🎉 PARTYMOD! 🎉

▪ Writeup:

Building the PARTYMOD THPS2 Renderer

Posted Dec 17, 2024

I had a bunch of early screenshots taken while putting the PARTYMOD THPS2 renderer, so I figured I would post them to illustrate how the renderer came together. The image boxes are a bit broken, but i don't care to fix them at the moment 👍

Mar 02, 2024:

Renderer is stubbed enough to run the game, clear color is displayed

Mar 03, 2024:

First polygons are displayed

Mar 04, 2024:

DXPOLY is now handled, 3D scenes work!
Untextured DXPOLYs, like the shadow, are broken
Fixed untextured DXPOLYs
Alternate shot showing broken depth on the Venice Beach shoreline
The game is completeable!

Mar 05, 2024:

Did you know that Elissa Steamer and Geoff Rowley's black pants are done via vertex colors? That's why they're white on N64!

Mar 08, 2024:

Line drawing implemented, as well as blending modes

Mar 10, 2024:

Wireframe drawing implemented

Mar 16, 2024:

Rendering is now done to an intermediate texture, drawn incorrectly here

Mar 17, 2024:

Game is now scaled from 640x480 to window size
Letterboxing and Pillarboxing implemented

Mar 20, 2024:

Broke the vertex format when implementing texturing, fun little bug
UVs are implemented, texture loading still in progress

Mar 21, 2024:

Textures are loading, but UVs aren't corrected for non-power-of-two textures
Texturing complete! NYC sky still incorrect

Apr 10, 2024 (continuing after a break to participate in a speedrun marathon with the current progress):

FMVs partially working
Bug in playing the level FMVs. Texture sampling did Geoff Rowley dirty

Apr 11, 2024:

Level FMVs working! Still sampled poorly
Video player complete

Apr 25, 2024:

Fixed NYC sky!

Apr 28, 2024:

Sprites draw incorrectly thin when game is running at 512x240 (PSX resolution)
I figured out a hack to make sprites draw less narrowly, but it's rather distorted

Sep 25, 2024 (post-release, I started looking into incorrect texture transparency):

Textures now have correct semi-transparent bits, but the shader is incomplete
The THPS sign is finally showing opaque!!