN64 or because I was using other textures along with your pack this could be the issue.

 

[ThatBum]

Amazing work! You seem to have the most polish and cohesive art style of all the MM retextures, and that sign art is amazing~! I particularly like that screenshot of the uncle sam-ish "Beware of bubbles, defend clock town today!" poster. I hope you continue, seems that most of the MM projects have fizzled before reaching completion.

A few tips, you can use dupeGuru to remove any dupes from the pack, just filter by filename and it will show you matching CRCs.

Also you might want to try pngquant to crush down the size of the textures without any noticeable decrease in quality. I ran it on the demo and got it down to 94MB! I recommend anyone making a pack to use it. To run it recursively on windows, use this command (be sure to back up your textures first!):

for /R %x in (*.png) do pngquant -f --skip-if-larger --ext .png --speed 1 --strip "%x"

Finally, you might know already, but waifu2x is an effective image scaler. It's got neural networks!

Happy arting!
hugs

 

[Gent]

Looking very nice indeed, nice work

 

[olivieryuyu]

it is amazing

 

[Nerrel]

Thanks everyone for the feedback.

The screenshots are really nice and now I see why you didn't decide on releasing a version with full resolution. As for the SSAO I still would like to get it to work because I cannot use the latest GlideN64 because it wont load the textures I've done for Ocarina of Time, instead it will simply crash the emulator. I've also noticed some odd issues with a dirt texture but I think it may be an issue with GlideN64 or because I was using other textures along with your pack this could be the issue.

You might want to back up your current files and try again using the latest versions of project64 and glideN64 just to check if your older versions are the problem. If it still doesn't work, then I'm not sure what would be going wrong. It sounds like Reshade just isn't working for you in general. Was that dirt texture in north clock town? There's a bad seam right in the middle of the dirt roads there where all the pixels get stretched over a few rows. The only solution to it is to make the edge of the image one solid color so that it's harder to notice the pixels stretching, which looks a little weird but it's much better than the stretched/glitched look. I really wish I were capable of fixing those texture issues, because they seem to be rampant. I checked with a few other plugins and they seem to have the same mapping issues, so I think it's just the way the game is. They really must have been rushing and figured no one would be able to see.

Amazing work! You seem to have the most polish and cohesive art style of all the MM retextures, and that sign art is amazing~! I particularly like that screenshot of the uncle sam-ish "Beware of bubbles, defend clock town today!" poster. I hope you continue, seems that most of the MM projects have fizzled before reaching completion.

A few tips, you can use dupeGuru to remove any dupes from the pack, just filter by filename and it will show you matching CRCs.

Also you might want to try pngquant to crush down the size of the textures without any noticeable decrease in quality. I ran it on the demo and got it down to 94MB! I recommend anyone making a pack to use it. To run it recursively on windows, use this command (be sure to back up your textures first!):

for /R %x in (*.png) do pngquant -f --skip-if-larger --ext .png --speed 1 --strip "%x"

Finally, you might know already, but waifu2x is an effective image scaler. It's got neural networks!

Happy arting!
hugs

Wow, thanks for that. I hadn't heard of any of those before. The size of the pack might become a problem in the future; if you use the demo I uploaded now without compressing the cache it'll take up 700mb of RAM. I think x86 programs are limited to 2GB usage? It probably won't ever hit 2gb with the compression option checked, but it would still be nice to reduce the sizes. I would have used DDS files and ended up with less than half the file size, but glideN64 isn't compatible with them.

 

[ThatBum]

It should not matter what format is used. According to chatter about the subject on github, it's all converted to OpenGL's texture format once it's loaded into GlideN64.

Once the dupes were removed (these, not that many) and it was compressed with pngquant, the resulting .htc cache file came to 150,841 KB, as compared to 268,608 KB unmodified. Of course, for usage cases where pure resolution isn't critical and hardware power/storage is limited (such as my 720p phone), One could downscale the larger textures with GIMP.

As for the 3GB barrier, this LAA Patch will fix it.

