





History The World of Hyrule The shape of our world has been seen as a disc and (since some years) is nowadays known as a sphere. The shape of the world where Hyrule is settled, has for form of a cube. The GameCube The GameCube console was released 13 years ago (in 2001) which makes it even more respectful what Nintendo squeezed out of its hardware. We’re talking about cell-shading, cloth simulation, depth of field effects and more. The following pages will cover some of the greatest tricks and we hope you’ll be as impressed as we are.













Vegetation The World of Hyrule Hyrule is full of refreshing air and rich green grass bushes. You can cut down every single one of them and you might suspect that there surely must be some batching/instancing technique behind that amount of bushes. But if you look at the scene drawcall per drawcall, you’ll notice, that every bush is separately rendered. Warbys observation brought up the question “What exactly is a draw call?” in Simons head and he then spent two month writing about rendering Below you can find an animation where drawcall after drawcall is shown – you can see that every plant is rendered separately.

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker The GameCube seems to crunch through those drawcalls very well and one reason for this is, that consoles have less clutter (driver, APIs, …) between the game and the hardware and the whole rendering process benefits from the less communication between software and hardware (read more about this in the mentioned article ).







Appearance The Inhabitants of Hyrule One remarkable characteristic of the citizens is, that their eyes and eyebrows are always rendered on top of their hair (the mouth isnt). For some people it’s hard to get used to this “Manga Style” but you better do because the Hyrulians don’t like to get stared at.

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker







Sport The Inhabitants of Hyrule not the first game with such a technology). The people in Hyrule love sport. Below you see one doing his morning exercises and he fits his feet in no-time to the stairs. Isn’t this impressive? The game is more than 12 years old and even today not every game has such a IK -System implemented (but it’s worth noticing that Zelda wasthe first game with such a technology).

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Additionally, the feet don’t only get fit to the height but also to the angle of the surface! A lovely detail in my eyes.







Fashion The Inhabitants of Hyrule The residents in Hyrule love fashion! Even the monsters decorate their spears with beautiful moving streak-cloth-thingies. But simulating cloth is expensive and some skeptical tourists could think it is pre-calculated.

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Today we know: It’s not! If it would be pre-calculated, it would not be able to adjust itself to various ground heights. Interestingly the cloth always assumes, that the ground it hits is flat (must be some kind of approximation / optimization. You can see this in the next picture, where the white line marks the actual orientation of the floor): Another optimization seems to be, that characters and objects are ignored by the cloth. If you have eyes like an eagle you will spot that, in this example, the cloth doesn’t collide with the wall (the video-framerate was reduced to make it more visible):

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Also non-static objects like this barrel (some Inhabitants use it as a hideout and sneak around) are excluded of the cloth simulation.

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Last but not least: the fashion-piggy itself seems to be made of air from the perspective of the cloth system.

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker But all this is really nitpicking. It looks great and while wandering around in this beautiful world, nobody rally cares about those tiny details and we rate this sense of detail with 5 Warby & Simon stars.







Astronomy The Activities of the Inhabitants of Hyrule Science is another big topic in Hyrule. Often executed is observing the universe by looking at the stars. If those would be based on textures, you would get pretty blurred results by looking at them with a telescope. But look at this: The stars are made out of two triangles which makes sure that the edges always stay sharp! Another interesting detail can be observed by looking at the sky – but at daylight. By looking closely into the sun you get a nice lensflare and an even nicer HDR effect.

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker If you’re a professional archer, you can observe the HDR effect (and a red tint) by shooting a fire-arrow and enjoying the following explosion: A small hint from our side: Look out for a clear sky when you want to observe the sun because clouds make the effect disappear.

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Speaking of clouds: some foreigners think, that there is exactly “1” perfect swirl/whirl/twirl-cloud texture. Warby worked on multiple games where people tried to imitate that perfect Nintendo cartoon smoke cloud sprite texture. But newest discoveries tell us, that there are actually a whole bunch of different ones for all sorts of occasions:







Sailing The Activities of the Inhabitants of Hyrule Since the world of the game consists almost only of isles, driving around with a boat is kind of a forced hobby. It’s great but also dangerous if high waves push you around. The water in the game is basically one huge non-tessellated plane. So how is it possible that there are harmful waves you might ask? Well…as soon as you leave the secure waters an additional plane fades in (only visible in wireframe mode):

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker You can’t see this plane in-game yet, but as soon as the world decides to turn the water on, the plane fades slowly in and presents itself with a nice water-texture.

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Several points shall be noticed: The plane is tessellated and therefore “real” waves can be produced. The center of the plane is always below the boat and moves with it (if you look closely you can see where the plane ends in the distance). To give the illusion of movement, the wave-texture is scrolled over the plane depending on your direction and speed.







Fireflying The Activities of the Inhabitants of Hyrule Without Internet, the people in Hyrule have a lot free time, which some fill with catching fireflies. While running behind a shiny firefly, you may notice, that they seem to have dynamic light sources which could be kind of a performance hit.

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Instead of using Deferred lighting , they used a stencil buffer – which is a full resolution texture, masking out (using bright and black pixels), where the light actually needs to be rendered. To create this mask, they render 3 geometry spheres per light – their presence/intersection with the world create the final mask. THe following is speculation – for the 100%-truth you have to ask Nintendo.

Only the back faces are taken from the 1st sphere. And only its obstructed geometry (behind the torch, wood, wall, ground) is rendered into the mask (which means that even light spheres behind walls are taken into account): Only theare taken from the 1st sphere. Andgeometry (behind the torch, wood, wall, ground) is rendered into the mask (which means that even light spheres behind walls are taken into account): The 2nd sphere is rendered – this time the front faces are used when they are not obstructed (which means that this time hidden lights are not added to the mask). If you look separately at this draw call, it looks like this. In the stencil buffer this mask is overlayed above the one which was rendered first. The result looks then like this. The areas where the first and this draw call overlap, get even brighter. This bright area is exactly what we want.

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Last but not least, the 3rd sphere is added to the scene. And within its range, the darker values are clamped and only the brighter values stay in the buffer. This means, that hidden lights are clamped to black since they were not brightened up since they didn’t make it into the mask during the 2nd step. After those 3 spheres, a fullscreen quad is rendered above the whole scene with the color of the light. Of course, you don’t want to have the whole scene lightened up! Therefore you render the light only where the just rendered stencil buffer mask has bright pixels. Here’s an example of the whole process. Notice, that some lights “disappear” from the scene, since they are hidden by geometry. Like mentioned above , everything is rendered in Zelda. There’s no distance culling.

Source: Source: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker











