GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[SubDrag]

Finally some more footage of this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRRuhviJGMQ

Lots of interesting things, more multis (like Dam Depot and Frigate as multis, which is an odd choice I feel like, I mean great in our gameshark codes, but interesting for multi). Dam had some footage and was the tunnels portion.

I must admit - I am not a fan of a the texturing, especially. I think everything looks too bright, the textures look like they are too high res for the geometry, the faces are weird, the weapons seem like could be improved, they all look off and way too bright. I liked some of the level backgrounds. Surface and Cradle looked glorious.

Cool to see more of this. I guess I could've always just played with the mode to use the old textures, though I suspect the faces they couldn't reuse the originals.

[The Extremist]

Clearly more effort put into this than the PD "port". Not only do we get instant switching to the original graphics (complete with blur filter...why? ), there's also a 4:3 mode (see new menu screenshots here), some quality of life improvements (Unarmed is labeled, no need to cycle through all the multiplayer loadouts, photos for the bonus characters), and new multiplayer maps.

Outsourcing = bad, folks.

The new textures are a mixed bag. Some great (Cradle & Egyptian), some ok (Surface, which while technically good, ruins the atmosphere), some horrible (WTF did they do to Complex?). The new explosions look out of place too. But hey, press a button, and poof! Back in 1997!

Aside from the obviously unfinished parts, I only noticed two flaws. The KF7 seems to be firing too fast, and the glass hole decal is the same in the new graphics.

Pretty much the only extra thing I could ask for is an option to switch to the uncompressed music tracks.
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Pure hand-drawn goodness.

[fredspider]

Wooooow, this is amazing!! I thought we would never see more footage than the Silo gameplay and some leaked images.

It is delightful to watch the Goldeneye "engine" (let's call it an engine) running on an Xbox. It's cool to think that the original game source code still exists and was literally ported to work at 60fps on a new hardware. There are still some port glitches (like sounds and gun flashes) but overall it is in a good playable state, almost finished.

Also, nice to see some original N64 textures in high resolution, like the character pictures on the multiplayer mode. That confirms that they still hold lots of original textures before the cartridge compression (Goldeneye Decoded leaked some of that original textures a long time a go). I don't have a good sound software to analise if the sounds and musics are in a higher quality.

The transition from new to old graphics mode was really impressive for me, I thought the game would had to be rebooted for that to work. It switch modes on the fly without a single FPS drop! Hats off to the programmers!

Note: I confess I was curious to see how they would port levels like Surface or Jungle, to restrict the level perimeter with the surrounding textured wall-trees. The idea of a inserting a fence all over it with some new-gen trees was really cool! Maybe they did the same in Jungle.

I agree they did a really nice job with the new level backgrounds and skyboxes. Overall the game looks almost finished as we all imagined.

Hope we see more footage on the future!!

[pavarini]

Some of the texture work is rather questionable. I'm not really a fan of the new artstyle applied to the weapons as well. The hit sparks and mine icons use the original textures, and the lighting on the weapons is static.

Hopefully it will be completed one day like Perfect Dark was, thanks for posting.

Last edited by pavarini on Wed Aug 24, 2016 2:07 am; edited 4 times in total

[The Extremist]

fredspider wrote:

The transition from new to old graphics mode was really impressive for me, I thought the game would had to be rebooted for that to work. It switch modes on the fly without a single FPS drop! Hats off to the programmers!

Halo: The Master Chief Collection has this feature too, though the "original" graphics are actually from the PC ports, and are missing some shaders.
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Pure hand-drawn goodness.

[Wreck]

Great to see some more levels, and now also multiplayer. Maybe we'll get to see even more in the future. Jungle is one mission I'd like to see what they did with, and the other bonus multiplayers are intriguing (Frigate and Depot).

This thing is really hit or miss for me. While I like how certain maps were handled (Aztec and Cradle, to some degree Surface, and portions of Dam), I probably dislike more stuff overall. Some of the textures feel really repetitious, such as the mountains in Dam. I know it was probably the same in the original, but it wasn't so obvious. Simple, flat architecture doesn't suit many of the higher res images. The Complex is horrendous. I'm really bothered by the weapons, as well. I don't know if I can honestly say I like any of them. A few are just plain awful (Klobb, Moonraker Laser, Sniper), and others have this weird frost-like appearance on the dark metal. Very disappointed on that part. And the way models, especially guards, are lit, almost seems as if the clipping tile RGB colouring isn't having the right effect, or the way they set up the models isn't corresponding to it properly. The environment mapping on original texture mode looks off, too. Just see the silver / gold weapons shown in Egypt.

My criticisms aside, it would still be nice to have this thing finished up and released. If for no other reason than to introduce younger gamers to GoldenEye. And online multiplayer would be a huge draw for veteran players.

[mistamontiel]

WOW this should totally be let out .. stupid licensors

I for one really like the 'splosions ! The PD remaster were horrendous doodoo brown dull muddy chite
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[TH126]

This is some golden footage. Nice find! But what's with the Facility bathroom? Did the commies never clean it?
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GoldenEye X Tool-Assisted Videos

[PaRaDoX]

I never thought this day would come....
I AM EXCITED

[fredspider]

After watching the video, I was wondering as a programmer how Rareware managed to do the port.

Probably they developed an emulator that runs the original game code (in a ROM maybe) and intercept live game data such as player and objects positions, camera information, input buttons, etc. With those data in hands they put a new layer in front of that and draw new models, textures, skyboxes, etc.

