Impressive because a lot of N64 devs at the
time didn't do these now-common things
Absolutely, but it's also worth noting that these techniques might not have been viable in the context of a game (or at least, most games) anyway.
The author himself addressess this at the end of one of the videos and concludes that it might be a stretch unless a game was designed specifically around this rendering strategy.
He skips the N64's hardware Z-buffer (to conserve bandwidth) and DIY's it, which works for the demo because the demo room has exceedingly simple geometry. I don't know that this approach would work once you involve player models with 500-700 polys as seen here: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/nintendo-64/
The transition between texture detail levels is also a bit jarring: it's an amazing demo, but might be too jarring or frustrating for a game.
On the positive side, the demo runs in the N64's hires mode, which could be avoided to free up some (a lot of?) perf. Also the author admits that the highest detail level of the textures is not something that would necessarily be needed for a game.
One also wonders if a hybrid approach would work: "megatextures" and DIY z-buffering for the scenery, trad rendering for the characters. I don't know if that is possible.
The author himself addressess this at the end of one of the videos and concludes that it might be a stretch unless a game was designed specifically around this rendering strategy.
He skips the N64's hardware Z-buffer (to conserve bandwidth) and DIY's it, which works for the demo because the demo room has exceedingly simple geometry. I don't know that this approach would work once you involve player models with 500-700 polys as seen here: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/nintendo-64/
The transition between texture detail levels is also a bit jarring: it's an amazing demo, but might be too jarring or frustrating for a game.
On the positive side, the demo runs in the N64's hires mode, which could be avoided to free up some (a lot of?) perf. Also the author admits that the highest detail level of the textures is not something that would necessarily be needed for a game.
One also wonders if a hybrid approach would work: "megatextures" and DIY z-buffering for the scenery, trad rendering for the characters. I don't know if that is possible.