 

[Knight45]

Yeah I think that was the texture issue I was talking about, it's a same we cannot import high poly models into the game. About the SSAO crashes I believe I did try with the latest Project64 and GlideN64 but it still had the same issue with the little square being the only visible object, I'll test it again maybe it might be the textures I'm using since the latest version of GlideN64 will also sometimes crash with the textures I use.

 

[Nerrel]

^DDS wouldn't have any benefit at all in terms of how the emulator loads anything, I just wanted to use it for better control over file sizes. The method you linked should help with that, though.

As for Reshade not loading correctly, I'm not sure that would be a texture issue. Reshade does something similar for me in Citra, where it just doesn't load up correctly and won't display its menu on screen, even though others have gotten it working. I've reinstalled Reshade a few times (I did a clean Windows install a while ago and had to set everything up again from scratch) and it's always just loaded right up. You can check the log file Reshade creates in your emulator directory to see where it's failing or logging errors... I might not be able to help you with them, but someone on the Reshade forums might be able to figure it out.


Here's what I'm doing with the Bomber's notebook:


I think the original concept art makes for good portraits, but there are a few gaps I had to fill in. For the Gormon brothers I took Ocarina of Time's Ingo art and gave it the heavily shaded, underlit look Majora's Mask art has to match the rest of the portraits:

For Shiro I'm using Breath of the Wild Link's soldier armor as a base, since it's very similar to the clock town guards, and drawing over it. I'll get the correct design on the helmet done eventually:

And I'm drawing Grog, Anju's grandmother, and the bomb shop lady from scratch. I'm not sure about how the bomb shop lady is turning out:

They're rougher than the original concept art, but hopefully the difference isn't too obvious when scaled down in the notebook.

 

[ThatBum]

Yeah, DDS decreases the file size compared to png. But the thing is, once either one is loaded, something is done to them in GlideN64 as to make them the same size in memory and in the cache file ,which is what's really being distributed these days. Streaming the textures directly from RAM is much faster, loading each one from disk as they're used results in stuttering. That's my understanding anyway. This is not my forte, so.

And that art is beautiful! I can't draw to save my life (am a network engineer by trade), so I appreciate your skills and dedication!

 

[Admentus]

Hi, Nerrel!



I should introduce myself here, since it is my first time on these forums. I am Admentus. You might or might not have seen me around on the Dolphin forums there I work on porting Project64 texture packs for Dolphin. Games so far which have I been working on with porting them into HD are The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Super Mario 64, Super Smash Bros. 64 and Mario Kart 64. Often I make use of multiple texture packs, create themselves or with the aid from a few others helpful members.

Anyway, to make a long story short. I noticed your work for Majora's Mask and I must say I am really impressed. Mostly likely at this point you probably already know what I will be asking for next. If it is alright by you, I would like to use your assets for the Dolphin version of Majora's Mask. The Dolphin HD pack in question is found here: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thre...ition-hd-texture-pack-v1-3-2016-12-13?page=26. Through I am not the main author of the texture pack, I did primarily work on porting Majora's Mask's environments and monsters/characters from start to finish and the missing parts for Ocarina of Time all the way through the end. Majora's Mask thus has HD equivalent textures for the Dolphin texture pack, but needless to say, your quality strikes as higher. I intend to make texture packs consistent and complete with the higher quality possible.

The Zelda 64 texture pack for Dolphin is by the way free of any license, as are my other texture packs. Only the licenses for the original used texture packs applies. So if you prefer to use any assets from the Dolphin texture pack feel free to use them. If you are around sometime on the Dolphin forums, feel free to give me a buzz.

Truth be told, I would be fantastic if you would join the Zelda 64 texture pack for Dolphin instead. Did I already mention the many benefits for using Dolphin instead of Project64? Of course the is the standard emulator benefits such as increased resolution but Dolphin is needless to say more stable to use. You should also check out the many great AR/Gecko codes for both Zelda 64 games on Dolphin for an enhanced experience such as Extended Draw Distances, 30 FPS mode for Ocarina which is quite stable, widescreen support for 16:9, 21:9 and 48:9. double damage (or any multiplier you want), no culling and quite a lot more. Since Dolphin offers a more enhanced and stable experience I was intended to port texture packs for Project64 for Dolphin (through the virtual console or promotion discs such as the Collector's Edition / Master Quest).

