Deep Sea 1.0.0-beta.4

The Great Sea, now with sound

A native Windows port of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (USA GameCube, GZLE01), built on your PC from your own disc.

Website: https://ah64-dll.github.io/DeepSea/

New in beta.4

• Camera stick fixed. The right stick now works like modern games: push right to look right and up to look up. The original game turns the view left when you push the stick right, so the horizontal axis is swapped by default. beta.3 had wrongly swapped the vertical axis instead, which left left/right as it was and turned up/down upside down. The launcher now has Invert camera stick X and Invert camera stick Y under each controller port. Each one switches that axis back to the console's direction. The J and L camera keys on the keyboard follow the same rule.
• If you keep your beta.3 folder, the old mapping stays in assets\user-dir\Config\GCPadNew.ini. Either choose Reset to defaults for the port in the launcher, or unzip beta.4 fresh and copy over only assets\user-dir\GC (your saves) and assets\user-dir\modules (so setup doesn't run again).

New in beta.3

• Sound works in play. Music, sound effects, voices and menu sounds were silent in beta.1 and beta.2. Only the streamed intro music played. The setup step that relocates the game's wave-bank table was copying each entry as a name string. The entries are actually pointers to the sound data, so every bank was built empty. Now a full run from the title screen through file select, the pause menu and Outset Island plays continuously.
• Smoother 60 fps. More of the picture is now drawn between game frames instead of stepping at 30 Hz:
  • shadows
  • animated textures and material colors
  • full particle state (rotation, size, color and emitters), not just position
  • character models during more of the scene transitions
  • flags and sails
• Fewer drops to 30 fps. Those drops were mostly the game thread being pushed aside by other programs. While 60 fps is active, the game thread now runs one priority step higher.
• Setup retries file operations for up to about 15 seconds when antivirus software briefly locks a file. More of the game compiles with light optimization, so the cached module is about 380 MB instead of 475 MB. In-game speed is the same as beta.2: the sailing benchmark measured 26.4 ms of work per game frame with both.

Download

File	What it is
DeepSea-1.0.0-beta.4-win64.zip (107 MB)	The game runtime, launcher, mods and the setup kit. Unzip anywhere and run DeepSea.exe or Play Deep Sea.cmd.
DeepSea-src-a343c138a3bb.tar.gz (76 MB)	Complete corresponding source for everything in the zip (GPL).

You need

• Your own USA copy of the game (GameCube, GZLE01): an extracted disc folder, or an ISO/WBFS/RVZ image that the launcher unpacks
• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
• A graphics card with Vulkan 1.1
• About 2 GB free for the first-time setup (about 380 MB stays afterwards)

First launch

The download contains no game code. The first time you press Play, setup checks your disc files, translates the game's code and compiles it for your processor. It took 11 to 12.5 minutes on a 6-core laptop and is faster on quicker CPUs. A progress bar shows each step, and it's safe to cancel. Afterwards the module is cached, and later launches start in seconds. Updating from beta.2 runs setup once more, because the setup kit changed. beta.4 uses the same setup kit as beta.3, so a beta.3 module can be reused.

Features

• 60 fps: in-between frames are rendered and paced to your display's refresh. On a PC that can't keep up, it drops to 30 fps rather than slowing the game.
• True widescreen: at 16:9 the camera widens and the HUD moves to the screen edges. Choose 4:3 to play exactly like the original.
• Controllers: Xbox-style pads work out of the box. DirectInput pads and the keyboard work too, and everything can be remapped in the launcher.
• Cutscene skip: hold Z + Start (RB + Start).
• Savestates on F1, fast-forward while holding Space, fullscreen with Alt+Enter or F11.

This is a beta

• Automated testing on one PC (a Ryzen 5 8645HS laptop with a GeForce RTX 4050) covered:
  • first-launch setup from a clean unzip
  • the title screen, file select and the pause menu, with sound recorded and checked
  • Outset Island gameplay
  • sailing, including a 10-minute run with no errors and no 30 fps fallback
• Flag and sail interpolation passes its tests, but none of the automated test scenes had flags or sails in them. If a flag looks wrong, set MODERNGEKKO_F60_CLOTH_INTERP=0 and please report it. Each new 60 fps feature has its own switch, listed in README-PLAYERS.md.
• Nobody has played the whole game on this build yet. Please report problems with your GPU, CPU and what you were doing: https://github.com/AH64-dll/DeepSea/issues
• The first run of each new scene can hitch briefly while its shaders compile; later runs reuse them.
• Savestates belong to the module build they were made with, so beta.2 savestates don't load in beta.3 or beta.4. In-game saves (memory card) carry over if you copy assets\user-dir\GC.
• Only the USA GameCube release is supported.

Credits

Built on the zeldaret/tww Wind Waker decompilation, ModernGekko, DolRecomp and GXRuntime, RecompCore, Dolphin, aurora and llvm-mingw. Full credits are on the website and in the README.

Legal

Deep Sea is free software (GPLv3; the vendored Dolphin code is GPLv2+). No Nintendo code, artwork, audio or game data is included in the download or the source. The Legend of Zelda and The Wind Waker are trademarks of Nintendo. This is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo.

Checksums (SHA-256)

842afa9b5ee014786e8d74f1bdaaac23b432a06c39f03a3169a387c34fe6b73f  DeepSea-1.0.0-beta.4-win64.zip
3cea1fa10ae7dfcae90174594754ef54e4d05f247afef26a0dd373c54ea3ecb2  DeepSea-src-a343c138a3bb.tar.gz