That's why the switch to the old graphics mode is done so easily, because the original game is still running on the background and they are just pasting new 3D stuff on the draw screen (or, let's say, replacing the original information). This ensures that the "logical game parts" still acts the same, like enemies AI, hit boxes, damages, spawn points, objects placement and path, including level clip information (yes, they don't even have to bother to make that "paste layer" a solid thing).

It means that the toogle between old and new graphics mode was not a developed feature to please the classic players, because it was there the whole time. It acts more as a developer debugging tool and would be left in the final game version because it looks like a cool feature.

Small facts that maybe proves this theory:
- The game switches really fast from new to old graphics mode, and doesn't seem to do any calculation to render old models and textures.
- Sometimes trough the video a headless guard appears, meaning that they didn't had the current head replacement to the original one.
- Things that are not 3D rendered, such as game texts, doesn't change when old graphics mode is activated.
- The old graphics mode clearly runs in an lower resolution than the "new pasted" layer.
- N64 and Xbox are completely different platforms and have different architectures, and the original Goldeneye was probably not a game that uses a cross-platform API that could be easily ported.

That's it, but it's just a theory. If this is all correct, it was a good idea after all because the game seems to work really fine under 1080p 60fps. They would have a done a good job, but that will never see the daylight ever again...

[pavarini]

If I remember correctly, Chris Seavor said on the conker commentary that the SGI harddrive containing the source for GoldenEye and Conker were recovered minutes before the harddrives failed back when Rare was porting Conker to Xbox. I believe it is a actual source port as there are changes made that could not be possible with a N64 interpreter (menu, multiplayer). The N64 mode is most likely a upscaled resolution combined with the original textures.

[Kerr Avon]

I agree that it mostly looks great, but that some textures seem wrong. Still, the explosions in this are better than the rubbish and too quickly over ones in the XBox 360 version of Perfect Dark (I hate 360 PD's explosions when playing multiplayer with explosives).

And Complex's textures seem especially bad.


And in all the thousands of posts I've ever made on the 'net, I doubt I've ever once criticised the font of a game, but I have to say that the font used for the black writing on the folders in the menu, and in the speech text in-game, really doesn't fit at all. It just shouts out "This is a place-holder font". It somehow manages to harm the atmosphere much more than I thought a font could ever do.

What I find more disappointing, though, is that they've not added to the game from what I can see. Fair enough, they didn't do so with Perfect Dark either, but I felt reasonaly sure that the 360 version of Goldeneye would have restored the objective where you have to go to the island on the dam, and get the rappelling/bungie-jumping stuff, and that this time round Bond would leap off the dam actually using the equipment, instead of just jumping off without visibly being secured to the dam.

And why is there no speech now? I doubt many modern gamers would want to play a first person shooter where the in-game speech is merely text?

As someone who prefers PC to Goldeneye, I am glad that we were given PD instead of GE, but I'd have preferred to have both of course. Mind you,
I'm not too keen on PD 360 (I play the N64 version instead), and looking at this preview of GE 360, I think it would be the N64 GE I'd prefer to play.

pavarini wrote:

If I remember correctly, Chris Seavor said on the conker commentary that the SGI harddrive containing the source for GoldenEye and Conker were recovered minutes before the harddrives failed back when Rare was porting Conker to Xbox. I believe it is a actual source port as there are changes made that could not be possible with a N64 interpreter (menu, multiplayer). The N64 mode is most likely a upscaled resolution combined with the original textures.

Surely they'd have multiple versions of all valuable source code, backed up repeatedly, in different locations? What's the point of having, say, ten backups, if all ten are in one building that could catch fire and destroy all ten?

[Fillerthefreak]

I'm mixed about the XBLA version.

The textures have that flat, ugly-looking "Hi-res texture pack" look that some N64 graphic plugins have. It's too detailed for the quality of the models used.

A-lot of the GoldenEye charm feels lost in this port, the weapons no-longer have their quirks to them, and instead look generic. I'm sorry, but the Grenade Launcher looks likes some sort of edgy, futuristic military-shooter weapon, as the RC-P90 looks like a generic P90.

The graphic switch button looks.... bleh. Many of the shaders are broken, some of the skies just look plain look wrong, and they just bog down the game's frame-rate, despite being a solid 60 (30 with too many explosions)

I am pleased that there's an ability to remove the character height differences, though.
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[pavarini]

Kerr Avon wrote:

Surely they'd have multiple versions of all valuable source code, backed up repeatedly, in different locations? What's the point of having, say, ten backups, if all ten are in one building that could catch fire and destroy all ten?

Not many game companies bothered to backup source codes in that era. Luckily ge seemed to have made it in some state.

Some interesting discussion in this topic suggests that at one point 'Bean Project' was available on XBOX PartnerNet back in 2007. Supposedly some people still have 'Project Bean' on their xboxes but these are just rumors so ¯\_(シ)_/¯

Jhirmer614 wrote:

I just wonder where this footage came from?

In an interview with Ars, Rare Thief site founder Amir Abdollahi did not reveal how he got a hold of the footage, except to say that he recorded someone else playing the game. "I was just lucky to get the footage together to share with everyone" - from this article

Last edited by pavarini on Fri Aug 26, 2016 6:42 pm; edited 9 times in total

[Jhirmer614]

I feel like its only a matter of time before this gets dumped to the internet its out their. I just wonder where this footage came from?