Nimso Ny

it's considered cheating to alter the texture work of a game using video plugins and calling it a romhack

Fair enough, this is a mod either way. The level was designed specifically for the hires textures. I build the whole castle and grounds so that part is a Rom Hack anyways. There is no other way to import prerendered lighting like this.

There will be a video gameplay and probably even a release. Bare in mind the textures folder is about 100MB.

And what if I said the land texture alone was rendered at 4096x4096, the castle brickwork at the same, and the 4 main towers at 2048x2048, along with the small towers and the central at separate 2048x2048 textures using a hi res texture replacement and about 3 hours rendering.

Wow, just goes to show what some decent vertex colour mapping and a texture pack can do. Does the level geometry need many more polygons to create such a soft shadow gradient?

This is not vertex colours, the lighting is entirely baked in textures. For vertex colour it would have to have thousands more polygons, which is just bad by design.

Everyone in this comments section needs to calm down. In short, this is not possible within the actual Super Mario 64 rom. This is not a rom hack (at least not the lighting and textures and whatnot) and cannot be played with a normal video plugin. Yes, he said rom hack. (1/2)

but, it was probably an honest mistake. Yes, calling it "one of the most beautiful rom hacks ever" is kind of misleading and wrong, you don't have to get all pissy about it. It still looks nice even though it's not an actual rom hack, but hasn't been done in the past, so (2/2)