Anyway, I am looking forward to your reply. Should you approve, I will start working on updating Majora's Mask using your assets (of course, providing credits, I make sure masterotaku, the thread owner, does so). But since we strife after the highest quality, I might for example not use some fonts or icons should it not match to the quality standards of what is already in use. Although to be honest, I did not yet study that part thoroughly yet of your texture pack. Should you prefer not to approve, no worries, I won't pursue it.



Peace,
Admentus

 

[Nerrel]

I'm fine with you porting these textures to Dolphin if you want, just make sure to give credit where it's due on the forums/in the pack. You may want to wait before beginning that process, since I'm near updating the pack with a complete version of clock town and a lot of the textures will be revised. I've never tried emulating MM in Dolphin, even though I'm an avid user of it, so I can't say whether I'd want to switch over to it. Are you using the GC collector's version of the VC version? I recall the GC disc having some buggy issues that made it inferior to the original or VC. I imagine there could be some big benefits it Ishikura can inject ambient occlusion as easily as in Wii games, since right now I'm waiting for a glideN64 developer to take up a depth buffer issue for that to be possible here. 30fps would also be huge; is that possible with MM? I imagine it would really screw the game up if the time cycle programming is tied to the framerate.

Here are a few more shots from around clock town:

 

[Admentus]

So far there is only a proper working 30 FPS code for Ocarina of Time sadly enough. I do use both the Virtual Console and Collector's Edition disc for Majora's Mask on Dolphin. The big issue with the collector's edition disc is the huge lag, especially in Clock Town. The lag is an issue from within the game itself, even on a physical GameCube. But that all got fixed since the Dolphin support overclocking a while ago. Just overclock to around 150% to 200% and there won't by any lag at all, period. Even smoother than on Project64. The virtual console version was broken for quite a while on Dolphin, but eventually that got fixed too. While the virtual console version does not have any lag issues, it does not support as many AR/Gecko codes as the Collector's Edition... yet... Oh, and the virtual console version does not really support the free cam option, but the Collector's Edition does that wonderfully. You could also extract Majora's Mask from the Collector's Edition easily through Dolphin these days which allows you to skip the "Select Your Game" menu and directly boot up Majora's Mask (or any other extracted Zelda game). 30 FPS for Majora's Mask has been proven to be capable of, the issue is just that many issues such as time, jumping speed, item range and a lot more needs to be resolved.

Other than the things I mentioned so far, using Ishiiruka for example indeed allows for advanced lighting and filters (SSAO, DOF, etc). The official development builds so far only allow as far up as SSAA x8. Personally I think dumping and replacing textures through Dolphin is a lot less complicated and restricted. There is no cap on the size of the texture pack either (Project64 always needs to be patched with extended memory support for any reasonable texture pack to work). Quite a few texture packs at the Dolphin offer the choice between a PNG and DDS pack. Recently Dolphinwas updated to support the new BC7 technique for DDS textures, which allows for DDS textures to be almost as sharp as PNG while still offering the benefits of DDS (reduced RAM and improved loading). Currently, I am working on updating my DDS packs to be redone in BC7 instead of the old DXT1/5.

I am still bugging the AR/Gecko expert members on the Dolphin forums from time to time. I really want that hero mode (double damage and no recovery hearts) for Majora's Mask and it is still a dream to make 30 FPS for Majora's Mask come true. So, who knows. They are certainly quite active over there. Today the hot topic seems to be 60 FPS for Xenoblade Chronicles.

Primarily, I just stick to the Collector's Edition, which works perfectly these days. The system requirements can be a bit higher than for Project64. I see to it that your name gets the credits on the Dolphin thread, even I have to restart the thread myself.

 

[MuffinSlayer]

Another texture artist named Hypatia shared similar sentiments about using Dolphin instead. Mostly about the the ability to instantly see changes in-game when you edit a texture.

 

[Nerrel]

A few more screenshots:

Stock pot inn
Before
After

Before2
After2

Shooting gallery
Before
After

... Recently Dolphinwas updated to support the new BC7 technique for DDS textures, which allows for DDS textures to be almost as sharp as PNG while still offering the benefits of DDS (reduced RAM and improved loading). Currently, I am working on updating my DDS packs to be redone in BC7 instead of the old DXT1/5.

I am still bugging the AR/Gecko expert members on the Dolphin forums from time to time. I really want that hero mode (double damage and no recovery hearts) for Majora's Mask and it is still a dream to make 30 FPS for Majora's Mask come true. So, who knows. They are certainly quite active over there. Today the hot topic seems to be 60 FPS for Xenoblade Chronicles.

Primarily, I just stick to the Collector's Edition, which works perfectly these days. The system requirements can be a bit higher than for Project64. I see to it that your name gets the credits on the Dolphin thread, even I have to restart the thread myself.

Another texture artist named Hypatia shared similar sentiments about using Dolphin instead. Mostly about the the ability to instantly see changes in-game when you edit a texture.

It definitely sounds appealing in a lot of ways, especially the faster texture loading (it takes about 30 seconds every time I want to load a new texture), but what about the audio issues/missing effects/freezes mentioned here:

"Although the game mentions "sound irregularities" on the disc as a result of emulating Majora's Mask on the GameCube, no mention is made of the game freezing. This is a common issue encountered less often when not using the rumble function. The framerate of the Collector's Edition version of Majora's Mask is also lower than the 20 FPS framerate of the original game. The problems could be caused due to the game's reliance on the Expansion Pack. Majora's Mask also presents a high number of graphical issues, such as the blur effect commonly used during cutscenes either not disappear or not loading entirely."

From the sounds of it, GlideN64 emulates the framebuffer effects more accurately, has better audio, and is potentially more stable. Dolphin is a great, rock solid emulator but in this case accurate emulation means those issues still persist, right? It sounds like increasing the draw distance and having easy to use AO would be the main benefits for users of the mod for now, but I'm not sure if it's worth the trade off. I'll keep working through GlideN64 but will keep the GC version in mind. Getting 30fps to work smoothly might push me over. I have the disc somewhere, so when I get a chance I'll dump it and try it out.

BC7 support is also great, but I use GIMP and the dds plugin for it is pretty outdated... B7 support is on their github's "to do" list.

 

[Nerrel]

I haven't been able to post for a while due to an internet outage, but I've been making solid progress. The next time I update, I should have clock town (minus the observatory) and all of the start menu textures done.





I spent some time revisiting textures to work in the feedback I got. For instance, the posters around town have been given the borders/rough edges and text they were missing:


And I finished Shiro's notebook portrait:

I also went back to do the drawings from the intro sequence. I always interpreted these as Skull Kid's drawings, so I kept them crude and they look about the same, just sharper. There were two that were hard to interpret, so I checked Majora's Mask 3D and found that one of them was actually fierce deity link- the face markings match. The other image was just totally unrecognizable... the best I could guess is that it looks like some kind of forest harp made from branches? MM3D just completely replaced it with the mask design from the mayor's office. I decided to replace it with something that Skull Kid might more likely draw and settled on the giants- I had been thinking of using his OoT skull mask, but it's not relevant to anything in this game.

And finally there's some good news on the GlideN64 side as the lighting system for the game has been decoded and will now be accurately emulated. This will solve the problems of some rooms being too dark/too bright or pre-baked shadows not showing up correctly as well as the weird jolts where objects will be illuminated and go dark or vice versa. This was, in my experience, the worst (and only real) glitch GlideN64 had while running this game.

 

[Mollymutt]

Nice!

 

[death--droid]

Looking great!, keep up the good work