SSunnKing/Open-Nectar---Pikmin-Native-PC-Port 0.6

Open Nectar 0.6 - Android Release

on GitHub

Open Nectar now runs on Android.

Same code, same disc images, same saves format natively on your phone with touch controls designed for the game rather than a virtual GameCube pad glued on top. Alongside it, custom texture packs on every platform, a much faster renderer, and a batch of desktop fixes.

Android

One APK, both discs USA Rev. 1 and European

Requirements:

• Android 10 or newer, 64-bit device
• OpenGL ES 3.0
• about 1 GB free
• ISO/GCM only, convert rvz compressed images on a computer first.

First run.
The app opens with a single button: pick your disc image with the system file picker. The disc is verified and its assets extracted into the app's private storage. The image is read once, never copied, and can be deleted afterwards. From then on the app opens straight into the game.

Performance.
Holds 120 FPS with a hundred Pikmin on screen on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (OnePlus CPH2449) and it got there through the renderer, not by cutting content:

• Static geometry lives on the GPU. Every model's display list is parsed once, its vertices uploaded to a resident buffer, and skinned in the vertex shader. Draws that used to be re-decoded from the GameCube FIFO format every frame are now a single glDrawArrays.
• The vertex ring buffer no longer stalls on Adreno. glBufferSubData on a buffer the GPU is still reading forced a full CPU↔GPU sync per draw (~300 ms of a 360 ms frame). GLES now uses a fenced ring that never orphans storage.
• Shader binaries are cached to disk (shader_cache/), so the stutter of compiling on first sight of each material happens once per device, not once per launch.
• Depth and colour attachments are invalidated when they are no longer needed, which is what a tiled mobile GPU wants; depth is 24-bit without a stencil the port never used.
• Native heap dropped by roughly 500 MB: two GameCube heaps the port does not use were being zeroed page by page at startup. They are now lazily mapped.
• The existing 60/30 FPS option is the knob for mid-range devices.

Touch controls.
Drawn only when you touch the screen; they vanish as soon as a Bluetooth or USB controller is used.

• Floating stick on the left half; throw, whistle and disband buttons where a thumb rests. Hold disband and drag to move the squad (C-stick).
• Pinch to zoom, camera-angle and centre-camera buttons; a colour icon in the HUD cycles which Pikmin you throw. Photo mode has a button too, with the stick and a drag driving the free camera.
• Every button prompt the game draws the blinking A on dialogue boxes, X/Y on copy/delete, the whole controls page of the pause menu is replaced by the matching touch icon, and that button appears in the layout while the prompt is on screen. Inline prompts inside tutorial text get the icon too.
• Menus are operated by touching what the game draws: file slots (one tap selects, a second confirms), yes/no prompts, world-map areas, option rows. Swipe left/right flips pause-menu pages. Back on the world map returns to the file selector.
• Layout editor: move and resize every button, snap to a grid, saved with the rest of the settings. A settings button opens the same menu as F1 on desktop.

Under the hood, for people who build it.
android/ is a Gradle project that compiles the game from the same root CMakeLists.txt (now usable as a subdirectory) with SDL2 vendored in third_party/SDL2-android. The tree compiles under Clang without -fpermissive tricks; the handful of src/ edits that took are explicit casts, not behaviour changes. Release builds are signed with a project key kept out of the repository; see packaging/android/.

HD texture packs (all platforms)

Dolphin-format texture packs load in Open Nectar. Drop a pack under Load/Textures/<GameID>/ next to pikmin_settings.conf (desktop) or install it from a ZIP/RAR through the F1 menu (Android), then enable it under Graphics → Texture packs. Applies on the next start; the menu says so.

• DDS in BC7, BC1/BC3, RGBA8 and BGRA8, with _mipN chains, plus PNG.
• Compressed formats upload directly where the driver supports them and are decoded on the CPU (bcdec) where it does not — which is how BC7 packs work on Android GPUs that have never heard of BPTC.
• Packs are matched by Dolphin's texture-name hashing, so existing packs made for the emulator work unchanged. Tested with the Pikmin 4K pack's 1080p and Android editions.
• Nothing is redistributed: you download the pack from its author.

Desktop

• The renderer work above is not Android-only: the resident-mesh path, GPU skinning and the lazy batch-state key are on for desktop OpenGL as well, and the shader-binary cache lands in the save folder.
• PIKMIN_MESH_CACHE=0, PIKMIN_SHADER_CACHE=0, PIKMIN_GPU_SKINNING=0, PIKMIN_FB_INVALIDATE=0 and PIKMIN_FRAME_DUMP=<dir> are there for A/B testing and bug reports. PIKMIN_TICK_STATS=1 prints the per-frame profiler; on Android the same variables go in env.txt in the game folder.
• New tools: tools/bti2png.py (view the disc's 2D art), tools/texpack-check.py (validate a pack before installing it), tools/android_perf_capture.sh.

Known limits

• Android supports ISO/GCM only. RVZ/WIA/GCZ still need Dolphin's converter.
• The 4K edition of texture packs is for desktop; on a phone use the 1080p or Android editions. The loader keeps the original texture for anything that exceeds the GPU's limits and says so in the log.
• The Android build is arm64 only. 32-bit devices are not supported and will not be.
• Save data on Android lives in the app's private storage: uninstalling the app deletes it. Update by installing the new APK over the old one.

Thanks

To the authors of the Pikmin 4K texture pack, https://www.henrikomagnifico.com/pikmin-4k whose work made the texture-pack feature worth building.