When I look out there,
it makes me GLaD I’m not you.
Demakes of popular games are certainly a thing. However, much like with the recent Bloodborne demake, they tend to be for or made to look like games from consoles like the PlayStation, if not an older console. So much so, that it’s actually a surprise when they’re made in the style of an N64 game. And, in the case of James Lambert’s Portal demake, run on actual hardware.
Lambert’s been working on this for a couple of months, now. But this video marks the first time he’s had a working portal gun running in engine. Over the course of the video, he pushes the limit for portal layers (in other words, that “hall of mirrors” effect the original game has with portals), hitting 16, at which point the game crashed.
As he notes, though, at 14 you can barely see the last portal in a line; at that point, in the N64 resolution, it’s little more than a few pixels wide. In the video, he also goes over some of the rendering tricks involved in making the whole project function. In addition, he notes that there are a lot of effects that he’s got ahead of him, like particle effects for the gun and having the portals expand rather than just pop into place.
That said, to do all he has and have it run on original hardware is pretty damn impressive. This is definitely one to keep an eye on. And if you want to do that, you can keep track of things by Labert’s above-linked YouTube channel, or via GitHub.
Source: PC Gamer
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