Personal Update Notes

Hello everyone, you might have noticed the previous 3 posts that were posted rather fast in a sequence, do not worry, I'm not hacked or something! Those are legitimate patch notes, I'm sorry it took a little longer to get them out than usual, this is due to the ongoing situation with my real life, as some of you might know, my grandma is currently undergoing chemotherapy due to her condition (Stage 4 Lung Cancer), due to this I've had a lot less time and a lot more stress to work on things, so I prioritized getting UltraCam updates over everything else, including the upkeep of the website(s) and the Patreon/Kofi posts.

First of all Happy TOTK 3rd Anniversary! I've been working on this project for over 3 Years now! That's a very long time and thousands and thousands of hours have been poured into UltraCam, countless sleepless nights and a lot of day-time, Thank you for the continuous Support.

As for me, I'm doing okay, just extremely stressed and overwhelmed, here's what's going on currently:

During the dates May 15-17 I won't be around and be able to help with anything, due to having to travel to the other city's hospital for my Grandma's 4th chemotherapy session, each chemotherapy session, I have to drive over 500km and with the current world situation fuel is expensive, so thank you to those that ended up donating as it helps me cover some of the costs associated with everything.

During the dates May 23-30th, I'm going on a vacation in another city, so I won't be working on any project, this is my first real vacation in 5+ years and likely the only opportunity I have to take some time off this year.

During the Month of June or July, I'll be undergoing a surgery, some of you might know but during the month of November 2024, I broke my ankle, which was a horrible experience, I had to have 2 surgeries to have it corrected in place and was unable to walk for 4+ months straight, since my grandma got sick I had to push the surgery back for a while, however I can't delay it any longer, as any longer delay will end up in a much more heavy outcome of the surgery, due to orthopedic hardware being harder to remove as time goes on. The plan is to drive my grandma to the hospital so she gets her round of chemo, then I'll have the surgery the following days, which hopefully I'll be able to walk and drive within the next 2 weeks of the surgery because I'll have to drive her to the hospital again even after the surgery.

If you want to help with my Grandma's cancer, any donations directly on my kofi are used to cover treatment/pills/fuel and anything else necessary, thank you to all of those that donated and kept their subscription despite the lack of Patch Notes and the slower update cycles!

TLDR:

I'll be Gone during May 15-17th due to Grandma's Chemotherapy,

I'll also be Gone during May 23-30th due to a vacation.

And I'm also Expected a surgery somewhere in June/July, which is another few days of me not being around.

Besides that, I'll also be gone in a few other dates in June/July and August to take care of my Grandma's Cancer treatment.

Plans for Public Release of UltraCam 3.5

For now the plan is somewhere in July or August, this update will include a lot of fixes, stability improvements and some of the beta features! As well as 1.4.3 TOTK support.

Plans for Next Beta

The plan for the next beta is to be focused on BOTW 1.9.0, including a complete redo of the BOTW mod and syncing the UltraCam library between BOTW and TOTK. The old BOTW mod will not be used for the new mod, as the new mod will be a completely done from 0.

Development Progress Report

During the last few betas, development for UltraCam was heavily focused on stability and separation of core systems, this is done in order to make UltraCam work more as a framework for mod development rather than just a thing exclusive for TOTK, it was a lot of work that needed to be done, a lot of systems were refractored and changed heavily to be untied away from TOTK as a whole and work on their own entirely.

A lot of new fun features were added and a lot of features were expanded overall, making UltraCam way easier to scale in scope.

Big Framework in Development

During the past 11 months I've been working on a system which i called initially called the Shader Manager before, this system functions somewhat similar to what you might know as RenoDX, it's implemented entirely inside of the game's rendering pipeline aka the NVN api and it has 0 reliance on TOTK's in-game systems (e.g it works on it's own), during the past month I've spent a lot of time, working on improving the devkit of said system and improving the decompiler/compilers for the shaders (which still need a lot of work).

This system spans over 30 different C++ files now and is being expanded everyday, the very first user implementation of this system is in the beta is a tab that was added during beta 17, called the Shader Manager, this tab currently only offers support for V1.2.1. or under, currently the Shader Manager doesn't have a huge amount of things it can do for you (the user), however it's capable of turning a bunch of different shaders from being drawn, things like removing cellshading from link and other stuff like lensflare etc all in real time.

Sneak Peak!

In the dev side of things, this system is very important in order to learn how the game renders and the possibilities this system alone brings to the table is endless, it'll take a couple of more months worth of work, due to the complexity of it all but in the end things that are and will be possible are:

Texture Replacement for shaders in real time.

Uniform Buffer Injection in real time, e.g changing the information that the GPU receives in real time.

Render Targets Upgrades for HDR (e.g, textures will be upgraded so native HDR is possible on all emulators).

Custom Shader Injection, this is already possible but due to the compiler not much has been done with it, albeit I'm currently working on implementing Native HDR in UltraCam already! It'll be implemented for TOTK and BOTW!

Saturation/Bloom, etc sliders and many other things!

User injected parameters that can be shared, eg. someone could inject their own textures/or other things and share them with the UltraCam supported framework, this allows for things like replacing Miasma textures in real time, or re-coloring the way Miasma is shown on the screen, or literally anything, the possibilities are endless here.

Render targets and texture inspection and Texture dumper using UltraCam.

Render Snapshot capabilities, e.g you can save a frame of data with all the info cached, this is a very important yet very difficult system to implement I'm currently working on

KEEP IN MIND ALL OF THIS IS VERY AMBITIOUS AND WILL TAKE A LOT OF TIME AS IT'S ESSENTIALLY REMAKING THE ENTIRE GAME'S RENDERING API.

Special thanks to the RenoDX developers: souperman9 and shortfuse for a lot of guidance on how graphics API work: Also seriously check this awesome mod made by souperman9 and some of the other developers to make TOTK/BPTW run in HDR on Ryubing!

https://www.nxoptimizer.com/guides/hdr-renodx/

Also if you want to read the full patch notes that weren't posted for the past few months just go to these links:

https://www.nxoptimizer.com/releases/beta-18/

https://www.nxoptimizer.com/releases/beta-17/

https://www.nxoptimizer.com/releases/beta-16/

If you wanted to support the Beta/This whole project, check out the beta Guide:

https://www.nxoptimizer.com/guides/beta-download/