henrikomagnifico

Zelda: Twilight Princess 4K Texture Pack 1.5.0 Update (Patreon)

Published:

2023-05-01 10:00:02

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4K 4k texture pack download hd texture pack twilight princess 4k update zelda

Content

Good morning everyone! 🌞

I'm pleased to announce the release of the next major update to the Zelda: Twilight Princess 4K texture pack, 1.5! This is yet another huge update to the pack with over 300(!) brand new textures! Changes include new environment textures for many areas in the game, new character textures, new UI textures, new material maps, performance optimizations, file size optimizations, improved stability and plenty of bug fixes. And many, many more miscellaneous changes. Here's the detailed changelog:

Overhauled environment textures!

The environment textures have been overhauled in many areas of the game, and many new ones have been created from the ground up as well in 4K! The new textures cover these regions;

Ordon Village
Ordon Ranch
Ordon Spring
Hidden Village
Kakariko Village
Death Mountain
South Hyrule Field
Snowpeak
Gerudo Desert
Hyrule Castle Town
Faron Woods

As well as these dungeons:

Snowpeak Ruins (Extensive)
Arbiter's Grounds (Extensive)
Lakebed Temple
Temple of Time

Many new 4K textures!

Many areas have been overhauled this update with brand new textures. There are over 150 new environment textures this time around, with nearly all of them receiving newly created material maps for them as well (making these environments look a lot more fancy than before with more realistic lighting and reflections, in the post processing edition!)

The primary focus this update has been on two locations, namely the two dungeons Arbiter's Grounds and the Snowpeak Ruins. Both dungeons have been somewhat neglected for a long time, so it was well overdue for both to get the upgrades they deserve! Both dungeons now look stunning, both from within and outside. And of course, future updates will continue to add textures for the remaining dungeons as well!

New material maps!

New material maps have been created to give more surfaces and textures depth and more realistic reflections from lighting!

Updated Dolphin versions- with major improvements!

The bundled Dolphin Emulator that comes with the pack (specifically the "Standard Edition") has been updated to a very recent version and now supports several great new features and improvements! Most notably for our usecase is the new "VBI Skip" feature, which can be toggled on within the Dolphin Graphics Settings > Hacks tab > VBI Skip. This feature most notably is capapble of preventing stuttering audio whenever the game lags or drops frames for whatever reason, which can really break immersion. However- this feature is still in beta and can cause issues, so use it with care and save frequently if you do!

The next huge feature directly affectes Twilight Princess directly, and is called "Cull Vertices on the CPU", and can be toggled on within the Dolphin Graphics Settings > Advanced tab. This setting lets the emulator cull (or not display) things which aren't visible on the screen, resulting in potentially huge performance gains, even with the "Hyrule Field Speed Hack" toggled off in the Game Properties > Patches tab! With the Speed Hack disabled, several visual effects will now display correctly in-game, such as the mini map which has been visually downgraded from playing on original hardware since Dolphin's inception. If you have a modern CPU and GPU in your system, I highly recommend that you toggle this new feature on inside of Dolphin and disable the Hyrule Field Speed Hack, since this should now provide the ideal experience overall moving forward! (Note: Disabling the hyrule field speed hack will reduce performance by a fair margin, so only do this if you have plenty of headroom to spare in terms of performance)

New shaders and visual tweaks!

The "HenrikoMagnifico_Ultra" shader has been upgraded and is now enabled by default in the post-processing edition! It has been tweaked to better fit the original style, but still overhauls much of the visuals with new effects such as configurable bloom, ambient occlusion, tone mapping and more. You can of course configure the shader however you like, or disable it entirely from the Dolphin Graphics Settings. Go wild!

Increased consistency and improved quality all around!

Lots of work was done under-the-hood this update to re-review and remake many of the old textures to be higher quality, and to be more faithful to the original artstyle. The game should now feel a lot more like the original GameCube/Wii versions when played with these textures, and a lot fewer should look out of place and blend in better with their surroundings.

Simpler version selection and improved instructions!

Starting from version 1.3 onward, the post-processing edition and standard editions have been partially merged. Both versions now share the same folder and Dolphin settings will transfer between them, and they both load textures from the same location. This means the file size of the texture pack has been halved as a result (since duplicate textures are no longer included) and it should also make it possible to switch between the versions as you please, provided you're saving the game normally using in-game saving and not save states (save states are not compatible between versions).

What are the differences between the "Post-Processing Edition" and the "Standard Edition"?

There are two versions of the texture pack you get to select once you've downloaded it. One is the "Post Processing Edition", which includes all the post processing effects showcased in the trailer like ambient occlusion, tone mapping, bloom and more. The other version is the "Standard Edition" which doesn't include these features but has some other benefits instead.

The Post Processing Edition utilizes Ishiiruka Dolphin to achieve these features, and has some graphical features implemented not available in regular Dolphin at all. It also requires Windows 7 or higher (not compatible with MacOS or Linux) and a dedicated graphics card. Both editions include a controller preset for common gamepads like Xbox One, PS4/PS5, GameCube etc. The standard edition version alleviates some bugs present in Ishiiruka Dolphin (increased stability, for example) and supports MacOS & Linux, too! But does not support any of the additional graphical features listed above, like material maps, custom tone mapping, HD bloom, depth of field or ambient occlusion. Both versions look stunning so if you're uncertain I recommend you play the standard version- or try out both and see which one you prefer! The screenshots above have been taken using the post-processing edition.

Enjoy!

This update is available to all you Patrons here, with a public release 1 month from when this post was first published!

There is also a 4K version available, if your computer can handle it! Please feel free to try it out!

Note: The 4K version will look better than the 1080p version, even if you don't have a 4K display. This is because the textures are physically larger and contain more detail in the 4K version, no matter what resolution display you're using!

(Only available for the Dolphin Emulator, the texture pack does not work on real Gamecube/Wii/Wii U consoles).

Updating from an older version is super simple:

Just copy & paste the "GC" and "Wii" folders inside the "User" folder in the texture pack directory over to the new version's User folder and it should work straight away!