Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I've been dabbling today with playing some games in stereoscopic 3D mode; Wind Waker and Twilight Princess GC. I dunno why I never tried it earlier, I must have thought that my hardware wouldn't be up to it but my PC runs it just fine! It looks really good on my 3D TV.

So anyway, I noticed a few curiosities that I just want to share. You all probably already know about them, and I'm not looking for help here as I don't think they're problems, I just want to type out loud for a sec  

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In both WW and TP, the nighttime stars seem to be rendered closer to the eye than the foreground scenery, despite being billions of kilometers away... or at least, as far away as the sky texture is from the camera. It feels like they pop out of the screen instead of being off to infinity.

Rendering the water effects in TP is REALLY screwed. Best you avert your eyes!

I've got Gran Turismo 6 on the PS3 and when I play that in stereo 3D it looks like a fuzzy low resolution mess, and that's a game that is designed to play in 3D, on a console that is designed to output modern games in 3D. Dolphin on the other hand looks super smooth. It is emulating hardware which isn't based on PC architecture and came out in 2002, when things like 1080p and stereo 3D were just the dreams of hopeful tech-heads or the extremely rich. Big respect to the developers for making that work in such an awesome fashion; why can't Nintendo do this in the WiiU with it's Wii backwards compatibility?

I really like how Dolphin knows that the on-screen icons don't have to pop out in 3d - they can just be placed in the same position for each eye, while any 3D graphics can be rendered with depth. But since the games aren't designed to be displayed in 3D from the beginning, you get interesting side effects like scenery being closer to the viewer than a text box, yet the text box is 'on top' of the scenery. It tricks the eyes a little bit.

I'm hopeful that one day a TV manufacturer will produce a big screen with no-glasses 3D like the Nintendo 3DS. That would be nice.

(05-28-2016, 11:24 PM)Rare White Ape Wrote: [ -> ]In both WW and TP, the nighttime stars seem to be rendered closer to the eye than the foreground scenery, despite being billions of kilometers away... or at least, as far away as the sky texture is from the camera. It feels like they pop out of the screen instead of being off to infinity.

Rendering the water effects in TP is REALLY screwed. Best you avert your eyes!

Those issues you mentioned can be fixed with 3Dmigoto, in the same style as the typical DX11 3D Vision fixes. However, unlike most PC games, shaders in Dolphin can change with different graphics settings, builds, etc, making a universal fix almost impossible. Besides, for each game you would need to replace files.

I have sometimes fixed some effects for myself when I was going to play that game for some time. Then I start using a new Dolphin build, and boom, time to start fixing things again   . I don't know if those 3D issues can be fixed at the Dolphin level, or at least with cheat codes.

The Stereo support in Dolphin is amazing, they've done a great job and I really appreciate that they went to that effort when many people don't seem to see the value in 3D gaming. I'm hoping that they can keep supporting it an maybe support an interlaced mode so we can play at 4K60Hz instead of "just" 4K24Hz.