Super Mario Sunshine water sparkles effect

[Yoasakura]

Super Mario Sunshine emulation on Dolphin is almost perfect, one of the few things I noticed were missing is the water sparkles from the ocean water.

Here's the screen from the game running on a real gamecube:

You can see the effect in the background there, but here's how it looks like on dolphin:
http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/6509/smsmipmapdolphin.jpg

I found out that this effect is not showing up due to Dolphin not loading the original texture mipmaps, it's generating mipmaps automatically, and since this effect is a mipmap trick, nothing appears.

This is the texture ripped using BMDView2.

Then I decided to test the Load hi-res textures and switch the texture with one of the mipmaps, and here's what I got:

Mipmap level 1

Mipmap level 2

You can try it out by enabling Load Hi-res textures,
Save this texture and rename it to "GMSE01_084f4417_0.png" (Without quotes of course)
And then, create a folder under User\Load\Textures, named GMSE01 (for US version) and place the image there.

This will only work for delfino plaza, because each level uses a different texture.

Of course this "hack" does not recreate the effect correctly, because the effect needs mipmaps, but it does make things a little bit closer to the original.

[Runo]

Hmmm, very smart trick, I tried finding out why the mipmaps did not load correctly before, but I never realized that it was not trying to load them, like you did, probably because when I did this years some ago I had very litlle programing experience..... Congrats, and thanks for tha info......
I couldnt even look in the source because it was not open source so a guess like that would be nearly impossible LOL