Reality64
Project Summary
Reality64 grew out of building Pandemonium: a desktop editor for making N64 games on the open-source libdragon + tiny3d stack, so the next game doesn't start from raw C and Makefiles. It's C++17 with SDL3 and Dear ImGui, rendered through SDL3's GPU backend so a single binary targets Vulkan, D3D12, or Metal across Windows, macOS, and Linux.
The editor never touches N64 headers. Scenes, cutscenes, and UI screens are authored in portable JSON formats, and a separate cooker bakes them into on-cartridge formats: binary scene files, tiny3d models, and compressed sprites. A component-driven runtime engine consumes the baked output, and a gallery of example scenes mirrors the tiny3d feature set: skeletal animation, particles, cel shading, point lights, zone streaming, HDR bloom, and split-screen.
The whole toolchain experience is built in: the editor installs the N64 toolchain (mips64-elf-gcc, libdragon, tiny3d), cooks assets, builds the ROM, and launches it in the ares emulator or deploys it to a SummerCart flashcart. It ships as installers for all three platforms with a SHA-256-verified self-updater.
Links
- GitHub repository ↗ · Editor, cooker, runtime engine, and example projects (public at launch)
- Documentation site ↗ · Docusaurus docs: setup, tutorials, and format references
- Releases ↗ · Windows, macOS, and Linux builds with the N64 toolchain fetched in-app
- Architecture ↗ · The four-layer editor design and the editor/cooker/runtime split
Features
- Dockable scene editor with orbit camera, transform gizmo, ray-pick selection, outliner, and a component inspector, with undo/redo across every mutation
- Portable JSON scene format baked by a separate cooker into binary scenes and tiny3d models
- Cutscene timeline editor with transport controls, scrubbing, and eased camera-path preview
- UI screen editor and node-based logic graphs
- Runtime engine features: skeletal animation, particle emitters, zone streaming, outlines, bloom, split-screen, and render-to-texture
- One-click build and run to the ares emulator or a SummerCart flashcart, plus a ROM build-analysis panel
- In-app N64 toolchain installer, .blend to .glb export, and a CRT preview filter that approximates real hardware output
- Native PC export through an SDL3 shim layer for libdragon/tiny3d
Gallery
